Gold, Land, and Labor: Ideologies of Colonization and Rewriting The Tempest in 1622

Various associations of The Tempest (1611) evoked in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Sea Voyage (1622) suggest that the two plays are engaged in a dialogue that reveals their divergent ideologies. I argue here that The Sea Voyage critiques the colonial ideologies expressed in the earlier play. By confronting The Tempest's silence on piracy, the later play focuses on the practice of European privateering, transferring the characteristics of barbarity and savagery, attributed to the non-Western "other" in The Tempest, to the European pirates. By valorizing labor and connecting it with temperance, The Sea Voyage exposes the unreality of Gonzalo's plantation on the one hand, and the exploitative nature of Prospero's governance on the other. Finally, the Amazonian commonwealth in The Sea Voyage interrogates further the western right to impose cultural norms on the natives that Prospero and the Europeans arrogate to themselves.