Grace Mc asked Elizabeth Nunez:

What are your thoughts on diversity in Shakespeare adaptations? Thanks!

Elizabeth Nunez I will limit my response on the question of diversity in Shakespeare adaptations to adaptations created by Caribbean writers. Perhaps no other play by Shakespeare stirs up controversy among Caribbean writers, if not outright anger, than The Tempest . For many, this play epitomizes the evils of colonialism. A European arrives on an island, many assume to be in the Caribbean, and within a short time, he enslaves the male inhabitant and transforms the female spirit into his willing lackey. In his collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960), the Barbadian writer George Lamming, explores the effects of colonialism, striking out at Prospero as a vile blackmailer. The poet and playwright Aimé Césaire, from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, follows a similar theme based on The Tempest, in his play Une Tempete (1969). The Guyanese writer Pauline Melville, of Amerindian and European ancestry, ridicules Western philosophy, and The Tempest with deadpan humor in her short story “The Parrot and Descartes” in the collection The Migration of Ghosts (1998). Then from Jamaican writer Nalo Hopkinson comes the short story “Shift” where a reinvented Sycorax lectures Caliban on finding his own identity. Of course, there is my own novel Prospero’s Daughter (2006) inspired by The Tempest where Caliban and Miranda tell their side of the story. My latest adaption of a Shakespeare play is my recent novel Even in Paradise , inspired by King Lear. I’m not certain that any other Caribbean writer has adapted this play or has set the story in the Caribbean as I have.

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