Gender-Swapping in The Tempest: Female Empowerment

Director Julie Taymor's 2010 re-imagining of Shakespeare's fantastical play, The Tempest, introduces a few major changes to its source material. The most noticeable one is her choice to gender-swap the protagonist, Prospero, a male, into Prospera, a female (played by Helen Mirren). In this essay, I will explore how a sex change, and its effects on all the relationships Prospero has - with his daughter, Miranda, his servants, Ariel and Caliban, and his brother, Antonio - disturb The Tempest’s original social commentary on politics and race. The wider implication of such a sex change is seen between Prospero, Shakespeare's last alter ego, and the playwright himself. The play no longer functions as a farewell to theatre, but instead, functions as a celebratory welcoming of female empowerment in the 21st century. This research paper uses scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, in addition to other critical studies, to support the argument presented.

Firstly, I concur with Director Taymor herself, when she says "that the dynamic between mother-daughter is different from father-daughter;" the parent-child relationship between Prospero and Miranda softens virtue of the 2010 film adaptation (Radish). Film Critic A. O. Scott, in his analysis of the 2010 re-visioning, writes, "When the character is a woman, a central relationship in the play, between the magician and her doted-on child, Miranda, sheds some of its traditional, patriarchal dynamic.” By making Prospero a woman, any reading of the character as a tyrannous ruler over his daughter (manipulating Miranda like a pawn in order to regain power) - evidenced in one case by Prospero eliciting the help of Ariel to have Miranda fall in love w...

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... reads as poetic acceptance of human mortality plays as the defiance of a magician clinging to familiar tricks.”4 Whereas Shakespeare’s play reads as the author’s own abjuring of “rough magic,” or his power to create worlds with his writing, there is no such finality in Taymor’s film (5.1.2071). This is because, in making Prospero into Prospera, the connection between character and author is blurred. Prospera is a less obvious embodiment of Shakespeare, and Ebert states “Taymor, in Prospera, rages against the dying of light.” It seems the film rages on forward against retirement. Even more, Taymor’s ending is filled with sound, fury, and excitement – a celebration of sorts. Through her celebration of female empowerment, and the exciting years to come for women to finally ascertain equal rights, Taymor makes her own point but loses the one made in the original text.