As Greenblatt states, Shakespeare had clearly read “Of the Cannibals,” since one of the
characters in The Tempest quotes part of the essay (114).
Given this historical evidence, Shakespeare clearly intended to draw parallels between
New World imperialism and Prospero’s exercise of power over the island in The Tempest
Greenblatt correctly states, then, that “it is very difficult to argue that The Tempest is not about
im perialism ^ 14). Contrary to Will’s apparent belief that reading The Tempest in this way ruins
Shakespeare, Greenblatt insists that “it is . . . difficult to come to terms with what The Tempest
has to teach us about forgiveness, wisdom, and social atonement if we do not also come to
terms with its relations to colonialism” (115). Only through acknowledging the clear connection
Shakespeare was making between The Tempest and colonization of the New World can the
other thematic elements in the play be seen most clearly. In other words, teaching
Shakespeare effectively requires teaching the connection between The Tempest and issues of
New World imperialism. To do otherwise, to teach some “esthetic” reading that ignored all the
evidence of this connection, would in essence be tantamount to ruining Shakespeare.
Indeed, Will’s “esthetic" reading of The Tempest would privilege removing from the play
any unpleasant entanglements with issues of imperial domination over even what the author
intended when writing the play. Clearly, this supposedly non-political reading has a definite
political agenda, and Greenblatt implies as much from the title of his essay that such readings
are “a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order” (113). Stated in those terms, this
“esthetic” reading and the political purposes it serves start to sound very familiar: Caliban was
not the oppressed symbol of imperial domination of the New World. He was a disloyal servant
who served a benevolent master. Similarly, slaves were not routinely mistreated in America,
and after the Civil War, they were wistful for the lives they had before. This “esthetic" reading
and the protests that politically liberal race-mongers are taking over teaching The Tempest
have at their core the same attempts to sugar-coat troubling issues in America’s past having to
do with slavery and imperial domination.
After Will’s and Greenblatt’s articles in the early 1990s, Shakespeare seemed to
undergo a resurgence in popular culture. From 1990-2000, three film adaptations of Hamlet
achieved commercial success, and this same period of time saw film productions of Much Ado
About Nothing, Love’s Labour Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Titus
Andronicus, all of which were profitable for movie studios and producers (Thompson 1059).
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