Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest
FOR MANY YEARS IDEALIST READINGS OF THE TEMPEST presented Prospero as an exemplar of timeless human values. They emphasized the way in which his hard-earned "magical" powers enable him to re-educate the shipwrecked Italians, to heal their civil war-and, even more important, to triumph over his own vengefulness by forgiving his enemies; they emphasized the way he achieves, if not a wholly "brave," at least a harmoniously reconciled new world. Within the last few years, however, numbers of critics have offered remarkably similar critiques of this reading. There is an essay on The Tempest in each of three recent anthologies of alternative, political, and reproduced Shakespeare criticism, and another in the volume on estranging Renaissance criticism; The Tempest was a focus for the 1988 SAA session on "Shakespeare and Colonialism" and was one of the masthead plays in the Folger Institute's 1988 seminar on new directions in Shakespeare studies. Together,