After reading The Tempest for class I had to read Brave New World and watch an old sci-fi movie, Forbidden Planet. I then had to write a response to all of this for my teacher. I like my response so much I'm going to post it here. It will make more sense if you've read these works or seen the movie, but I think it gets its point across anyway. And perhaps it will inspire you to expand your horizons. I am writing directly back to the teacher so just ignore any references to "last week".

Ahhh!

“The Monster in the Id! The Monster in the Id!” I love that line. Anyway, on to more important matters. The Tempest did not bother me have so much as what we have read and watched this week. How has reading Brave New World and watching Forbidden Planet changed how I view The Tempest? I’m not quite sure, but I know they have changed how I view my life.
Brave New World is just flat out scary. I was sure I would hate it (since I hated it in high school) but I read it in a day. Absolutely couldn’t put it down. I suppose that means I’ve matured at least a little bit since fifteen. However, for as much as I liked it, it scared me more. Especially in this age of the government secretly tapping phones and keeping tabs on people all over the place without their consent. Which being a conspiracy theorist myself I’ve thought has been going on this whole time and the media just finally caught wind of it, but that’s neither here nor there. The important thing is that Brave New World might be closer to coming true than any of us want to admit. But I’m supposed to be relating this to Shakespeare.
I have to say I thought Brave New World was more a commentary on the overall works of Shakespeare than The Tempest in particular. I didn’t see an exact link to that play in particular, more an overall commentary on emotion viewed thru Shakespeare and what that means. There isn’t really a character in the novel a person can get behind except perhaps Mustapha Mond or Helmholtz. Bernard is a whiny, self-pitying idiot and John Savage is a misogynistic ass. I feel for The Savage, I honestly do but he is an excellent example of the dangers of learning the world only through Shakespeare. Helmholtz and Mustapha Mond were right in their assessment that you must go over the top when reaching for an emotional reaction but they recognized, which The Savage failed to do, that such excess should exist only in the text. “Civilization” is devoid of emotion and John Savage has too much of it--or, too much held in too tight of strictures.
As to how all of this relates to The Tempest I suppose it goes back to an idea I am still half-forming. There is something different about The Tempest from Shakespeare’s other plays. It isn’t just about colonization or a god story. Reading it this last time it’s almost like Shakespeare himself didn’t even know where he wanted it to go exactly. In his other plays he expresses the major theme explicitly. One of his characters offers the reader (or viewer) a nice little emotional rant that sums it all up quite nicely. But in The Tempest we don’t ever get that. It bothered me last week that no one saw a greater meaning in the play. We read the critics and we all tailored our responses around what we read but none of us, myself included, really reached for something greater. Maybe a critic has already commented on this, but what if The Tempest is bigger than love or death or revenge? What if this is Shakespeare’s culminating play? The one that truly tries to tackle all the aspects of the human condition, humanity itself?
Certainly Brave New World and Forbidden Planet go in that direction. Their storylines have nothing to do with colonization or revenge and everything to do with man tinkering with powers that are beyond him. As the captain says at the end of the movie, “man is not meant to play God.” I suppose that’s where you were trying to get us to go last class with your talks of Chimeras and what not. Sarah and I knew we were missing it but we couldn’t figure out where you wanted us to go. Sorry about that.
So I’m back once again to that age-old question, what does it all mean? Was Shakespeare trying to warn us away from creating Calibans or warn us that we already had? Did he create Prospero so like his enemies in the hopes we would look to ourselves and see our own faults so clearly? Was he trying to show us the dangers of a caste system or too much knowledge? Or all of the above?
Prospero is an amazingly powerful character, but his power truly lies in manipulating those with more power than himself. That does reflect mankind in that, as human beings we are fearfully fragile, but immense in our ability to create technology that protects us. Is Prospero then, a metaphor for all of humanity? And, if so, what does that mean? Is Shakespeare trying to tell us we are meant to lord over nature or show us that we are, actually, equal to it? Without his servants Prospero wouldn’t survive and without our natural resources neither do we. Perhaps Shakespeare saw in the discovery of the New World the destruction of the last pure wilderness and with it the total sublimation of the Earth. But how could he have possibly predicted we would end up where we are today?
But maybe it’s more simple than that. Greed is no new friend to humans and greed was as powerful in the 17th century as it is today. Greed has been the root of destruction for entire cultures. Assuming that Shakespeare was bound by the strictures of the time, Prospero had to fulfill certain requirements for the audience to accept, the play had to end a certain way where does that leave us? Prospero had to get his dukedom back and had to forgive his brother. Miranda and Ferdinand needed to fall in love. These were all necessary parts to the story for the basic plot. Of more interest is Prospero’s dealings with Caliban and Ariel.
Caliban is an ill-mannered brute, there can be no doubt about that, but he reminds me of Magua from The Last of the Mohicans. Beaten and abused by the world he lives in is he truly to blame for what has become of him? Unable to comprehend the world Caliban attacks Miranda and Prospero deals with him accordingly. Does that make Prospero evil? Who is at fault? What if no one is at fault? What if that is the point?

What if Shakespeare was just trying to say shit happens and there’s nothing anybody can do about it?

That’s not a very eloquent way of stating the argument but it does get the point across. Caliban is a victim of circumstance, but a dangerous creature none-the-less. Prospero is a conceited jerk, but must deal with the very real threat Caliban poses to Miranda. Antonio is a backstabber, but Prospero wasn’t watching over his dukedom properly. Alonzo should have kept Antonio from stealing the dukedom, but as King he had the very real need of his provinces being run by competent people. Everyone in the play makes a bad decision but not a completely unjustified one.
What if, after all his plays and all his sonnets William Shakespeare finally came to the realization that humanity will never be perfect? Could The Tempest be his response to that realization? Both Brave New World and Forbidden Planet deal with the ills of utopian societies. Could Aldous Huxley and the writer of Forbidden Planet have grasped this concept so clearly? Did they grasp this realization or did it just work its way out in their works?
Deep down we all know utopia isn’t possible but perhaps on Shakespeare and the writer of Forbidden Planet understand why. Because always, for all our education and refinement, for all our power, magical or otherwise, there will always, always be a monster in our id.