Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 45

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). 41