Shakespeare in dialogo con la letteratura caraibica contemporanea

This essay deals with how Shakespeare's work can be re-read and re-written in the light of contemporary, post-colonial perspectives. More specifically, it focuses on the work of the Barbadian writer George Lamming, who considers Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610) an extraordinary text not only because it contains and crystallizes the conflicts of the colonial enterprise at its outset, but also because it somehow prefigures the very end of colonialism. Lamming discusses the unwanted, unsearched encounter between Prospero and Caliban, the colonizer and the colonized, in order to explore the mutual transformation of the two characters. He explores the way hybrid subjectivities come into being within the text, and he teaches us how, four centuries after his death, Shakespeare is still able to talk about us and make us reflect on the paradoxes and complexity of the world we live in.