ABSTRACT
As much as it uses the theater to talk about colonialism, The Tempest (1611) uses colonialism to talk about the theater—particularly, about authority and work in certain early modem playhouses. Traditionally, when critics have spoken of the theater in The Tempest, it has been as an abstraction. In contrast, I take Shakespeare’s theatrical experience to be a practical, not abstract, matter. Indeed it is not enough to say The Tempest is about the theater. We need to ask: Which theater or theaters? and Who and what in those theaters may have shaped the play? My primary claims are thus twofold, though related. First, that The Tempest, commonly acknowledged a play without a major literary source, looks to the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses, and to the realities of working in those structures, for its most salient sources. Its portrait of playhouse labor and experience includes not only Prospero as a playwright/director, but Miranda as a figure of an idealized spectatorship, and Ariel as a boy actor. My second major claim, one that builds on this playhouse allegory, is that Caliban derived from Shakespeare’s experiences with Will Kemp, a celebrated Elizabethan clown known for his physical, even priapic comedy, his independent spirit, folk ethos, and intrusive ad libs. Kemp’s tendency to ignore the lines playwrights had written translated, in fact, into Caliban’s animosity toward Prospero’s powerful books. Rewriting the relation of (among others) Theseus to Bottom as one of Prospero to Caliban, Shakespeare recollected an apparently unwelcome interdependence of himself, as playwright and actor for what were then the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and the company’s famous, if unruly, clown.
