A julio de burgos
Sanchez, Melissa E.
Studies in Philology, Volume 105, Number 1, Winter 2008, pp. 50-82 (Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: 10.1353/sip.2008.0001
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Seduction and Service in The Tempest
by Melissa E. Sanchez
he Tempest is unique among Shakespeare’s plays in that it lists only one female character in the dramatis personae. Yet Miranda’s isolation is neither inconsequential nor entire; in actuality, she is the touchstone for the women who enter the play via its tissue of allusions and whose presence makes legible a contemporary political discourse that likened the relation of sovereign and subject to that of husband and wife. The sixteenth century had seen critiques of Elizabethan policy couched in the erotic entanglements of such influential romances as Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s late plays evoke similar narrative structures to participate in an ongoing debate regarding the location and scope of sovereignty in early Stuart England. Read in such a discursive context, The Tempest’s attention to female desire and consent registers the participation of both populace and ruler, women and men, in sustaining structures of authority. Miranda’s enactment of political subjection differs conspicuously from that of Ariel, Caliban, or any of the shipwrecked Italians, for her femininity accentuates an erotic dynamic that is less visible—but equally significant—in Prospero’s relations with his male subjects and rivals. Given the prominent conjunction of courtship and politics in early Stuart discourse, it is surprising that female figures have generated little interest in criticism of The Tempest, which has typically responded more to the masculine struggles emphasized in the play’s comic subplot than Critics have differed as to the relation of Shakespeare’s last four plays to the rest of his oeuvre. E. M. W. Tillyard, for instance, argues that the romances incorporate the experience of the tragedies in order to transcend it, while Howard Felperin suggests that in their emphasis on disenchantment and human limitation, these plays actually produce effects more akin to the epics of Spenser or Milton than to Shakespeare’s own previous work. See Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938), 16–20 and 81–89; and Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 53–58. 50 © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press
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to the male and female negotiations staged by its romantic main plot. Early twentieth-century readers saw The Tempest as a struggle over the angelic—but passive—soul (Miranda), between the forces of divine enlightenment (Prospero), on the one hand, and bestial desire (Caliban), on the other. As numerous postcolonial adaptations of the play have demonstrated, such mythic interpretations, far from being apolitical, are saturated with precisely the ideological mystifications that helped justify the brutalities of colonial regimes. Drawing on these identifications of Caliban with the insurgent native, Prospero with the ruthless colonizer, Shakespearean critics of the past few decades have tended to see The Tempest less as a simple encomium to humanist, European values than as an imaginative arena of political struggle and ambivalence. While postcolonial criticism of The Tempest has offered an im Works that tend implicitly to justify imperial and colonial projects by interpreting Prospero as the beneficent voice of education, civility, and providence include G. Wilson Knight’s The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s...
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