Prospero + Caliban + Ariel

Question 1

Keith Sagar: ‘Prospero…

Answer 1

…is a Godlike being’

Question 2

Matt Thompson: ‘We and Prospero…

Answer 2

need those creative, imaginative, brutish qualities as well as our intellectual, social, logical, conscious, ordered aspects’.

Idea of Ariel and Caliban being reflections of Prospero’s psyche
- psychoanalytical critic

Question 3

Kim F. Hall: exploit Caliban for money

S - ‘If I can recover him…he’s a present for any emperor’ 2.2

T - ‘Were I in England now…and had but this fish painted…would give a piece of silver’ 2.2

Answer 3

‘Trinculo and Stephano immediately see the economic potential of Caliban’

Question 4

Brinda Charry: ‘Caliban is constructed…

Answer 4

…as monster, brute, savage, all reminiscent of the way in which many Europeans represented natives across the world’

Question 5

Deborah Willis: ‘the threatening…

Answer 5

…‘Other’ is used by colonial power to display its own godliness and to justify colonial project morally’

postcolonial perspective on Caliban - unbalanced power dynamic - oppressors are superior (prospero and miranda)

‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse’ 1.2

Question 6

Jonathan Miller: ‘Caliban is…

Answer 6

…demoralised, detribalised, dispossessed’.

• mistreated and inferior - stripped from cultural traditions and deprived of his land, property and possessions

‘and here you sty me/In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me/The rest o’th’island’ 1.2

‘This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, /Which thou tak’st from me.’ 1.2

Question 7

Peter Hicks: ‘Ariel it is who…

Answer 7

performs the action of the play, the motor that powers the plot, the animating force which accomplishes Prospero’s design’.

• Ariel’s impact on the play

Question 8

Diana Devlin: ‘Prospero…

Answer 8

…manipulates his powers quite tyrannically to achieve his higher purposes’.

Question 9

Neil Bowen: ‘A subtle…

Answer 9

…but arch Machiavellian’