A05: critical nuggets

• Michael Foucault: 'Power and knowledge are inseparable'
• Edward Said: 'Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that it's mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate'
• Leela Gandhi: 'The 'West' attempts systematically to cancel or negate the cultural differences and value of the 'non-West' '
• Homi K. Bhabha: 'Colonised people have their identity shaped jointly by their own unique cultural and community history, intertwined with that of the colonial power, which results in 'hyphenated, hybridized cultural conditions' '
• Kahn: Prospero displays a 'superb combination of power and control'
• Vaughan: 'Prospero seeks to monopolise the narrative'
• Thompson: Miranda has 'fully internalised the patriarchal assumption that a woman's main function is to provide a legitimate succession'
• Thompson: For Prospero, Miranda is his raison d'etre, her marriage and children his promise of immortality'
• McDonald: 'Language seduces the audience into a sort of stylistic suspension, an intuitive zone between sleep and wake'
• Smith: 'Prospero controls the present and the character's past'
• Green: 'Prospero takes on an almost sadistic quality'
• Vaughan: 'Caliban's rhetoric invests the island with reality'
• Barton: a surprising amount of The tempest depends on the suppressed and unspoken'
• Bates: Textual education is replaced with intoxication: the book that is kissed is the bottle. (Stephano and Trinculo become Caliban's new masters.)
• Bate: Ferdinand's 'wooden slavery' is not to 'inculcate virtue - the purpose of the order is to elicit submission'
• Lindley: 'The play is often seen as a play about power and control but perhaps should rather be regarded as a play about the illusion of freedom'
• Lindley's opinion of The Tempest being about 'the illusion of power' contrasts Kahn's opinion of Prospero's 'superb combination of power and control'
• Strehler and Simpson 2002: The island, far from being a utopia, is 'where civilisation, instead of recreating its lost paradise, creates a colony of ancient exploitation.
• Ledingham 2009: 'By using Prospero's language, Caliban is remoulded in the image of his master'
• Lindley 2002: 'Modern habits of mind ... do not accept, as Shakespeare's society generally did, that the authority of the duke over subject, master over servant, father over child, is fundamentally unquestionable'
• W.H. Auden (1944): Ferdinand and Miranda are 'inexperienced - they think that love can produce Gonzalo's Utopia here and now'
• D. Traversi (1949): Ferdinand and Miranda's relationship is 'a symbolic ground for reconciliation.
• Coleridge (1811): Caliban is 'in some respects a noble being, the poet has raised him far above contempt'
• Hazlitt (1816): Caliban's 'deformity whether of bod or mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the imagination displayed in it'
• Tilyard (1954): Propspero's decision to save Alonso in 2.1 'is proof of his already achieved regeneration from vengeance to mercy'
• Zimbardo (1968): 'The heart of the play is not regeneration through suffering but the eternal conflict between order and chaos'
• Auden (1944): 'Gonzalo makes goodness easy by blinding himself to evil'
• Coleridge (1811): Ariel is 'like a May-blossom kept suspended in the air by the fanning air'
• Kott (1977): 'Violence, as the principal on which the world is based, will be shown in cosmic terms'.
• McEvoy (2018): 'The 19th and early 20th century critics were wedded to the Romantic idea that the writer's life had it's fullest expression in his or her work ... Shakespeare's plays were meant to be read as a coded autobiography'
• Wilson (1932): Prospero's speech in Act 4 is Shakespeare's own 'farewell to the theatre'
• McEvoy (2018): Ariel is more noble than his master, which makes the play 'anti-colonialist: the coloniser is shown to have no innate moral superiority which justifies his imperialism'
• Greenblatt (1990): Caliban's observation that he was taught to curse by Prospero shows he is a product of violent enslavement by Prospero, which gives his remark 'devastating justness'
• Borlik (2013): Viewing Prospero as St Guthlac and Caliban as a native inhabitant of the fens reflects the 'colonisation of non-human nature by anthropocentric science'
• Thorndike: 'The whole of 'The Tempest' is a vehicle for display and nothing more'
• Proudfoot: 'Prospero plays the part of a masque presenter and the characters are manipulated by the presenter' (In Declan Donnellan's version, Prospero is the director)
• Welsford: 'many masques end with the thought not of eternity but of the swift flight of time and the inevitable end of beauty and delight'
• Rufo: 'If the tempest is the destructive side of Prospero's power then the masque epitomises his beneficent though no less coercive side of that power'
• Griffiths: 'Prospero has lost the plot at this point'
• Griffiths: 'The scene symbolically re-enacts another aspect of Prospero's immersion in his magic at the expense of state affairs'