Reconfiguring Shakespeare in a Postcolonial World
Comparison Between Julie Taymor and Oh Tae-Suk’s Tempest
Correlation on similarity can be drawn between Taymor and Oh’s productions of Shakespeare’s Tempest. They both use masks and puppetry to enhance the magical elements of the play and engage the audience’s imagination on the various spirits and supernatural beings that appear throughout the performance. However, it is intriguing to notice the connection between the actual productions with the time period in which they are performed. Both shows are staged in a contemporary, postcolonial setting, in New York City, the epitome of capitalism and an exemplified city built from the profit of Western colonialism. The original parallel drawn between Taymor and Oh’s works diverges when the emphasis is placed on the directors’ racial identity and position in the postcolonial world. As an American, Taymor’s identity is associated with that of the colonizer. On the other hand, Oh’s ethnicity is Korean, which marks his status as the colonized. By juxtaposing Taymor and Oh (while situating each director within their roles in our contemporary, postcolonial universe), this paper’s argument builds on the connection between the performance and the continuous historical influence of colonization, which are evident in the directors’ stage directions, whether the choices have been made consciously or unconsciously.
The main relationship which represents that of the colonizer and the colonized is shown in the contact between Prospero and Caliban. Depiction of Prospero is quite self-explanatory in Shakespeare’s original text. Prospero is male, and his age range is approximated to be either a senior or well into his middle age with a brooding charisma demonstrated by a white magician. However, directors gain more flexibility when creating their image of Caliban due to his vague, seemingly supernatural identity marked as a monster and an earth spirit, and both Taymor and Oh each have a unique interpretation of the character.
From the documentary, Behind the Scenes, Taymor mentions how she “took the line in the play where Caliban says, ‘Here I am stymied. You have stymied me in this hard rock … to be stuck to be imprisoned here’”, and the costume design for Taymor’s Caliban stays true to this line. The documentary later portrays how Caliban’s mask is designed after the “mudmen of New Guinea,” and Taymor informs how it is the “most primitive of masks.” To add a supernatural quality to Caliban as an earthly spirit, Taymor directs Caliban’s entrance as a “body emerging from the sandbank like a subterranean creature escaping an underworld darkness as he forces himself in the open air” (Quarmby 389). Thus, Taymor’s visualization follows Prospero’s portrayal of Caliban as a native earth spirit of the island by modeling him after the “mudmen” and guiding his entrance to be an emergence from the sand. However, when we view the Tempest under a postcolonial lens, forming such a correlation between a native tribe of a third world country and solidification of Caliban’s identity as a non-human being can become easily problematic. Prospero’s perspective of Caliban does not necessarily equate with Shakespeare’s interpretation of Caliban. Directors, like Taymor, tend to recreate Caliban as a subhuman, a supernatural entity, which is exactly what Prospero labels Caliban as because if Caliban is a human, Prospero’s treatment of him becomes unacceptable. Prospero justifies his subjugation of Caliban by determining the island native as one with a lower race and from a birth fit for slavery since he mentions Caliban’s origin to be from the witch Sycorax and Satan himself. Taymor’s representation of Caliban repeats this trope of the character’s justified inferiority. Establishing Caliban as the spawn of a witch and a devil, thus enforcing the individual to automatically assume the role of a monster, is uncanny when conducting a postcolonial reading of the play because this method of othering and exoticizing an individual was what the European colonizers did in order to enslave and commodify indigenous people.
While Prospero views Caliban as a monstrous demon and others simply regard him as a native spirit who naturally inhabits the earth, Stephano and Trinculo initially identify him as a fish. Such diverse description of a single character makes Caliban difficult to portray, creating confusion for the directors, and Taymor is no exception. Caliban’s persona is meant to be baffling and puzzling as humanity itself since his character is layered with various ideologies projected onto him. He could represent the colonized indigenous people, the subjugated masses of the working class, or human nature/instinct controlled by reason and intellect, and the list goes on and on. Therefore, “[Caliban’s] African face and body, encrusted with mud and earth … firmly established in Taymor’s 1980s version of the play” effectively dehumanize the character while excluding his potential for complexity (Quarmby 396). Taymor may have not intended her vision to align with Prospero’s Eurocentric and colonialist perception of Caliban, yet when she describes Caliban’s prototype, the “mudmen of New Guinea” as “primitive”, her definition “establishe[s] her postcolonial reading for Caliban” (Quarmby 396). Taymor’s use of traditional New Guinea masks can also be seen as an instance of cultural appropriation. The New Guinea mask worn by Caliban is a marker of his enslavement to Prospero and is used in the play as an object of negative connotation. After Caliban meets Stephano and Trinculo, he plots a rebellion against Prospero with the newly arrived Italians and is overjoyed by the possibility of freedom. During this process, Caliban cracks open his mask with a log (another symbol of his servitude) to represent his hope for regained autonomy. Evidently, Caliban does not willingly wear the mask to represent his cultural identity; the purpose of the mask is to “stymie” Caliban from his access to freedom. It is highly unlikely that the indigenous people of New Guinea utilize their clay masks as a form of punishment or confinement, and in the documentary, Taymor does not provide information on the masks’ original uses. Taymor does acknowledge the cultural background behind the mask design, yet she provides insufficient knowledge behind the true purpose and story of New Guinea’s art.
