Tempests after Shakespeare (review)

Chantal Zabus's important study joins a brace of books about the various afterlives of TheTempest, including Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan's Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (1991), Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman's edited collection "The Tempest" and Its Travels (2000), and Jonathan Goldberg's Tempest in the Caribbean (2004). But Tempests after Shakespeare is more comprehensive in its coverage and literally more global in its theoretical claims than any of the above. Whereas other recent studies of Tempest rewrites have tended to focus on postcoloniality, Zabus's book provides a bold broadening of perspective. Zabus argues that the multitude of Tempest rewrites of the past century constitute an evolving space in which three critical movements—postcoloniality, postpatriarchy, and postmodernism—have vied for "ownership of meaning," not just of Shakespeare's play but also of disputed "territorial niche[s] in the larger critiques of representation" (1, 2). In the process, she reads a staggering number of works, ranging from the familiar if not canonical—Aimé Césaire's Une tempête (1969), Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991), Marina Warner's Indigo (1992)—to the far less well-known, including novels, plays, poems, essays, and films from Latin America, Francophone and Anglophone North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, and Mauritius.

In keeping with the three "post"-isms that Zabus limns, Tempests after Shakespeare is subdivided into a tripartite though heavily cross-referential structure. The first section, "Calibanic Postcoloniality," covers material familiar to a readership versed in post-1980s criticism of Shakespeare's play. Yet Zabus lends new historical context and depth to this material by tracing a "Calibanic genealogy" that complicates and refracts the now conventional identification of Shakespeare's "thing of darkness" with a colonial subaltern. Indeed, rewriters of The Tempest have cast Caliban in an astonishingly contradictory array of roles: European worker (Ernest Renan) and Yankee imperialist (José Enrique Rodó); black African (Ndabaningi Sithole et al.) and white African (Leonard Barnes); Carib Indian (Roberto Fernandez Retamar) and South Asian Indian (Philip Mason); ithyphallic rapist (George Lamming) and caring lesbian (Suniti Namjoshi); Canadian bear (Charles G. D. Roberts) and Mexican frog (Rachel Ingalls). Zabus complicates this Calibanic genealogy further by showing how postcolonial adaptations have occasionally privileged other characters. In Edward Kamau Brathwaite's later fiction Sycorax is the cybernetic representative of a native writing that precedes Prospero's; she thus provides a key (and a keyboard) for escaping the prison-house of the Caribbean colonizer's language. And while Ariel was the anti-imperialist ego-ideal of the late-nineteenth-century Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó—a valorization that Césaire notably refused by styling his Ariel as a mulatto accommodationist—at least one Québecois writer has identified with another, unlikely anticolonial figure: despite the title of his 1977 novel Caliban, Pierre Seguin pays heightened attention to the figure of Stephano, who "delights in startling the old fogies" (98).

Zabus's second section, "Miranda and Sycorax on the 'Eve' of Postpatriarchy," chronicles how women (and some male) writers have challenged and reconfigured the gendered terrains of Shakespeare's play. For feminists who have found little to salvage from Caliban, Miranda and Sycorax have provided more fertile possibilities for literary re-vision. Whereas Miranda has figured prominently as a feminist heroine in the work of Canadian writers such as Audrey Thomas, Margaret Laurence, and Sarah Murphy, Sycorax has become a lightning rod for African American writers' critiques of gynocracy, including Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). White women writers from the United States have found different points of entry into the play: Sylvia Plath chose Ariel rather than Miranda or Sycorax as her poetic alter-ego; H. D. was drawn to the invisible, voiceless Claribel. Globally, however, literary interest in the play's "alter-native" female characters has also opened up space for new affiliations. In No Telephone to Heaven (1987) the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff offers "the recognition by a creolized Miranda and a bisexual, transgender...