SOURCE: “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” in The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 3, December, 1992, pp. 892-912.

In the following essay, Takaki probes The Tempest's relation to the English colonization of America, interpreting Caliban as representative of a “savage” American Indian figure.

“O brave new world that has such people in’t,” they heard Miranda exclaim. It was 1611 and London theatergoers were attending the first performance of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the early seventeenth century, the English were encountering what they viewed as strange inhabitants in new lands. Those experiences determined the meaning of the utterances they heard. A perspicacious few in the audience could have seen that this play was more than a story about how Prospero was sent into exile with his daughter, Miranda, took possession of an island inhabited by Caliban, and redeemed himself by marrying Miranda to the...