Power and Authority in William Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Seminar: World Will Always Welcome Lovers - Transatlantic Romance in Film and Literature, language: English, abstract: My goal in this paper is to show that The Tempest is a thematically complex play. Therefore, this work is concerned with an essential topic, which has not been elaborated on as much as the topics mentioned before, namely the question of power and authority within this play. Since the topic of this paper is to figure out how power and authority work within The Tempest, I developed the following working thesis: 'William Shakespeare's The Tempest serves as a prime example for Michel Foucault's theory on disciple and punishment.' To achieve this goal, I have organised my paper into four sections, three of which have sub-sections. In the first section, I provide Michel Foucault's theory of panopticism which he dealt with in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in more detail. In the second section, I explain the historical background of The Tempest and I briefly summarise the plot. In addition to that, I analyse the dramatic structure in order to form the basis for the third section, which deals with the application of Foucault's theory concerning power and authority on The Tempest. I conclude my paper with a fourth section that discusses the working thesis.