The Tempest (Vol. 84) | Kevin Pask (essay date 2002)
Kevin Pask (essay date 2002)
SOURCE: Pask, Kevin. “Prospero's Counter-Pastoral.” Criticism 44, no. 4 (2002): 389-404.
[In the following essay, Pask describes The Tempest as an inversion of the pastoral tradition that displays politicized motifs of colonialist, aristocratic, and sexual domination.]
1
At the beginning of the period in which Caliban was to acquire his strongest association with revolutionary energies of every sort, William Hazlitt lodged what remains a powerful if underappreciated critique of this association. Writing in response to the report of a lecture in which Coleridge described Caliban as “an original and caricature of Jacobinism, so fully illustrated at Paris during the French Revolution,” Hazlitt responded with some heat:
Caliban is so far from being a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that he is strictly the legitimate sovereign of the isle, and Prospero and the rest are...
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