Their Words, Then, Express Their Own Ideals, And Between The Lines Of The

Their words, then, express their own ideals, and between the lines of the words they say we can be sensitive to the playwright's attitudes to the naivety that informed the politics and idealism of his own society,
The Tempest is Shakespeare's dramatization of his political ideas concerning the state and the prince. Prospero's island is a model of a commonwealth: Prospero is the king, his magic a symbol of his absolute power, Ariel the agent of his government, and Caliban all the subjects (1.2.341) Shakespeare makes much of the criminally large amount of trust Prospero's invested in his brother. As Iwasaki notes,
Prospero was not an ideal prince in his trusting his brother nor in his neglect of a life of action; his loss of the dukedom was a result of his disqualification as a prince. He did not put realpolitik into practice. Alonso is another failure as a sovereign ruler. Having sent in marriage his daughter Claribel to a far-off country, he has now lost his only son and heir Ferdinand to his great sorrow. The political uneasiness of a kingdom with no prospect of its future succession is analogous to the actual situation of the Virgin Queen's commonwealth, in which succession problems caused political unrest and governmental debates
Theory aside, there are keen racial implications, entangled in the rhetoric of ostensible politically sensitive play. The Tempest has generally been read as a play about forgiveness and reconciliation, change and transformation, illusion and magic and the Prospero's usurpation. Such interpretations generally privilege the attitudes of noble, educated Europeans- in particularly those of Prospero. Such readings are in danger of nulling Caliban's rights and silencing his appeal for freedom. A postcolonial reading leads to another reading entirely: The Tempest can then be appreciated as allegorical, referencing the exploitation of indigenous races, with Caliban as a single figure standing for the natives of the New World who were dispossessed and exploited by the European powers. Caliban voices the indignance of the natives who were widely treated as inferior and even sub-human because of their skin colour and their differing cultural traits- which lead to their social marginalisation as uncivilised. Due to their widely accepted, aggressive branding as inferior creatures, the natives were exploited to benefit the economy, through their capture and subsequent use as slaves.
Arguably, the manner of representing race in The Tempest suffers from being heavily and naively Eurocentric. Caliban's physicality evidences his difference, which is arrogantly equated with inferiority, something even found in his name which is almost an anagram of 'cannibal'. Yet I have argued that Shakespeare is conscious of his characterisation as separate from himself, and that, although they may sometimes speak with his voice they certainly have distinct voices of their own.