Comparative Analysis of The Tempest and an Adaptation
Printable Essay Rubric | Printable Essay Prompt
Assignment
Select an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest of any genre. Choose one element—for example, a character, passage, scene, or theme—and compare the treatment of that element in the original play to the adaptation you have selected. In what ways does the reimagined version challenge, reinforce, or extend the original? Why are those changes significant and what impact do they have on the shape of the adaptation? What can we learn about the original play that, without our knowledge of the reimagined version, we might not have understood?
You will be required to integrate two scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books into your essay. While a set of sample secondary sources is available on the Comparative Analysis Source Guide, this assignment requires that you conduct research both at UCI Libraries and using academic databases.
Your final paper will be between 5–6 pages in length (no more than 7) and will be worth 40% of your writing grade.
Learning Goals
- Reinforce and hone skills developed in fall quarter: to make specific, complex and arguable claims, produce cohesive paragraphs, present well-selected and well-contextualized evidence, develop strong warrants, develop organic transitions that show the progress of ideas over time, and write rhetorically persuasive introductions and conclusions
- Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions of comparative analysis, and, where applicable, the methodological approaches appropriate to literary, dramatic, visual, filmic, and/or discourse analysis
- Develop more advanced information literacy skills for locating contextual information and conducting research at the university library and using online scholarly databases
- Evaluate scholarly claims, identify scholarly conversations, and integrate secondary source material in writing
- Practice active revision such that the final draft demonstrates that the student has developed flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also reflecting on the process of writing itself
Required Reading
Before you begin brainstorming for this assignment, make sure you have read the following:
- Shakespeare, William. The Tempest.Signet Classics, 1998.
- Several adaptations of The Tempest (see Comparative Analysis Source Guide).
- Morse, Susan. “Paragraph Writing Strategies.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 51–61.
- Short, Gretchen. “Writing Transitions.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 79–86.
- Short, Gretchen. “Integrating Quotations and Citing Sources.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 108–18.
For visual (paintings, graphic novels, etc.) and film adaptations of The Tempest:
- Buhanan, Kurt. “Visual Analysis.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 94–100.
- Buhanan, Kurt. “Film Analysis.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 101–7.
The Writing Process
In this essay, you will interpret how two primary sources—the first, a text regarded as part of the Western canon and the second, an adaptation of the first—relate to one another. Comparison is the foundation for this writing process; that is, your comparison will go beyond the mere listing of similarities and differences. Comparative analysis demonstrates not only how two or more texts reframe each other’s meaning, but, importantly, how their intersection generates entirely new meanings. The purpose of this assignment is also to begin exploring academic conversations and debates through research into scholarly secondary sources, thus in effect, comparing the interpretations of other readers.
Selecting an Adaptation for Comparison
It won’t be difficult to locate an adaptation of The Tempest, as numerous dramatists, fiction writers, film directors, musicians, poets, television producers, and visual artists have reimagined aspects of the play over the past 400 years. Most importantly, you will want to choose an adaptation that interests you, both for the perspective it takes on the original and the differences generated by its genre. We have provided you with an extensive list of potential adaptations on the Comparative Analysis Source Guide, though it is by no means exhaustive. Take time to read, view, or listen to a few different versions so that you begin to understand various interpretations of on the play. Many of the film adaptations will be shown on campus this year, so try to attend a few screenings.
Adaptation is a very general term, and one that is usually used colloquially to refer to film versions of novels. In selecting the adaptation of The Tempest on which you will focus your essay, you should think about the intention and purpose behind the adaptation. Does it try to make the original more legible or accessible to a new audience? For example, Leon Garfield’s claymation rendering for Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992) should perhaps be first understood in terms of the way it strips down the original play to make the story accessible to a television audience of children. Many other adaptations focus on political aspects of the story, often zeroing in on the depiction of gender, race, and/or colonialism in the original. H.D.’s By Avon River (1949), for example, takes as its focus the character Claribel, the daughter of King Alonso whose arranged marriage in Tunis precipitates the sea voyage. The poem explores Claribel’s omission from the dramatis personae and storyline of the play, and it often is viewed by most critics as a markedly feminist interpretation of The Tempest.
