What do you think shakespeare could be saying about the practices of colonialism?

Answer 1

The historical fact is that at the time Shakespeare was living, the only people involved in colonialism in any kind of noticeable way were the Spanish, and their experiences were not well understood by the English, who hated them and considered them to be enemies. Encounters between English people and North American people like Pocahontas and her tribe the Powhatan had been reported but the North Americans were not by any means dominated by the English or the French further north. Jamestown Virginia was founded nine years before Shakespeare died; Quebec City was founded the year after; Pocahontas came to England two months after his death. At the time Shakespeare is believed to have written The Tempest, Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America, was only 4 years old and had briefly been abandoned the year before.

All of this is to say that the "colonial" reading of The Tempest, while very clever and throwing an interesting light on the play and the relationships between the characters, is not Shakespeare saying something about the practices of colonialism because Shakespeare knew nothing about the practices of colonialism, certainly not in the way they are understood today and read into the Tempest. At best, we might say that Shakespeare had an idea of what might happen if someone as sophisticated as Prospero landed in a place inhabited by someone like Ariel or Caliban and decided to make it his home.