Abstract:

The Tempest by William Shakespeare is a classical play that deals with various themes including, colonization, power, language, confinement, freedom, revenge, and nature. In this article, The Tempest is examined in terms of linguistic colonialism; Shakespeare’s portrayal of the complex dynamics of linguistic oppression and resistance in the colonial context is examined in this article. The article explores what happens when the colonized come to understand and use their European masters’ languages. The main focus of the analysis is the relationship between Prospero and Caliban, the master and the slave, the colonizer and the colonized, the white and the black. It reveals an imagology study through the analysis of the characters and their linguistic interactions, it explores the Western image of the New World as a land of supernatural and exotic and the ways in which the inhabitants of this region are portrayed as wild, uncivilized, and powerless. The land and the inhabitants of the new world are placed in a dichotomous opposition to England and the English people who are presented as embodying the Western values of reason, civilization, organization, and active implication in a changing world. In this context, the article considers the notions of Caliban’s backwardness and underdevelopment, with a particular focus on discovering what sort of an image of the New World is implemented in the minds of its Western audience. This study provides not only depictions of a specific nation or character but also insights into the imagologies surrounding the New World and Renaissance Europe. Moreover, while exploring the theme of linguistic colonialism within the play, it sheds light on how language is used as both a tool of domination and control by the colonizers over the colonized by tracing the trajectory of the essay “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in The Sixteenth Century” by Stephan Greenblatt. This article uses Greenblatt’s essay’s new historicist analysis to understand the historical background that The Tempest is a product of the Renaissance.

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