So, ask yourself, is the creator of your adaptation appropriating Shakespeare’s play to serve political ends, and what might those be? During this process, your research questions may lead you to broader humanistic questions about texts, authors, disciplines, and genres. An encounter with Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969), for instance, may irreversibly alter the reader’s relationship with Shakespeare’s Caliban and his subjugation in the original play. If reimagined texts shape our sense of the original, how can we clearly ascribe originality and authorship? How can we definitively mark where texts begin and end? Comparative literary analysis poses these questions by destabilizing textual boundaries and analyzing meanings that emerge from textual interaction, a process that literary scholars often refer to as intertextuality.
Selecting an Element and Brainstorming Points of Comparison
The next step will be to select an element for comparison between your two primary sources. Let’s take another example from our course readings: Kamau Brathwaite’s “Letter Sycorax” from the collection Middle Passages (1992). At a poetry reading in 1993, Brathwaite—who has revisited The Tempest again and again during his career—described Shakespeare’s play as “a blueprint, a report on something that was coming into being.” Brathwaite detailed how the various characters in the play serve as recurrent archetypes in his work: Prospero as the plantation owner, Caliban as the slave, and, above all, Sycorax as Prospero’s feminine alter ego, “the submerged African” of the story. An element that could serve as the basis of comparison between The Tempest and “Letter Sycorax” might be the characterization of Sycorax herself, even though she is always off-stage and off-page in both versions. An essay could compare how Sycorax is discussed by Prospero and Caliban in Act 1, Scene 2 in the original and how she is portrayed in the letter Caliban types to his mother in Brathwaite’s experimental poem. Alternatively, an essay could examine a thematic element between these two texts: parent-child relationships, imaginative figurations of Africa, the politics of Caliban’s mother tongue, etc. The point is that the scope of comparison in your essay will be bounded by the element you select. This is not to say that you will not make multiple points of comparison and contrast about your chosen element, but rather that it will force you to make comparative claims in a detailed, specific way.
Your articulation of these points of comparison should take minimal space because that step in your process serves only to present evidence. The bulk of your essay should show how those points of contrast create new meanings and contexts while also reframing our understanding of Shakespeare’s play. It will be useful to chart these similarities and differences in such a way that you can also think about how to interpret each point of comparison formally and thematically. One way to brainstorm for this assignment is to create a three-column chart. For example, suppose you have decided to focus on the theme of power hierarchies between Shakespeare and Césaire’s plays. The sample chart below demonstrates how one could explore this theme by comparing the list of the dramatis personae in each version:
| Shakespeare’s The Tempest | Césaire’s A Tempest | My Interpretation |
|
Introductory cast of characters lists the actors in descending order according to rank, beginning with King Alonso and ending with the non-human residents of the island. |
Introductory cast of characters sets up the actors in the play “As in Shakespeare,” but with alterations to characterization of two enslaved characters, suggesting instead the Caribbean plantation slave system. |
While Shakespeare focuses on the hierarchies of European aristocracy, Césaire emphasizes the racialized hierarchies served as legitimation for the enslavement of human beings. By explicitly framing his own cast “As in Shakespeare” but with targeted emendations, Césaire sets his play in a specific relation to the original, implying that a literary/linguistic inheritance determines our identities. |
|
Caliban and Ariel are both ascribed extra adjectives. Caliban is described as a “savage and deformed slave” and Ariel “an ayrie spirit.” The connotations of savagery, deformity, and airiness should all be explored. |
Ariel is characterized as a “mulatto slave”; Caliban as a “black slave.” Contextual differences between slaves understood as black and those viewed as mixed race should be explored. |
In Shakespeare, both characters seem to be outside of the European hierarchy and the language of legitimacy it prescribes. Césaire takes this further, transforming Ariel into a human, and thus making his enslavement part of an all-too-human economy. Césaire’s characterization of the two slaves suggests not only the racial hierarchies that often determined domestic and agricultural labor practices on many plantations, but also the widespread rape culture of those settings. |
|
The non-human characters listed (Iris, Ceres, Juno, Nymphs, and Reapers) all appear to be from the Classical (i.e., Western) tradition. |
Césaire’s third emendation to the original cast is the addition of a character: “Eshu, the black devil-god.” According to an academic reference source, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, Eshu is a Yoruban god, “the messenger and general intermediary between the gods and humans, and…the god of thresholds.”[1] While he is often understood as a trickster, the connotations of Césaire’s specific phrase “devil-god” should be explored. |
While both authors bring deities and the world of magic into their plays during Prospero’s masque, Césaire deliberately departs from the Western, Neo-Classical aspects of the original by convoking a West African god. |
Notice that each aspect of this chart focuses on the specific shape and language of a specific section to make comparisons. Because the texts chosen in this example are both the scripts of plays, the evidence represented here is linguistic and dramatic; indeed, you may find it helpful to write a list of keywords for the formal/technical evidence you identify. If the adaptation you choose is of a different genre or medium than a play, the form of your technical evidence will also shift. For example, if you choose an oil painting, you should address visual components like composition and iconography. If you choose a film, you should address filmic techniques like cinematography, sound, and costuming.
