Gender and Sexuality 12

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child and here was left by th’ sailors. Thou, my slave, as thou report’st thyself, wast then her servant. And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate to act her earthy and abhorred commands, refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, by help of her more potent ministers and in her most unmitigable rage, into a cloven pine, within which rift imprisoned thou didst painfully remain a dozen years; within which space she died and left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groans as fast as mill wheels strike.

William Shakespeare (1611): The Tempest.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English playwright.

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Caliban, an indigenous man from a fictional island and son of the witch Sycorax who is referred to in the quote, organises an uprising against the Europeans of the island together with two European workers. The uprising fails. Black poet Aimé Césaire wrote the play A Tempest in 1969 in order to confront Western ideologies. The quote represents the European spirit of the 16th and 17th centuries. During this period especially, femininity was portrayed as depraved and dangerous. This was in part because women played a major role in the movements of heretics, which questioned the authority and power of the church and thus represented a threat to order in that period. One of the defining features of this campaign of vilification was the burning of witches. Between 1550 and 1650, a particularly large number of women in Europe were burned as witches (Federici 2009: 229).

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: Mandelbaum. *Aimé Césaire (1969): A Tempest. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications. * Sarah Richt (2019): A Tempest by Aimé Césaire: Curriculum Guide for Postcolonial Educators.    

1611