The Production of Early Modern Humanism in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Abstract

This article reads Shakespeare's The Tempest as a key text for any genealogy and post-humanist deconstruction of Early Modern humanism and of the human/animal divide, having been written during the transition from the Renaissance to Early Modernity, but also because it dramatizes the very process of the production of humanism (and of the human as opposed to the animal). Thus, the illusionist "play" that Prospero sets up on the island to convince his countrymen of his legitimate claim for the throne may be read as the enactment which is necessary for the production of he human according to the new Early Modern values of art as a tool to power and knowledge. The article also focuses on the importance of the inauguration of the ontological human/animal divide for Prospero's play, by the means of which he can activate the anthropological machine (as Agamben calls it) that will fabricate the Early Modern civil human.