Essay: Compare The Tempest Play and Movie: Themes, Gender Switches and Caliban’s Portrayal

The Tempest is a play originally written by William Shakespeare in the early 1600s, however since then it has been previewed in different movies and plays, such as the one directed by Julie Taymor in 2010. The play contains many different themes, however forgiveness and repentance are the two most emphasized. When the movie is compared to the play, there are many specific differences that can be seen, such as the fact that Prospero is played by a woman in the movie versus a man in the original text, also the Caliban character is a pitied devil in the text versus a more savage human figure in the movie. The play starts off with the Duke of Milan, Prospero, who was banished to sea by his brother Antonio. While banished, Prospero was able to master his unique skill. He uses this mastery to create the tempest to crash his enemies’ ship and to wreck them onto the island on which he resides. In the meantime, Antonio has taken Prospero’s place as the Duke of Milan and he uses this to leverage an agreement with Alonso, the King of Naples.
The first big difference when comparing the play and the movie of The Tempest is the gender that Prospero, the protagonist, is portrayed as. In the movie by Julie Taymor the protagonist is a woman named Prospera. In both the original text and movie the protagonist is a complex character who undergoes a lot of character development. The main roll of the gender switch from text to movie is to show how women’s empowerment has changed over the 200 hundred year time span. The director Julie Taymor, being a girl, wanted to highlight how the character Prospera is able to empower throughout the movie sexually, even though her powers are only limited to the island.
Creating a movie from a text, especially Shakespeare’s text can pose a great challenge. Interpreting the lines and capturing all the emotions and romances from Shakespeare’s characters is impossible to do perfectly for even the most masterful directors. Despite some significant changes, Julie Taymor does a magnificent job at unscrambling the work and keeping the elements that make Shakespeare’s work so unique. When recreating the Caliban character on screen, Taymor made an ingenious decision to cast Dijimon Hounsou as the only dark skinned actor on set. This showed the audience that Caliban stood apart from all the other characters in the film. His physical performance also stood out on screen, particularly the way he moved and stood. Dijimon studied butoh, a Japanese dance form which helped him master the way he moved on screen and this also helped him successfully mimmic the behavioral characteristics of Caliban from the text. This is displayed by the rawness in his movement on screen and his ability to stay away from customary human movement. With the cumulation that Caliban has a different skin color and a different style of movement on screen, the audience should be well aware that he is clearly of a different origin than the rest of the characters, which is what gives Caliban his own niche in The Tempest.
To further reinforce that Caliban stands out from the rest of the characters in Julie Taymor’s film, his physical appearance is even more unique compared to the other characters than just that pertaining to his skin color. In the film, Caliban has the appearance of being made from volcanic earth and clay. This gives him the appearance of being more connected to the earth from the rest of the characters. This helps the audience to picture Caliban as less human and this is only further enforced by his clothing. In the entire film Caliban is portrayed with less clothes than any other character. In Shakespeare’s text, Prospero describes Caliban as a “demi-devil” (V,1,2351), half human, half devil. Caliban is seen as a monster figure in the film because of the way he moves and his physical appearance. The audience can also make the connection that Caliban can be seen as part human however, because of the lighter spot on his face which only makes up a fraction of his full look. Caliban is also given one blue eye, and one brown eye. His blue eye is meant to express the fact that he is the son of the “blue-eyed hag” (x.x.x), while his brown eye is meant to somewhat assimilate him to the rest of the characters. The physical features cleverly given to Caliban by the director Julie Taymor helped create the idea in the audiences’ mind that he was half human and half monster.
Shakespeare creates the Caliban character as one who is suffering from Prospero’s somewhat tyrannical commands, creating a sympathetic feeling in the reader towards this “monstrous” character. One of Shakespeare’s ultimate goals was to incorporate the controversial theme of colonization, which was occurring during Elizabethan times, into this play. This was done through the Caliban character. It is argued that the Caliban character symbolizes the suffering and grief caused towards the natives during colonization, and Julie Taymor managed to reflect this idea extremely well. Through his physical appearance and depiction in the film, the director successfully conveyed a modernized interpretation of Shakespeare’s colonization theme in The Tempest. On a basic level, West-African actor Djimon Hounsou was hired as the only dark-skinned cast member in order to link him to the natives of the indigenous countries who were being colonized at the time. Djimon Hounsou in essence represented the ruthless, brute natives that were overpowered and conquered by the Europeans. As mentioned earlier, it is noticeable that a light spot was drawn over his left eye covering a big part of his face. This can also be interpreted as to depict how western civilization was already beginning to corrupt and conquer the inhabitants of these “unknown” countries. Their essences were being corrupted and they were being overpowered by the totalitarian Europeans. Director Julie Taymor managed to include the crucial topic of colonization in the movie with the incorporation of Djimon Hounsou, who depicted the symbolic victims of colonial expansion. This cinematic feature enables for the movie to have a stronger attempt at being as allegorically and symbolically rich as Shakespeare’s original novel is.