What at first glance makes The Tempest by William Shakespeare unique is the great hope that carries for the future of humanity. In fact the main character, who is called Prospero, forgives all, sets free the spirits and, in the love-match of his daughter Miranda with the son of the man who had wronged him, sets the course for a new beginning. Thereby Prospero opens the way for a new generation to build a world on a different basis.

Moreover, as Shakespeare says, “what’s past is prologue”, which in my opinion means that everything that happened in the past is only the beginning of what happened next and what will happen in the future. For this reason, I believe that we can understand contemporary society, other than predict what might happen in the future, only by catching what the author wanted us to comprehend. Therefore it’s so important to go deeper.

I discovered that The Tempest is the work in which Shakespeare demonstrates that patriarchy is frightened by the empowerment of women. In fact, the great author tried to include a powerful woman’s character, that exemplifies anti-patriarchal ideas facing opposition on a daily basis. In addition to that, he introduces a male protagonist that is pathetically in competition with this woman, who represents everything that a man should fear.

The two extremes of gender and power are precisely Prospero, a white male patriarch, and Sycorax, who is a witch with a potential power and who’s also possibile of color. However, the witch is only an imagination of the man, who sees her as his female opposite and tries also to demonize her using a language of misogyny that he was not accustomed to do. So he projects his anxieties about women and power onto her and that’s why it’s inevitable to think that Shakespeare’s mindset was to use women’s non-existence to subvert patriarchal society.

To conclude, I’ve been hooked on this work and I was able to draw my deductions principally thanks to an article by Brittney Blystone, who explained that Prospero creates the model of a powerful woman who breaks gender restrictions, by attempting to condemn Sycorax as a “witch” and a “whore”. Then the absence of Sycorax finds a way for her to exist as an idea and a contradiction that twists the logic of patriarchy against itself. Moreover, as an idea, Sycorax is Prospero’s greatest enemy, an invisible assailant that is not physically present for him to defeat or appease. That’s how she and Prospero become the extreme opposites of power and gender in The Tempest.