postcolonialism and tempest

A few days ago in class, we began a discussion similar to this blog about what Miranda meant with the word “savage.” Of course, who’s to say what a savage is when one cannot see one’s self. But concerning this discussion, in history, it has been written down and shown throughout Hollywood specials what a “savage” really is. According to those back then, the savages were uncivilized natives who slaughtered and massacred other white men; “they [were] vicious killers, all of them; they [are not] even humans” (The Great Sioux Massacre [1965]). Then again, these lines are just stereotypes made for the perfect American story. 

Upon reading Act II and III of The Tempest and the article of postcolonialism, however, I found parallels concerning Caliban’s similarity to natives and how others came to label him as a “savage”. For example, in Act II, Trinculo encounters Caliban for the first time and commented that “in England this strange monster would be just like a man” (Shakespeare Act II, Scene 2). Just like how Miranda had called him a savage, Trinculo calls Caliban a monster; with Trinculo from another place entirely, it would be normal to find surprise and maybe awe at the newly discovered individual; however, immediately after his first sight, Trinculo names him the most vulgar of names. Shakespeare might have created an unfair stereotype of “others” to give us the image of how he portrayed this Caliban character, and with this image he creates, it does give us the sense of colonization and how the white man is superior. But then, incidents like this has happened throughout history where stereotypes were put onto a populace according to how they lived, what environment they lived in, and what their physical appearance was like; in colonial times, natives were labeled according to how different they were. With the images of the white man in superiority, consider the article when it says that “many British people believed that Great Britain was destined to rule the world,” and had an assumption that “Western Europeans… were biologically superior to any other race” (“Cultural Studies” 236). Going back to the quote I used up there, Trinculo also mentions that he is from England, which further reveals that Shakespeare tries to portray the image of this postcolonialism to his readers through his play. With these stereotypes, Shakespeare represents the people of the colonial days, and maybe with his labels, allows others to sympathize with these characters.