Reproduction of Past Injustices and Inequalities in Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest Summer Jade Dolan College

Given that William Shakespeare was writing in a period when ‘blackness [was] one of the many qualities, physical or otherwise, that isolate[d] and acutely degrade[d] those who possess[ed] it’, and ‘the male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of that subordination to women in society in general… had become so deeply embedded that it has appeared immutable’, it is perhaps predictable that The Tempest (1611) has faced retrospective criticism from literary theorists in terms of its depictions of both gender and race relations [1]. Within this essay, two adaptations of The Tempest – Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) – will be explored in terms of how they reinforce and/or challenge these problematic elements within Shakespeare’s original text.

The complaints of sexism prevalent in Feminist readings of The Tempest emerge also in Feminist discussions on Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet. In both cases, much of the criticism focuses on Shakespeare’s character of Miranda, (and the corresponding character of Altaira in Forbidden Planet), and the significance of her sexuality, or lack thereof; ‘the most elusive yet far reaching function of Miranda in the play involves the...