jiggley

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there is a clear allusion to the concept of colonization of native peoples in his character, Caliban. Caliban is seen as a lesser being that is biologically inferior to Prospero and his daughter Miranda, yet is used by the two to help tame the island and make it inhabitable. For example, Caliban is described by Prospero as being a “horrible slave, with a wicked hag for a mother and the devil himself for a father”, yet Prospero cannot effectively live on the island without his help. Even though Caliban was on the island first, Prospero took control and forced Caliban into an inferior position. If it were not for Prospero’s superior magic, none of this could have been possible; however, it was because Prospero had a huge power advantage over Caliban that he was able to take control and achieve power over the island.  This relates almost perfectly with what was written in Charles Bressler's Literacy Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. In this document, it is written that “Great Britain, the chief imperialist power of the nineteenth century, dominated her colonies…forced labor of the colonized became the rule of the day… these sub-humans or savages quickly became the inferior and equally ‘evil’ others”. So, what was believed by Prospero about Caliban was noticeably similar to what was believed by the European colonists about “heathen” natives. Prospero used his “chief” power to “dominate” Caliban into a sort of “forced labor” on the island, putting Caliban into a lesser or “sub-human” state in the hierarchy of the island. The similarities of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Colonization of Great Britain colonies are to obvious to miss, and they additionally make for some good arguments.