Mini: Shakespeare and the Colonial Imagination

In recognition of the National Day of Mourning/Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, we are exploring how the "Age of Exploration" and Colonial Imagination in Early Modern England influenced Shakespeare's works--specifically The Tempest.

Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing. 

Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because, well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.  

KS: In today’s Thanksgiving mini-episode, we’ll be discussing postcolonial theory in Shakespeare. And there is a lot to discuss here. Since we haven’t covered any of Shakespeare’s plays that include postcolonial themes, this episode is an Intro to Postcolonial Theory in Shakespeare, focusing on colonial imagination in The Tempest.

ES: And, as Korey was writing this episode, she realized the study of postcolonial theory in Shakespeare is so vast that we need to cover this topic as a mini-series. Subsequent episodes will discuss the colonization of Ireland, anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice, racism in Othello, immigrants in early modern London, the aftermath of colonialism, and, of course, postcolonial performance, past and present.

KS: In addition to our mini-series, we will dive deeper into this topic during our The Tempest, Othello and Merchant of Venice series, respectively.

ES: The reason we are releasing this episode on Thanksgiving is because we believe in deconstructing and decolonizing our readings of, as we said in our trailer, this old white dude, William Shakespeare. Art is not created in a vacuum. People create the art we consume for a reason. So let’s re-examine the Renaissance man through colonialism.

KS: We also want to acknowledge Jyotsna G. Singh’s 2019 book Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (published by Arden Shakespeare) as our primary source today. And as we will be discussing colonialism, we will cover topics that may be triggering for some people. Please listen with care. 

ES: So, now that we’ve covered our bases… let’s dive in!

KS: Postcolonial theory is the academic critical cultural study of European colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized peoples and their lands. And, boy, did England do a lot of colonizing during the last 400 years! The British Empire was composed of colonies and territories that were ruled under the United Kingdom, often through invasion and force. Some of those territories include the continental United States, Ireland and Scotland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, India and portions of Africa, among others.

ES: The British Empire’s goal was to extend England’s authority around the world, often for economic and religious purposes. The empire was at its strongest during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but it didn’t completely fall until the late twentieth century, after a series of uprisings for independence by the colonized.

KS: The British Empire also included the original thirteen colonies of the United States. Which leads us to Thanksgiving. Without historical context in mind and restorative justice in place, Thanksgiving celebrates the horrifying legacy of English and European colonization that led to the slaughter of the Indigenous peoples and their culture. It’s misleading to teach a tale of unity when, less than a generation after the supposed meal between the English Pilgrim colonizers and the Wampanoags, the two groups were at war; and the American government systematically destroyed Native sovereignty. In addition, Native peoples and their allies call Thanksgiving the National Day of Mourning.

ES: If you’re listening to this episode and are unsure of what to do about the Thanksgiving holiday because the history is so bleak, stick around for the end of the episode. We have suggestions about how to begin ethically celebrating this moral dilemma.

KS: So now, let’s tie colonialism to our main man, William Shakespeare. But how? Shakespeare wasn’t a colonizer. In fact, he never even left England (or so we have no proof of any such travels). To frame this episode, we must point out that colonialism had extraordinary consequences on the global landscape, especially for the colonized. And it feels almost inevitable that early modern England, the “age of discovery”, influenced colonialism in one way or another. So, we posit, Shakespeare, a “Renaissance man”, must have been influenced by colonialism to some degree.

ES: Historians generally agree that English and European colonial and imperial power against non-white, non-European peoples was at its height, like we said, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But, that’s not to say that imperialism was not present before; and it definitely doesn’t mean that it isn’t present now. I mean, gestures broadly at the everything imperial. However, in this episode, we’re going to connect colonialism to Shakespeare’s world and, of course, his play, The Tempest.

KS: If you remember from our Intro Series, the concept of the British Empire was brought to Elizabeth I by her adviser, John Dee. He advocated for the development of settlements abroad for British trade and national strength. In the coming decades, England made forays into America, including: the failed Virginia colony of 1585; the first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, in 1607; and Walter Raleigh’s journeys into the New World. This, proto colonialism or, shall we say, “colonialism lite”, leads many scholars to dismiss early modern colonial discourse as irrelevant when analyzing colonization on a large scale. However, Jonathan Burton, professor of English at Whittier College, states that the “representative practices of high imperialism [can] be sometimes found germinating in earlier periods.” To put it in lay terms, the systems of colonization didn’t come out of a vacuum. They came out of a world that imagined it into action.