Oh’s Caliban is also characterized as a non-human entity, yet the development behind Oh’s directorial choice can be interpreted in a different light than Taymor’s portrayal of Caliban. Oh’s retelling of the Tempest is set in ancient Korea depicted in its folklore of samguk yusa and the history of a territory named Kaya (Kwon 81). By situating his Tempest in a country with a history of being victimized by colonization and Japanese imperialism, Oh’s production displays a rich array of culture and art that were once oppressed and subjugated by colonial powers. Such “assertion of national identity via traditional cultural values [is] ‘a form of struggle against colonial exploitation’” (Kwon 81). Oh’s strategy of choosing precolonial Korea, instead of a contemporary, postcolonial Korea as the setting for his Tempest, indicates his desire “to look to Korean precolonial memory to overcome the feeling of impasse that Korea’s modern tragedies and legacies of colonialism, war, national partition, dictatorships, and Western hegemony bring” (Kwon 82). Oh’s Tempest is a cultural mixture composed of various traditional Korean aspects: the spirits of Eastern shamanism, historical figures in samguk yusa, actors’ lines spoken in the Korean language, Korean talchum and pansori, etc. Within this context, there is a second Caliban in the performance venue other than the actor playing Caliban on stage. “With respect to the language of the play, an English speaker is somewhat like Caliban, with a crude but effective grasp of the language” (Zarnoweicki). By situating the Anglophone audience in Caliban and Miranda’s place, Oh gives them a foreign experience of the Tempest consisted of the colonized’s language and culture (Zarnoweicki). Thus, Oh effectively flips the positions (colonizer vs. colonized, ruler vs. ruled) in the colonialist power dynamic “when evaluating indigenously based works” that are usually interpreted “from Western-, Anglophone-, and text-centered aesthetic standards”, which serves “to open up space for more diverse aesthetics” (Kwon 91).
Another significant contrast between Taymor and Oh’s Tempest is revealed in their set design. While Taymor’s stage is designed to be a physical sandy shore of an island, Oh interprets the island as a boat. While an island is rooted in place, a boat at sea is constantly moving. This juxtaposition of mobility versus immobility is noteworthy when focusing on the postcolonialist sentiment of the Tempest. While Taymor’s production is marked for its traditional Western interpretation of the play as mentioned previously when describing her characterization of Caliban, Oh’s Tempest is an Eastern rethinking of a Western play. “No longer an island we dutifully visit in the name of Shakespeare, this play is indeed a boat: it takes us to the places, times, and aesthetics which Oh has chosen. It is a Tempest of globalized contact, one that transports its audience” (Zarnoweicki). The boat functions as a medium for transcendence in time, so the people on deck can heal and progress towards a better future. This process of healing is demonstrated by the two brothers, Prospero and Antonio, as they “beg each other’s forgiveness” (Zarnoweicki). Another way of understanding Oh’s creation of his setting as a moving boat instead of a stagnant island is viewing it as a symbol of decolonization — moving away from the pains of colonialism to heal and rejuvenate in regaining autonomy. This process of decolonization appears in several fashions: Antonio apologizes to Prospero for usurping his government and decides to return his political authority, while Prospero frees the twinned Caliban by splitting them into two.
Nevertheless, Oh’s happy ending diverges from the original ending because Shakespeare’s ending is difficult to determine as a comedic conclusion. Shakespeare’s Antonio is hardly repentant, and the only reason Prospero secures his dukedom again is from the arranged marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero frees Ariel, the spirit who served him faithfully for many years, at the same time he frees Caliban, who always plotted rebellion. Therefore, Prospero decides to free the spirits simply because he no longer needs to use them. Ariel and Caliban’s acquisition of freedom is not a cathartic liberation but more akin to abandonment due to their now lack of utility. Although Oh’s ending and set design illustrate “the potential for human forgiveness to be truly transformative and transporting” due to its decolonial connotation, it is idealistic like Gonzalo’s utopia because the boat does not move ahead but seems to go backward, idealizing the precolonial universe and romanticizing the past: “Antonio, upon being confronted by Prospero, asks, ‘Is this an island or a boat? We have been taken back twelve years.’” (Zarnoweicki). Even though Oh’s Tempest does express progressive intentions in resituating the cultural experience by conducting the setting as pre-colonial Korea, it is important to note that the performance does not necessarily provide a solution to the problems of postcolonialism or methods of decolonization.
The essay has thus far explained the diverging characteristics between Taymor and Oh’s production of Shakespeare’s Tempest by conducting a postcolonial interpretation of both plays. The world of wonder and chaos depicted in Tempest is a reflection of reality, to which the audience must return, outside the theatre hall. The decision to analyze Taymor and Oh’s work in a postcolonial lens stems from this aspect of the productions’ meta theatricality. Remnants of colonial influence are forced to resurface in the form of art when beautiful aesthetics meet the ugly footprints of subjugation and exploitation in history.
Works Cited
Behind the Scenes with Julie Taymor. Directed by Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, PBS, 1992. Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0tDiWWwcxI.
Kwon, Kyounghye. “The Hilarity of Unhappiness in Oh Tae-Suk’s Tempest: Cross-Cultural Access and Precolonial/Indigenous Aesthetics.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, 2017, pp. 75–96.
Quarmby, Kevin A. “Behind the Scenes: Penn & Teller, Taymor and the Tempest Divide Shakespeare’s Globe, London.” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 29 no. 3, 2011, pp. 383–397. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/shb.2011.0056.
Zarnoweicki, Matthew. “‘Is this an island or a boat?’: The Tempest (dir. Tae-Suk Oh) at La MaMa Theater.” Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria, 2016. Web. 8 Apr. 2019, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/scene/2014/11/Tmp_Oh_LaMaMa/.