Developing a Claim and Utilizing Scholarly Secondary Sources
Ultimately, charting points of comparison will allow your focus on the two primary texts to narrow. As the points of comparison become increasingly complex and interrelated (as you can see above), they should work towards supporting an overarching claim about the intertextual relationship between the original and the adaptation. For example, the comparison of the two casts of characters above might support a working thesis that Césaire attacks Shakespeare’s unquestioned fortification of the European aristocratic hierarchies to reveal how hierarchical logic supported not only the colonial endeavor but also the racialized thinking that legitimized the subjugation and enslavement of human beings.
Your claims will also be shaped by your research into scholarly secondary sources that contextualize and present interpretations of The Tempest and/or your chosen adaptation. Professor Lewis has compiled an introductory list of general secondary sources in the Comparative Analysis Source Guide; however, you must also conduct research into your specific adaptation and the element of comparison using the UCI Library Search and other academic databases. You will learn about this process during Library Workshops this quarter, but one resource to begin exploring immediately is JSTOR Understanding Shakespeare, which allows you to search JSTOR’s vast database of scholarly articles using a line-by-line digitized text of Shakespeare’s play. Clicking on Prospero’s line, to Caliban, in Act 1, Scene 2, “Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself,” leads to (among many others) an article by James Robinson titled “Caribbean Caliban: Shifting the ‘I’ of the Storm” in the academic journal Comparative Drama. Using the keywords that appear under the link and a brief survey of the article itself, I would able to quickly identify the utility of Robinson’s article were I to be writing about Césaire’s adaptation. An important skill you are developing this quarter is how to properly introduce and cite the interpretative claims that you locate in scholarly sources. In this essay, these claims should also be placed in conversation with one another as well as in relation to the claims that you generate from your own analysis of the primary sources. Gretchen Short’s Writer’s Handbook chapter on “Integrating Quotations and Citing Sources” will be invaluable in honing these skills.
Organizing Your Essay
After charting points of comparison and conducting secondary research, you should spend a moment contemplating the organization of your essay before you begin writing. You may have been offered models for writing comparison/contrast papers in the past. Many students think of comparison papers as being mapped out in one of two ways:
- The AAABBB pattern, in which all comparison points of the original (A) are represented first, followed by all comparison points of the adaptation (B)
or
- The ABABAB pattern, in which one point of comparison is discussed at a time, moving back and forth between the original and the adaptation
Both patterns presume that your comparison will take a neat, binary shape, and perhaps your essay will take the form of one of the patterns above. But it should do so only if your ideas flow from one idea to the next in such a way that no other form of organization would be more persuasive. The patterns should not dictate how your ideas are formulated and presented. Rather, your ideas should dictate form. As you write, you will gain even more insight into the way transitions determine your argument, your formulation of claims, and your presentation of evidence from both the primary and secondary sources.
And what if your comparisons are not so neat? You may find, for example, that one comparison can be divided into numerous sub-comparisons, some of which might focus on similarities, some on difference. And some comparisons may not be as clean as the patterns above suggest. Or, what if you prefer to make a comparison of Shakespeare’s written play to a painting? What would it mean to compare textual and visual evidence? There, you would need to use the technical terms to describe composition and iconography, and the formulaic patterns could either enrich or limit your presentation of evidence. Instead of feeling constrained by a form, map your paper to represent your argument. A good place to start is to pinpoint your points of comparison (and possible sub-comparisons). How would these be best ordered? Do certain points require several paragraphs, or only one?
By now, you surely recognize that while the topic of this assignment might at first glance seem limited, the wide range of genres and contexts that adaptations of The Tempest offer make this a very open-ended assignment. And while the element of comparison and adaptation you select will, to a large degree, guide what kind of scholarly conversation your essay enters into as you work with secondary sources, you also can and should seek out interpretations that reflect the investments that brought you to those choices in the first place.
[1] Leeming, David. “Eshu.” The Oxford Companion to World Mythology: Oxford University Press, January 01, 2006. Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 27 Aug. 2018 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195156690.001.0001/acref-9780195156690-e-521>.