ES: But to define early modern English people as colonizers as we know it today can be tricky because the British Empire was mostly engaged in something coded as trade and sea exploration. Again, our “colonialism-lite”. And, again, as with all things, colonialism didn’t appear out of thin air. From a postcolonial perspective, Singh argues that “the cultural and literary texts and events representing interactions with non-Europeans from the early sixteenth century onwards bears the mark of a ‘colonizing imagination.’” And this colonizing imagination is what we will discuss. But where can one find it?

KS: The colonizing imagination can be found in a diverse body of works in early modern English society -- specifically travel narratives and plays. And, yes, that includes Shakespeare. These works represent the cultural climate of England’s global expansion in the form of commercial, cultural and religious dimensions. Remember, England’s economy was rapidly adapting from the roughly six thousand years of feudalism to the relatively new mercantile system popularized less than 100 years before Shakespeare. Mercantilism led to trade. Trade led to sea exploration. And sea exploration led to interacting with cultures other than the English. And, consequently, “othering” those peoples in the hopes of creating an empire, as well as cultural and religious hegemony.

ES: Through permeating tropes, fantasies, rhetorical structures and visual images about the “others”, like natives in the New World, Africans in northwest Africa, and the Irish, early modern England defined life through a binary that laid the foundation for the colonial imagination. We, the English, are this. They, the others, are that. Examples include civilization versus barbarism, white versus black, pious restraint verus uncontrolled eroticism, Christianity versus Islam. From an expansionist mindset, focusing on these non-white, non-English, non-Protestant differences made colonizing justifiable.

KS: But let’s talk more about these travel narratives' that influenced the colonial imagination, and (likely) Shakespeare. In order to understand the prolific nature of travel writing in the period, Singh explores Richard Hakluyt’s travel anthology The Principle Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation published in 1589. Hakluyt was a clergyman, adviser to Queen Elizabeth and a purveyor of travel accounts. In his commercial pursuits, he wrote to promote the commercial and moral superiority of the English nation. He can be seen as a “potent catalyst for the exploration movement … instrumental in colonization and trading efforts … [and] one of the conduits for much of the [short-lived] information then circulating.” In other words, he had clout.

ES: And that clout had consequences. For example, in Hakluyt’s Epistle Dedicatory to Francis Walsingam, he writes of the English as “stirrers abroad [who] have excelled all nations and people of the earth.” To Hakluyt, England should competitively pursue trading advantages, including the slave trade. He wrotES: “Now it is high time for us [England] to weigh our anchor … and with all speed to direct our course for the … Atlantic Ocean, over which the Spaniards and Portuguese have made so many pleasant, prosperous, and golden voyages … for the getting of slaves, for sugar, for Elephants’ teeth, grains, silver, gold, and other precious wares.” To Hakluyt, exploration was an opportunity for England.

KS: But Hakluyt was only one travel writer in a list of English world travelers who wrote for domestic entertainment, patriotism, commercial and colonial invasion, or Protestant Christian proselytization (or forced religious conversion). These writers' depictions of the “others” they encountered, as well as the power dynamics they portrayed, evoked analogies in many of Shakespeare’s works of colonial or proto colonial themes.

ES: If you’ve never read or seen The Tempest, or if it’s been a while, here’s a quick synopsis: Prospero, a powerful magician, uses magic to conjure a storm and torment the survivors of a shipwreck, including the King of Naples and Prospero’s treacherous brother, Antonio. Prospero’s slave, the native Caliban, plots to rid himself of his master, but is thwarted by Prospero’s spirit-servant Ariel. The King’s young son Ferdinand falls in love with Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Prospero confronts his brother and reveals his identity as the usurped Duke of Milan. The families are reunited and all conflict is resolved. Prospero grants Ariel his freedom and prepares to leave the island. The end.

KS: Now, back to theory. If you add travel narrative’s historical complexity to The Tempest, the play mirrors a travel account in its motifs of sea-voyage, discovery and encounters with a “native”. Travelers and explorers wrote of their travels during the age of discovery and encouraged England's “incipient empire.” Through this lens, the relationship between the play and its cultural context is apparent. For example, scholars connected William Strachey’s 1610 New World Bermuda pamphlet about a shipwreck in the Caribbean to The Tempest. Like the use of the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth, Shakespeare might have been thinking about this pamphlet while writing The Tempest.

