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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2014
“Dramaturging The Tempest: A Pedagogical Forum,” uses dramaturgy—the interface between research and its practical application in the theatre—as a way of preparing The Tempest for a college course curriculum. The article aims to show instructors how to teach dramaturgy as an explication of The Tempest and how to use The Tempest as a means of teaching dramaturgy. The objective is for students to emerge from the course conversant in how to be dramaturgs in the preparation of a professional production. Dramaturgy also illuminates the highly metadramatic underscoring of The Tempest, a play that constantly invites its own characters to be audience to, and critics of, Prospero’s carefully constructed “worldview.”
My brief for this journal issue is to write an essay on The Tempest that can be used as an explication de texte for teaching postcolonial studies. As a practicing dramaturg, I’ve decided to focus on postcolonial dramaturgy. What does a dramaturg do? What can be gained from dramaturgical teaching, and how is it prepared for? What skills will students develop?
1 In an interview with Elizabeth Schafer, theatre-maker and activist director Enzo Cozzi posits an interesting meta-frame of pedagogy for The Tempest. Having been arrested in Chile in 1974 for opposing Pinochet’s rule, Mr. Cozzi managed to escape to England where he lived in exile for many years. He suggests that Caliban, Miranda and Ariel represent three types of “uneducable students”. While I don’t agree with all the aspects of his model nor with all of his line-readings, the article—an interview on the subject of his stage practice told through his own life story—is fascinating. “Theatres of Instruction, Theatres of Learning and Shakespeare’s Tempest.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 9.3 (2009): 298–304.
2 All references to The Tempest and to any of Shakespeare’s works are from the Folio edition, The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Greenblatt, et al. (New York: Norton, 1997).
3 Goldberg, Jonathan, “Shakespearean Inscriptions: the Voicing of Power,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker (New York: Methuen, 1985): 133Google Scholar.
4 Aimé Césaire, who wrote his own version of The Tempest, entitled Une Tempête Adaptation for a Black Theatre—translated from the French by Richard Miller: accessed online September 20, 2013 at http://firstyear.barnard.edu/shakespeare/tempest/tempete.
5 Dolan, Frances E., “The Subordinate(‘s) Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 43:3 (Autumn 1992): 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Dolan continues: “… a play like The Tempest represents Caliban and his fellow conspirators in order to trivialize and overmaster them; it grants them their own plot in order to subordinate it to a plot structure and a larger cultural narrative that diminish its significance and locate power and prestige elsewhere—in the master and his story (“The Subordinate[‘s]”, 322).
7 Ashcroft, Bill, Caliban’s Voice: the Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures, (New York: Routledge, 2009): 52Google Scholar.
8 For a summary of the debate over the allocation of this speech, see The Tempest, ed. Horace Howard Furness, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, IX (1892), repr. New York: American Scholar Publications (1966): 73–74.
9 Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: 52.
10 “What’s the metaphor?” was a question put to me in 2007 by director Richard E. T. White, currently chair of Theater Studies at Cornish College of the Arts. This is one of the most powerful questions a dramaturg can keep to the fore when preparing texts for modern audiences: don’t compromise interpretive ambiguity in the service of literal-minded clarity.
11 SirElyot, Thomas, The Book Named the Governor (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1970): 35Google Scholar.
12 Hakluyt, Richard, Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent. (1582, ed John Winter Jones, 1850), (London: Hakluyt Society Publications, Old Series, No. 7, 1850)Google Scholar.
13 Webb, Allen Carey, “Shakespeare for the 1990s: A Multicultural Tempest,” English Journal 82.4 (April 1993): 31Google Scholar.
14 Patricia Seed adds: “‘… Caliban's interactions with Prospero and Miranda over claims to the island closely resemble what would become the conventional narratives of English colonizers in the Americas: the preoccupation with seizing productive farmland, the aim of resettling the land with Europeans, and the denial of responsibility for native violence against the colonisers.” ‘Patricia Seed, This island's mine’: Caliban and Native Sovereignty, in Hulme, Peter and Sherman, William Howard, eds. The Tempest and its Travels (London: Reaktion books, 2000): 202–203Google Scholar.
