A Postcolonial Study Of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

With the development of the deconstruction in the1960s and1970s, the post-colonialstudies of The Tempest step into a new age. As the last work of Shakespeare, The Tempestis acknowledged as the most splendid work in language and structure. Centering on thecolonial and power themes, this thesis tries to employ Said’s Orientalism to analyze thisplay from a post-colonial perspective. It mainly interprets the early British colonizationreflected in the play; also the identity of colonialists and the distorted image of the Otherare under discussion. Through an analysis of the unequal power relationship between theOrient and Occident, and the ideology of Euro-centralism, it demonstrates thatShakespeare has racialism in his colonial ideology, which is ahead of his time.This thesis includes five parts. The first part is introduction; the historical backgroundof The Tempest is introduced, also the literature reviews on this play, and the purpose andsignificance of this thesis. The second part introduces the theory of post-colonialism; itfirst gives an overview of this theory, and then focuses on Said’s Orientalism, especially onthe concept of discourse power and the Subject-Other. The third part is the main body ofthe thesis; it first states the early British colonization which reflected in this play, thenexplores the process of the construction of the Subject and the Other from differentidentities of Prospero and Caliban. Afterwards, it infers the establishment of Prospero’sdiscourse hegemony under the violence and culture; which reflected in the differentrelationship between Prospero and Caliban, Prospero and Ariel. The Fourth part is also themain body; it states the unequal power relationship between the Orient and Occident, andreveals the Euro-centralism in this play, meanwhile analyzes the reflection ofShakespeare’s racialism in the colonial discourse. The final part is conclusion. Through ananalysis of the relationship between the characters and discourse power from theperspective of Said’s Orientalism, the author of the thesis finds that this play reveals thehistory of colonialism and the acceptance of colonialism in the western literary world tosome extent, which has enlightenment under the situation of globalization nowadays.