What I "Tweet" about The Tempest: A play about colonization?



William Hogarth's painting of The Tempest ca. 1735
(The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.)



After reading the first two acts of The Tempest, we have coincidentally discovered that “the main theme of the play is colonization”. However, the “eureka feeling” dissipates as soon as our minds are occupied with a question: is our impression the genuine intention of Shakespeare when writing the play?

        To many readers, the culmination of the play is reached in Act 3, scene 3, when the spirit Ariel appears as an avenging harpy, pronouncing the wrongs of Antonio, Alonso and Sebestian that have been done to Prospero, and the punishment to Antonio by taking his son in the shipwreck. In contrast, the scenes of Caliban and his new “lord” Stephano seem to serve as a short slapstick episode in the play.
   

        In the book Translating as a Purposeful Activity, Christiane Nord states what is actually translated is merely a kind of translator’s interpretation of the author’s intention ^[1]. Similarly, we should be aware that there are various kinds of interpretation about the play. For example, there is a view that Prospero’s first line “Now my charms are all o’erthrown” in the epilogue signals a farewell of Shakespeare to the stage of art. This view obviously takes the author’s egotism ^[2] as the main writing motive.

        Last but not least, we wonder if readers like us, i.e. hongkongers, may unconsciously interpret the story in a colonial perspective, given our colonial history. It would be exciting to investigate whether the colonial interpretation is more prevalent in the receivers with colonial experience or not.

---

Note:

^[1]  Nord, C. (1997), Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist approaches explained, St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester, p. 85.

^[2]   In the essay “Why I Write” (1946), George Orwell lists four great motives for writing, which he feels exist in every writer: (i) sheer egoism, (ii) aesthetic enthusiasm, (iii) historical impulse, and (iv) political purpose.