Revisiting William J. Shakespeare’s The Tempest From a Colonial and Postcolonial Lens

Abstract

The current paper shows colonialism as a concept and how European countries have created colonies in Australia, Asia, Africa, and America, capturing and overexploiting the colonies’ natural resources and dominating the colonies’ natives. The new nation discoveries accomplished by Europeans stuck in Shakespeare’s mind, naming these discoveries the “New World”. Shakespeare’s The Tempest approaches Prospero’s colonial attitude and Caliban’s postcolonial standpoint. With that being said, this paper aims to demonstrate that Shakespeare stands in the middle making no approval or disapproval of the European colonization. The Tempest by Shakespeare can be reviewed from a colonial and postcolonial lens. Fanon (1991) establishes that violence-based struggle is a component of the decolonization process represented by Caliban. Towards the end of the paper, key related interpretations of India’s overexploitation by Great Britain are adopted to make a piece of evidence that one of the deadly sins of European history rests in colonialism.