Prospero's Redemption in the Production

On Saturday, I went with my class to Salt Lake City to view a production of The Tempest, which was put on by the Pioneer Theater Company.  I really enjoyed the production.  It was well done and brought out some motifs in the play that I hadn't thought of before. 

The biggest thing that I noticed was the theme of redemption.  It had been brought up previously in class discussion, but I never noticed till I saw the play that the character who needed redemption the most was Prospero.  He was shown as consumed by his anger and desire for revenge, at least until he had his conversation with Ariel and came to his senses (the one in the play where he almost hit her, from Act V, scene 1). 



Case in point.

Sure, his change felt a little overdramatic, but it made me think.  What's so great about forgiveness?  I've found in my life that the person most changed by forgiveness is the person who was wronged.  Those who can let go of their anger can find peace that those who continue to hold grudges never discover. 





On a more serious note though, I felt like this production treated a much more serious-and difficult-side of redemption than did The Winter's Tale.  In that play, Leontes was seeking forgiveness.  He had to be penitent and humble and receive it from others.  Prospero, on the other hand, had a harder test in front of him.  It's relatively easy to ask others for forgiveness, but difficult to grant to them.  That's the true test of our own mercy, when all is said and done.  Can we forgive other people?

Retracted!

For those of you who noticed, I retracted my last post.  Here's a rule: When your own post bores you, it's not a good thing. 

I began reading The Tempest over the weekend (I'll be back to Henry IV, part 1 later in the week!) and I have to say I'm excited.  This is classic Shakespeare!  Admittedly, there was not a whole lot of interest in this play until the 19th century, and even then real analysis of the work came with the advent of post-colonial theory. 

I'm a little unsure about the whole "Tempest as colonial advocate" idea, mostly because the postcolonial mess that the world extricated itself from in the mid-twentieth century was not at all the same world that existed in Shakespeare's time, although the foundations for European empire were starting to be laid.  That's a topic for a different post though. 

I'm a little intrigued by Shakespeare's treatment of human nature, though.  Let's take Caliban.  His mother Sycorax, a "foul witch," died before the events of the play, and Caliban was adopted by Prospero when he came to the island.  By both Prospero's and Caliban's accounts, Prospero raised Caliban well and educated him, until he attempted to rape Miranda (Hide your kids, Prospero.  Hide your kids). 

Prospero explains this by saying to Caliban "thy vile race, though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures could not abide to be with."

In other words, it doesn't matter that Caliban got educated.  He is what he is.  This is probably not a racial discourse (Sycorax, his mother, is from Argier {=modern Algiers, in Shakespeare's day the seat of the Barbary Pirates, who were mainly comprised of Arabs and the native Berbers} and is described as "blue-eyed") but more to explain the fact that some people (Miranda and Ariel) are good and some people (Caliban) are not.  Angela made a good point about Shakespeare's treatment of fate in her post about MacBeth.  The Tempest would seem to be another play in which Shakespeare states that human destiny and character is fixed.  Does Shakespeare believe that fate governs peoples' lives?