15 Schafer, (Playing Australia, 75). Drawing on Rose Gaby’s discovery that a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works was most likely carried on board the ship, the Endeavour, on Captain James Cook's first voyage, Daniel Fischlin also suggests that “the Bard, as icon of the supreme literary achievement of a superior civilization, has been pressed into the service of a rapacious form of colonization.” Accessed online on August 28, 2013, at http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/spotlight.cfm.
16 Rob Nixon says, for example, “In colonial circumstances, the bard could become symptomatic and symbolic of the education of Africans and Caribbeans into a passive, subservient relationship to dominant colonial culture.” “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987): 560.
17 Post-1989, The Tempest has seen an increase in stage popularity in Romania, with an unprecedented high after the country’s accession to the EU, arguably allowing for post-communist (the local brand of post-colonialism?) takes on the play. Like productions of the play elsewhere, Romanian stage Tempests focus on Prospero; their interpretive stances polarize around seeing him as the master─whether as magician or tyrant (or both)─and the play as a directorial statement, rivaling Hamlet in meta-theatricality. Nicoleta Cinpoeş, “(Ship)wrecked Shakespeare in Romanian Tempests,” Shakespeare Bulletin 29.3 [Fall 2011]: 313.
18 - “From the perspective of recent critics, Prospero, as sovereign and imperialist, stands at the intersection of…discourses of power, compromised by his power over others and the brutality with which he wilds it. Yet the play also presents Prospero as compromised by his dependency on and vulnerability to those who serve him: first his brother, then his servants…Like Europeans exploring the New World… Prospero needs a native to show him 'all the qualities o' th' isle'..he also needs a slave so that he can proclaim himself a master." (Dolan, 322).
19 Thieme, John, Post-colonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Cannon (London: Continuum, 2001): 128Google Scholar.
20 Gillies, John, “The Figure of the New World in The Tempest,” in Peter Hulme and Sherman, eds. The Tempest and its Travels (London: Reaktion books, 2000): 200Google Scholar.
21 See Bosman, Anston, “Cape of Storms: The Baxter Theatre Centre-RSC Tempest, 2009,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.1 (Spring 2010): 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest 65; quoted by Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, “Virgilian Models of Colonization in Shakespeare’s Tempest,” ELH 70.3 (Fall 2003): 710CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Nicoleta Cinpoeş, “(Ship)wrecked Shakespeare,” 313).
24 D’haen, Theo“The Tempest, Now and Twenty Years After: Rachel Ingall’s Mrs. Caliban and Tad William’s Caliban’s Hour,” in Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character, ed. Nadie lie and Theo D’haen (Amsterdam: Free University, 1997): 316Google Scholar.
25 “Shakespeare… imputed to Caliban a motive for the attempted rape that reflects the specifically English colonial desire for ‘peopling.’ Caliban is rendered guilty of what were in reality English colonial ambitions.” (Seed, 205).
26 John Gillies makes the point about Miranda: “Raised in isolation from European society, [she] looks on human beings as a species for the first time, recognizing in them a ‘world’ of beauty, goodliness and utopian possibility. With no direct experience of ‘human’ (as distinct from native) depravity, she misses what Prospero sees: creatures whose potential is perpetually cancelled by their history.” (“The Figure of the New World in The Tempest,”180).
27 Vaughan, Alden T and Vaughan, Virginia Mason, Shakespeare’s Caliban, a Cultural History (New York: Cambridge UP, 1991): 185Google Scholar.
28 This essay, entitled “Learning to Curse: aspects of linguistic colonialism in the sixteenth century” was first published in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, vol. II, ed. F. Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 561–580.