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ABSTRACT
As professional and academic theatres re-opened their doors to the public for the 2021/2022 season, the first following the Covid-19 lockdowns, they decided upon plays to welcome back artists and audiences. Curiously, more than 35 American theatres chose Shakespeare’s The Tempest as their inaugural post-lockdown production. This paper examines the reasons for the continued presence of The Tempest on American stages, reading the anti-Black rhetoric inherent in the text – particularly around Caliban – against the increased national attention to racial equity and justice that resulted from the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I interrogate how the play came to be seen as an ‘essential’ Shakespearean text in a post-lockdown America, ultimately concluding that what is essential about The Tempest is not found within Shakespeare’s text, but in the social demand that producing the play places on theatres who wish to reframe the play as anti-racist. In other words, the conditions of the post-lockdown Tempest enable us to see the changing face of American theatre-making.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘About’, Black Lives Matter, accessed 28 March 2024.
2 ‘Principles for Building Anti-Racist Theatre Systems’, We See You W. A. T., accessed 28 March 2024.
3 See Appendix 1 for a list of these productions. Given the delay in producing work post-lockdown in 2021, and the often interrupted and volatile nature of live theatre productions in 2021 and 2022, I am considering the 2021–2022 period to be a single theatrical season.
4 See Appendix 2 for a list of the 2019 productions.
5 I use the term ‘post-lockdown’ to refer to the period after the re-opening of Broadway theatres in September of 2021, which followed the widespread availability of the Covid-19 vaccine in the United States in early 2021. Given regional fluctuations in Covid rates, this period is difficult to define precisely. Additionally, I avoid the popular term ‘post-Covid’ as an acknowledgement that – at the time of writing – Covid remains the third leading cause of death in the United States, and the disease continues to disproportionally affect people of colour.
6 Pollack-Pelzner, ‘American Playwrights Try to Reinvent the History Play’.
7 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 35.
8 Little, White People in Shakespeare, 1.
9 Avila, ‘Director’s Note’.
10 Virginia Mason Vaughan, discusses, for example, Sir Patrick Stewart’s decision to remove his body microphone near the end of his 1995 New York Shakespeare Festival Tempest as emblematic of this extremely common trope. Just as Stewart discarded the ‘theatrical magic’ of the mic – and its amplification of his voice above that of human speech – audiences might imagine Shakespeare himself returning to the ‘civilized world’ and abjuring his own art. (Vaughan, Shakespeare in Performance, 115).
11 ‘The Tempest’, Lantern Theatre, accessed 27 March 2024.
12 Ibid.
13 ‘The Tempest’, Washington and Jefferson College, accessed 27 March, 2024.
14 Thompson, Passing Strange, 17.
15 Smith, ‘We Are Othello’, 104.
16 Smith’s Citation2016 characterisation of America as aspirationally ‘colourblind’ at the same that it is hyper-violent toward Black people anticipated the arguments around racial dynamics that appeared during the post-lockdown period, including those of then Republican Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley that the job of Americans is ‘not to focus on the differences but the similarities’ between racial groups (Sullivan, ‘Nikki Haley Kicked off 2024 Presidential Campaign with Calls for a New Generation of Leadership’). Haley has indeed often denied any presence of racism in America.
17 Smith, ‘We Are Othello’, 110.
18 All quotations from The Tempest are taken from the Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury) edition, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan.
19 Udall, Birth of Merlin, 50.
20 Deroux, ‘The Blackness Within’, 96.
21 British Library Salisbury MSS, xi, 569.
22 Weissbound, ‘Those in their Possession’, 13.
23 Vaughan and Vaughan, The Tempest, 50.
24 Sentiments like Sebastian’s proliferate through Shakespeare’s works, with Ethiopians in particular often held up as contrasts to white feminine beauty. Examples are found in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing, in which, for instance, as penance for his dismissal of Hero, Claudio promises to marry Antonio’s daughter even ‘were she an Ethiope’ (5.4.38). These repeated denigrations of blackness – and of Black femininity in particular – speak to a larger pattern of white supremacist ideology in evidence in Shakespeare’s works.
25 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 4–5.
26 Malcolmson and Iyengar, ‘Spots, Stripes, Stipples’, 136.
27 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘bastard (adj.), sense I.3’.
28 Hall, Things of Darkness, 53.
29 Vaughan, Tempest, 175.
30 Smith, Black Shakespeare, 2.
31 Ibid., 63.
32 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 11.
33 Vaughan, Shakespeare in Performance, 9.
34 Hall, Things of Darkness, 2.
35 Wilson, Missing Link, 90.
36 Vaughan, Shakespeare in Performance, 50–1.
37 Ibid., 126.
38 Quoted in Vaughan, Shakespeare in Performance, 100.
39 Ibid.
40 Barker and Hulme, ‘Nymphs and Reapers’, 198.
41 Brotton, ‘This Tunis’, 136.
42 Loomba and Orkin, Postcolonial Shakespeares, 14.
43 Maler, Director’s Note.
44 Rose, ‘The Tempest’, 452.
45 Ibid., 454.
46 Akabr, ‘I’m Not Saying Shakespeare is an Anti-Black Racist’.
47 MacDonald, Shakespearian Adaptation, 4.
48 Ibid., 7.
49 Venning, ‘The Tempest’, 269.
50 Ibid., 268.
51 Césaire, Une Tempête, 15.
52 Even given the revolutionary nature of Césaire’s work, however, it remains far less accessible to many theatres given both the need for translation of the original French text and the cost of production rights (as opposed to the public domain Tempest). I found evidence of only two productions of Une Tempête in the United States in the period covered in this article: one at the Red Bull Theatre in New York in February of 2021, and one at the American Shakespeare Center in October/November of 2022.
53 Smith, ‘We Are Othello’, 122.