Climate Catastrophe and the Capitalocene in The Tempest
British Literature, Fall 2025
This October marked my third encounter with William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The first two were in high school: the Shakespeare unit in my freshman English class and the fall play sophomore year. Returning to it eight years later, I notice modern relevance and sharp political commentary in ways I didn’t before (aided mainly by my experiences studying Shakespeare in the intervening years). While choosing a topic for this paper, I wondered about parallels between this story and modern responses to disasters created by climate change, specifically pertaining to Prospero’s concealment of his role in conjuring the titular storm. My research led me to revisit material from an Eco-Drama course I took in 2024—specifically, a paper arguing in favor of replacing the “Anthropocene” framework with that of the “Capitalocene” when discussing the climate crisis. In further reading and analysis of my sources, I came to the following conclusion: a Capitalocene-based reading of The Tempest better equips contemporary readers to understand both the historical context and modern relevance of the play, with Prospero’s manipulation and deflection positioning him as a representation of the systemic forces behind imperialistic capitalism.
Existing scholarly works evaluating The Tempest frequently discuss themes including post-colonialism, imperialism, environmental exploitation, racism, labor, climate, and anthropocentrism. Due to the great volume and varying availability of scholarship around The Tempest, I found it difficult to confirm that I could address a true gap within it. Since the titular storm and ecological conditions of the island provide such rich symbolism, this play is a frequent subject of modern ecocriticism. However, I believe that my unique contribution to this discussion comes from my focus on Prospero’s singularly important role in causing the play’s events and subsequent denial of doing so, as well as my advocating for the Capitalocene reading.
The “Anthropocene,” or the “Age of Man,” is a historical framework positing that, for a certain period of time, humans have been the primary contributors to environmental and climatic changes. Many scholarly readings of The Tempest incorporate the Anthropocene, as Shakespeare lived during a period of regional cooling that’s likely linked to the mass death of Native Americans resulting from novel viruses, violent warfare, and enslavement by European colonists in the 15th century. Due to the resulting agricultural changes, “CO2 emissions radically fell during that period and hit their lowest point in 1610. As Shakespeare wrote The Tempest between late 1610 and early 1611[…] his insight into land-use behavior on a newly discovered land testifies to the emergence of an eco-minded consciousness” (Chiari, “Business” 55). This supports a reading of the play that assumes Shakespeare was experiencing the Anthropocene’s inception in real time. I’d argue, however, that fundamental failings of the Anthropocene framework make a reading through the Capitalocene more effective and relevant for today’s readers. According to Arons, “Where ‘Anthropocene’ implies that human beings are universally responsible for ushering in an ‘Age of Man,’ the term ‘Capitalocene’ more accurately directs attention to the socioeconomic system that enabled the large-scale transformation of the earth through equally large-scale exploitation of ‘cheap’ natural and human resources” (37). Arons tells us that the term “Anthropocene” obfuscates the very real and documented causes of environmental change: capitalist structures of power. While individual action is an important part of environmental protection, the planetary consequences of human activity are largely perpetuated by a small group of corporations and world governments, as well as the powerful people behind them. By this logic, a lens that pays special attention to the causes and systems behind large-scale change might better serve our understanding of the storm and its consequences. I’d liken the intentional obfuscation we see here to Prospero’s lies about the cause of the storm. In fact, characterizing the storm as something unpreventable is an integral part of his scheme to take back political power. Prospero’s almost omniscient power over the island, unknown to most of the characters, stands in for capitalism.
