An esoteric scholar once said, ‘The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.’
Distinguished peers and publishers, you might argue—’ But, Margaret! That esoteric scholar is you!”
You wouldn’t be wrong.
While studying Shakespeare’s 1616 comedy The Tempest, the carnal need of the post-modernist within me called to interrogate the playwright himself.
Shakespeare explores the notion that power and revenge are intertwined through his examination of the Caliban character. Can revenge ever be a means of empowerment, or does it trap individuals in cycles of subjugation? Today, through my proposed appropriation of The Tempest, “Hagseed”, I’ll explore revenge’s ability to empower, interrogating Shakespeare’s interpretation of the failure of revenge against culturally embedded power structures. The consequent textual conversation will allow for a post-colonial reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Caliban as an empowering symbol possessing intellectual complexity as opposed to a victim of colonial hegemony.
Shakespeare examines notions of power and revenge by depicting them as fundamentally intertwined; that true revenge is transcending power structures that kept you oppressed. Shakespeare emphasizes disempowering cycles of hegemony to critique ideas of social domination integral to colonial ideology. Shakespeare achieves this through Caliban’s characterization, central to which is his inability due to escape the cycle of subjugation.
Caliban seeks revenge with the assumption that pledging himself in servitude to another individual will empower him against Prospero is emphasized through biblical allusion in “I will kiss thy foot. I prithee, be my god.. a plague upon the tyrant I serve! I’ll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee.”
Shakespeare critiques this assumption by repudiating Caliban’s temporary empowerment “Then in dreaming the clouds me thought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.” Shakespeare’s use of form-specific conventions— monologue and blank verse – reinforces Caliban’s self-actualization through his distress at the illusion of emancipation, suggesting that his inability to escape subjugation impeded his revenge.
Why does Shakespeare choose this pessimistic view on vengeance and hegemony?
Minor details such as Shakespeare’s expiration hinder this interrogation. However, we do have contextual clues and the power of deduction.
Shakespeare’s examination is an overt criticism of colonial culture, reinforced and contextualized through his utilization of setting. The age of exploration glorified exotic, utopic depictions of islands, disregarding the dehumanizing subjugation that demarcated expansionism. Shakespeare criticizes this by portraying the island as a setting of disempowerment and torture. The contrast of strong visual imagery in “The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile… and here you sty me in this hard rock?” reinforces Caliban’s suffering in solidarity with the indigenous experience under expansionist colonialism.
Through the interrogation of Shakespeare’s creative purpose, I intend to adopt his scrutiny of cyclical oppressive structures to explore how revenge can be accessed through empowerment and derived from socio-political consciousness in Hagseed.
Reflecting Shakespeare’s utilization of setting, I’ll be using prisons as a narrative device to criticize judicial systematic oppression that entraps marginalized individuals in cycles of recidivism. I exemplify this notion in “Prisons are for incarceration and punishment, not for spurious attempts to educate those who cannot… be educated.” My use of parallelism highlights that prisons, rather than institutions of reformation, are designed to keep individuals uneducated. As education in our current meritocratic society is a means for gaining agency, the denial of this validates and criticizes the notion that prison systems hegemonize the incarcerated.
The adoption of Caliban’s character gives the prisoners political consciousness which allows them to expose the oppressive system and reclaim agency, successfully exacting revenge. This notion is exemplified in “You called me a criminal… But you’re a white-collar crook…Rakin’ taxpayer money, we know what you took, so who’s more monstrous…than you?” My use of rhetorical questions and alliteration emphasizes the prisoners’ reclamation of agency and consciousness of class prejudice corrupting judicial integrity.
The play also gives the prisoners access to revenge by providing an outlet to expose classism in the judicial system, exemplified through my use of polyptoton in “My Goblins…They’re the agents of control, but also they’re the enablers of vengeance and retribution.”
The subversion of Caliban into a symbol of empowerment is reinforced through my use of epistrophe in the rap. The repetition of the phrase “But I’m Hag-Seed,” culminating in “King Hag-Seed!” emphasizes the prisoner’s reclamation of the derogatory term. Therefore, the play and Caliban’s character give the prisoners political consciousness and agency in an environment that deprives them, providing them with true power over the system.
Esteemed publishers, I’ll leave you with one last reason to commission “Hagseed” for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. Hagseed achieves a simple task: it invites me to a Sunday afternoon tea with the playwright himself, to have a heated conversation where I pose questions that he, in a frustrating, roundabout way, asks me to answer myself. Hagseed’s reflections on power’s ability to manifest revenge sustain a textual conversation that allows for the post-colonial reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Caliban as an empowering symbol possessing intellectual complexity, as opposed to a victim of colonial hegemony.
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