#ShakespeareSoWhite!
Stanford University’s theater department has come under fire for neglecting to turn the Bard’s The Tempest into a social justice-warring morality play about racism, colonialism, Eurocentrism, cultural appropriation, victimization of Native Americans, and white supremacy.
The student production of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy about Italian nobles washed up on a mysterious island after a storm opened on March 1 to a packed house and a rave review by Alli Cruz, theater critic for the student newspaper, the Stanford Daily. The play’s plot revolves around Prospero, the long-exiled Duke of Milan who is also a magician, his beautiful daughter, Miranda, exiled to the island along with him, a charming island sprite called Ariel who serves the pair, and Caliban, the feral son of a witch who is first befriended by Caliban, then enslaved by him after he tries to molest Miranda. There are nymphs, there are drunken ship’s crewmen who tell bawdy jokes, there’s Ferdinand, a nice young Milanese nobleman who falls in love with Miranda, and there’s a happy ending and reconciliation all around in which Prospero gets his dukedom back and Ferdinand and Miranda get married.
You might wonder what any of this has to do with racism, colonialism, and the rest of the social-justice menu. But Shakespeare scholars have been speculating for decades that the island in question was likely in the Caribbean, even though the text of the play suggests that the island was actually in the Mediterranean, not too far from Italy. But there had been a well-publicized English shipwreck near Bermuda in 1609, two years before The Tempest made its debut performance in London, so it’s possible that Shakespeare indeed set his play in the New World, not the Old. That makes Prospero a colonial settler, Caliban a victimized Native American, Ariel a—well, I don’t know what Ariel is supposed to be. Or the nymphs, for that matter.
And so enter from stage left Kai Kent, Stanford class of 2017, with a March 14 op-ed for the Daily, “Don’t de-racialize ‘The Tempest'”:
Even worse:
Although having a white actor play the would-be rapist of a white woman does make that “racialized” rhetoric kind of confusing:
Then there was this crowning indignity:
Actually, the student actor who played Caliban was Hamzeh Daoud, a Jordanian of Palestinian ancestry. I don’t know whether that makes him white, “white-passing,” or a genuine member of an ethnic minority. Lea Zawada, the student actress who played Ariel, certainly doesn’t have a very European-sounding surname.
In recent years many of Shakespeare’s plays have been taken to task and found wanting for their lack of political correctness, especially in the sexism department (think Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew)—and they’ve often been reinterpreted and restaged to turn them into more pointed allegories of Western evils. So it may be that Kent’s beef isn’t so much with Stanford’s producers of The Tempest but with its author. Maybe he just wanted to write a mellow fantasy that happened also to explore serious themes of cultural clashes and morality and immorality on both sides of a cultural divide.
