“Degenerating Tempests: The Loss of the Ethical Power of Shakespeare’s Emotions in Brave New World”

Based on the homology she finds between the evolution of literary forms in the system of culture and that of biological forms in the system of nature, Linda Hutcheon writes in A Theory of Adaptation: “Stories do get retold in different ways in new material and cultural environments; like genes, they adapt to those new environments by virtue of mutation – in their ‘offspring’ or their adaptations. And the fittest do more than survive. They flourish” (32). If, in choosing Prospero’s name for The Tempest’s protagonist, Shakespeare may have meant to emphasise the flourishing implied in its etymon, its most immediate association would be with the power of the magician-artist to fruitfully generate stories by waking the dead and ‘letting them forth’ by his “potent art” and “rough magic” (V,1,49-50). As well, it is fascinating to see it as a foreshadowing of the extraordinary ability of Shakespeare’s character to adapt to new cultural and medial environments, re-appearing, like a revenant, in ever new forms of retellings. In a volume of essays in which she makes multiple references to The Tempest, Margaret Atwood writes that any writer wants his story “to grow and change and have offspring” (126); yet, if he/she does not engage at all with the social world he/she risks being simply “a recluse” who spends time “figuring out how many angels can prance on the head of a pen” (104). In fact, “Prospero uses his arts – magic arts, arts of illusion – not just for entertainment […], but for the purposes of moral and social improvement” (102). It is also, or maybe mostly, in this sense that both he and his story ‘flourish’ in a famous retelling of The Tempest: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Within the framework of cognitive psychology and philosophy, the paper aims to discuss how this narrative adaptation focuses on the empathetic and ethical power of Shakespeare’s art, albeit in an inverted perspective: it cautiously shows us how its elimination can cause the waning of values in a motionless world in which everybody’s happiness is not pursued through the cultivation of ‘eudaimonistic’ emotions but through full time experiences of ‘hedonistic’ pleasure, devoid of meaning and purpose.