ES: According to Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, “the voluminous literature of European exploration was rife with tempests, wrecks, miracles, monsters, devils and wondrous natives [but many] travel narratives are overshadowed by [Shakespeare’s] almost certain familiarity with William Strachey’s [pamphlet] ... written during and immediately after the events … [and] was probably read [as a manuscript] by many of London’s cultural and political leaders.” How could Shakespeare not have been influenced by this epic event? It was big news, like when the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021. 

KS: In addition to Strachey’s pamphlet, Prospero can be read as a colonizer. According to Paul Brown’s 1985 essay “The darkness I acknowledge mine”: ``The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism”: “From Prospero’s initial appearance, it becomes clear that disruption was produced to create a series of problems precisely in order to effect their resolution … for Caliban he is a colonizer whose refused offer of civilization forces him to strict discipline [and enslavement].” Putting it simply, if you create a problem only you can solve, you make yourself the de facto authority. If the natives do not like your authority, you assert your power through force, like colonization or enslavement.

ES: And, unfortunately, Prospero’s character is typically read through the benevolent colonizer trope. We here at Shakspeare Anyone can’t say it any better than Francis Barker and Peter Hulme in their 1985 essay “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish”: the Discursive Contexts of The Tempest”: The justification for Caliban’s enslavement “is the characteristic trope by which European colonial regimes articulated their authority over land to which they could have no conceivable legitimate claim [and its success relies on the audience’s] uncritical willingness to identify Prospero’s voice as a direct and reliable authorial statement. [Historically] European and North American critics [of the play] tended to listen exclusively to Prospero’s voicES: after all, he speaks their language.”

KS: But not everyone is open to reading Shakespeare and The Tempest through a postcolonial lens. Some scholars refute this reading because, as Singh argues, reading the play’s colonial themes implies reading it through a historical specificity that replaces its previous lens through a new lens that (we, at the podcast, argue) challenges white apologist feelings about Prospero. For example, scholar Douglas Bruster argues that, rather, the play is an allegory on playhouse labor, comparing Prospero to the director/playwright; Miranda to the spectator; Ariel to the boy actor; and Caliban to comedian and clown, Will Kemp. In his book chapter “Quoting the Playhouse in The Tempest”, Bruster emphasizes David Kastan’s argument that “the Americanization of The Tempest may be itself an act of cultural imperialism”. Now, we’re not quite sure about the mental gymnastics of this logic; but, as far as we can tell, a playhouse allegory and a colonialism allegory do not have to be mutually exclusive.

ES: And, frankly, none of us know what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote The Tempest. To erase a postcolonial reading, as if you know what Shakespeare was thinking, is absurd. Especially when we can surmise that he might have understood colonialism’s effects because Caliban was given language that indicates this “othered” character wants to escape colonization and get his land back. In Act 1 scene 2: “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,/ Which thou tak’st from me.../ For I am the subjects that you have,/ Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me,/ In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me/ The rest o’th’ island.” He’s not wrong.

KS: That’s all the time we have today. So, to sum up this intro episode, early modern England’s colonial imagination was a result of trade and sea exploration made possible by an emerging British Empire. While Shakespeare didn’t participate in proto colonial activities directly, he and his plays might have been influenced by the travel writers who were documenting their travels, as well as the people they encountered abroad. 

ES: And while it can be uncomfortable to read Shakespeare through a postcolonial lens, ignoring the possibilities of such a reading only further ignores the public discourse surrounding early modern England’s ambition to colonize.

KS: And before we let you go, if you choose to celebrate Thanksgiving, we have some suggestions for celebrating the holiday that we hope makes you feel less icky. First, unlearn revisionist history and learn real history. It may be uncomfortable, but remember: Native lives over white feelings. Then discuss this history with family and friends.

ES: Second, donate to your local tribe, either money, resources, or your time. Third, support Native activists and become an ally. Get involved in restorative justice and diversify your feed by following Native activists, organizations, and artists. Fourth, and finally, support Native businesses, art, and academia. Today, we recommend listening to the All My Relations podcast’s episode “ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving”.

KS: And that’s postcolonial theory! Keep an eye out for future postcolonial mini-episodes. 

ES: Thank you for listening to this episode.

Quote of the Episode:

ES: From Hamlet, act two, scene two, said by Hamlet, “I am but mad north-north-west, when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was "Korey Leigh Smith".

Episode written and researched by Kourtney Smith.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

Follow us on Instagram at @shakespeareanyonepod for updates or visit our website at shakespeareanyone.com

Works referenced:

Singh, Jyotsna G. “Historical Contexts 1: Shakespeare and the Colonial Imagination.” Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020, pp. 23–39.