In The Tempest, Shakespeare personifies capitalist and colonial power through Prospero and the Napoleonic royals. Even those who are lower within the hierarchy desire the imperial power they see their higher-ups wield (2.2.170-1), as these structures are culturally engrained enough to have followed them to this remote island. Most of the characters spend the story preoccupied with political power, financial gain, or both, despite being stranded on an island and thus having bigger fish to fry. This mirrors the colonial preoccupations of European settlers that Shakespeare observed from afar through written eyewitness accounts. Regarding the immense colonial violence in Jamestown and its likely influence on the play, Chiari says, “A pernicious form of brutality similarly impregnates the microcosm of The Tempest, where it is exerted against both Indigenous people and the earth” (“Business” 56). In Shakespeare’s Tempest and Capitalism, Scott incorporates Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, in which certain classes of people are separated from the means of production they use to generate value, forcing them to enter a system of wage labor under those who enacted this separation. She connects this to the British enclosure movement, which would’ve been relevant at the time of Shakespeare’s writing the play—taking place “in the context of shifting relationships on the world stage that allowed mercantilism to develop, created new international fault lines of oppression, and led to the development of Atlantic slavery and racism” (5). So, in his writing, Shakespeare commented on multiple social forces that are still relevant today: exploitation of labor, colonial violence, and the enforcement of hierarchical power. As a result, The Tempest “cannot be removed from its formative conditions in emergent capitalism nor from their reverberations in contemporary global capitalism” (Scott 22).
What makes Prospero’s position unique is his concealed magic abilities, as well as the labor of the supernatural servants he’s made in Ariel and Caliban. Notably, he does not admit to most of the play’s characters that he was responsible for the storm and resulting shipwreck, leaving audiences to wonder whether he’ll admit culpability after returning to Naples. In the opening scene, characters attribute the storm to inadequate crew members, fate, and God (1.1.54, 59), unaware that the blame falls on another entity entirely. Discussing Ariel’s role in enacting Prospero’s schemes, Chiari says, “Throughout the presence of his androgynous spirit, Shakespeare provides the audience with a nagging question: who controls the elements?” (“Business” 51). There are several viable answers to this question, dependent on how an audience member factors in different perpetrators and contributing forces. Some scholars even frame the storm as a false illusion, rather than a real event, but Chiari concludes: “Whether actual storms do or do not occur in The Tempest matters little; what the play is really about is the problematic nature of illusion. The playwright thus makes the weather issue come in handy as a way of challenging the reality/fiction dichotomy” (“I/Eye” 241). Regardless of the storm’s true nature, what matters is Prospero’s manipulation of the other characters’ realities (2.2.12-15) for his ultimate benefit, while claiming he has “done nothing but in care of [Miranda]” (2.2.16). Despite the unpaid labor and magic Prospero relies on to run his island empire, his power unequivocally makes him the key perpetrator of colonial violence on the island, with both direct and indirect involvement.
The obfuscatory network of control that Shakespeare illustrates, though, is just as relevant now as it was in 1611. The 1970s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign described by Arons (36) reflects patterns that have continued into the present day, where corporations lobby for environmental movements predicated on the actions of individuals to deflect from their roles in the climate crisis. The titular tempest is “a mirror of the geopolitical context of the play” (Chiari, “I/Eye” 245), a societal metaphor I suspect might resonate especially well with today’s audiences. In large part, I believe that we study Shakespeare today because he speaks to parts of the human condition that persist across centuries of cultural change. Though his work is famously dated by its unfamiliar conventions and often difficult to digest nature, the continued mainstream popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, more than 400 years after his death, is not a fluke. With The Tempest, he created a near-prophetic examination of power under capitalist and imperialist systems and how these systems impact the planet—a story that’s only gained prescience with time.
Works Cited
Arons, Wendy. “We Should Be Talking about the Capitalocene.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 67, no. 1, Mar. 2023, pp. 35–40. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000697.
Brokaw, Katherine Steele, and Elizabeth Freestone. Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet. Cambridge University Press, 2025. Elements in Shakespeare Performance. www.cambridge.org, https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/performing-shakespeare-on-an-endangered-planet/8316C8C1BBE6259C436E2F32CE6239AF.
Chiari, Sophie. “Business in the Frost: Climate and Imperialism in Shakespeare’s Tempest.” Early Modern Studies Journal, vol. 10, 2025, pp. 47–61, https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/business-in-the-frost-climate-and-imperialism-in-shakespeares-tempest/.
———. “The I/Eye of the Storm: Prospero’s Tempest.” Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modern ‘Fated Sky,’ Edinburgh University Press, 2019, JSTOR, pp. 217–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv8bt1v7.13.
Scott, Helen. Shakespeare’s Tempest and Capitalism: The Storm of History. Routledge, 2019, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315608792.
Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 11th ed., B, W.W. Norton & Company, 2024, pp. 729–86.
