Introduction – Master and Savage

About the lecture

In this lecture, we continue our introduction to The Tempest by thinking about the idea of the master and the savage, focusing in particular on: (i) the concept of the great chain of being, which imagined all living things as existing in a hierarchical structure with God at the top; (ii) the idea of white Europeans that they were ‘superior’ (i.e. higher in the great chain of being) to the peoples they encountered in the New World; (iii) the spectacle on the savage, both in real life (e.g. Pocahontas being presented in London in 1616) and on the stage (e.g. Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, Ithamore in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice and Othello in Othello); and (iv) the subversion of this power dynamic at the end of the Tempest when both Ariel and Caliban are given their freedom.

About the lecturer

John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Nottingham University, and holds Visiting Professorships in China, Malaysia, Spain and the USA. He is co-author of The Routledge History of Literature in English with Ron Carter, and also wrote The Language of Poetry, Literature with a Small 'l' and the first critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others.