In 1969 the Martinican playwright Aimé Césaire published Une Tempête: d'après "La Tempête" de Shakespeare—adaptation pour un théâtre nègre. Critical opinion of the play has for the most part fallen into two types of hasty generalization. The subtitle has led some commentators to believe that Césaire's play should be considered as but one more modern version of Shakespeare, this one having ethnic overtones. Others have concluded, on the basis of an earlier statement by Césaire that he intended to write a play on the contemporary racial situation in the United States, that his Tempest must be read allegorically. These readers choose to see Martin Luther King in Césaire's Ariel and Malcolm X in his Caliban. Both groups underestimate the significance of the play as contemporary drama and fail to assess critically its relationship to the Shakespearean model…. Comparison of...