The Freedom to Enslave: The Tension Between Humanism and Hegemony in Shakespeare’s "The Tempest"

Abstract

This study examines the tension between humanism and hegemony in "The Tempest" and how that tension situates Prospero’s island as a microcosm for Elizabethan England. The central paradox of the play is the humanist sorcerer’s decision to implement a hegemonic structure on the island mirroring the European hierarchy that betrayed him in Milan. Drawing on Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and New Historicist criticism, this study interprets the play as a series of power relations, with Prospero having absolute authority over the island inhabitants – Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban – and later, the shipwrecked Europeans. Through Prospero’s relationship with his daughter, his subordination of Ariel and Caliban, and the power dynamics between the shipwrecked Italians, Shakespeare repeatedly demonstrates that human beings across social classes harbored humanist desires to shape their own identities in order to exert personal agency and strive for fulfillment – a social phenomenon epitomized by Prospero’s own ascent to becoming an omnipotent sorcerer. "The Tempest," this study argues, is ultimately a play that explores identity in relation to social power dynamics, revealing how the quest for self-actualization is both fueled and thwarted by society’s dominant orthodoxies and the conventions of its reigning hegemonic structure.