Metamorphoses of Evil in Contemporary Adaptations of The Tempest

Abstract

As the supreme master over his heterotopic microcosm, Prospero embodies the ethical ambivalence of power at the heart of early modern debates on sovereignty, master-slave relations, and proto-colonial dynamics. His regime, built on total surveillance and absolute dominion, is a fantasy of omnipotence that challenges early seventeenth-century conceptions of divine authority. Caliban, long seen as the embodiment of savage monstrosity, disrupts and complicates Prospero’s dominion, whose evil evokes early modern anxieties about scientific progress, divine foreknowledge, predestination, and the crisis of subjectivity also spurred by new geographical discoveries. This article explores how Prospero’s tyranny and theatre of revenge have been reimagined as metaphors for omnipresent control systems in three contemporary adaptations of The Tempest: Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO series Westworld (2016- 2022), and Jeanette Winterson’s short story “Ghost in the Machine” (2023). By casting Prospero as the primary evil-doer and probing the ethical implications of his art, these works confront pressing issues such as the rise of artificial intelligence, the debate on free will and determinism, shifting definitions of humanity, the reinforcement of privilege, and emerging systems of control. As we shall see, these reinterpretations testify to the enduring potential of Shakespeare’s play, in which the embryonic forms of today’s ethical debates can be glimpsed.