Prospero's Island today: power relations in William Shakespeare's The Tempest and Marina Warner's Indigo

Intertextuality focuses on the relationship between one text and another one. Intertextuality is not a postmodern idea, as it existed long before postmodernism. However, intertextuality received new meanings, as the postmodern novel developed in a context of globalism and multiculturalism. Moreover, in such a globalized environment, the marginal becomes central, the unseen becomes visible, and the unheard becomes one of the strongest voices. Marina Warner's novel Indigo is concerned with representing the absences in the Shakespearian play The Tempest, and also with twisting the stereotypical images that have been cemented and canonized over time.

Power is the lens chosen to analyze the two texts, as it is the issue that characters from both texts strive for. The desire for power is what drives the action of the texts, and its presence or absence leads to the construction of relations in a certain manner. Therefore, images of political power and of the ruling class, such as the duke; images of powerful political figures in the colonizing process, such as the master; images of social power inside the intricate relations of the family, such as the father and the mother; or images of esoteric power, such as the magus and the witch are analyzed in the five chapters of the book.

Characters evolve and transform as the nature of power affects them; some of them for better, while others for worse. Power is everywhere, it comes from everywhere and it affects everyone according to the measure to which we allow it to subdue us or we acknowledge it and use it for the purposes it was granted. Intertextuality functions as the power that unites all the other different instances of power, announcing that the story is not over yet, and that history is still being written.




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