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CLCWeb Volume 6 Issue 1 (March 2004) Article 11
Simone Caroti,
"Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare's The Tempest"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss1/11>
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)
Thematic Issue Shakespeare on Film in Asia and Hollywood
Edited by Charles Ross
<
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss1/>
Abstract: In his paper, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare's The Tempest,"
Simone Caroti illustrates the way in which Cyril Hume and Fred Wilcox's 1956 science fiction movie
Forbidden Planet -- whose plot is inspired by Shakespeare's Tempest -- reconfigures in Shake-
speare's play. Caroti begins by defining the genre of science fiction and explaining its attraction for
modern audiences. Following Darko Suvin's notions of science fiction, Caroti highlights the theme
of cognitive estrangement and shows how Forbidden Planet offers a cultural translation of this
theme in The Tempest. The result of Caroti's analysis is to read Prospero and his magic in contem-
porary terms: the film translates Shakespeare's sense of wonder and the conflict between the ra-
tional interpretive self and the forces of the irrational into a search for truth and an understanding
of the place of humanity in the universe.
Simone Caroti, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest" page 2 of 12
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss1/11>
Simone CAROTI
Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare's The Tempest
That the marriage between Shakespeare and Hollywood has produced some offbeat, fascinating,
strange, and sometimes simply funny offspring is not a secret. From James Ivory's Shakespeare
Wallah (1965) and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), and Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You, many films have tried
-- with varying degrees of success -- to institute a dialogue with the bard's work that could go a
little further than a simple cinematographic adaptation. One of the more improbable-looking mem-
bers of this group is briefly discussed by Virginia Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan in their introduc-
tion to the latest Arden edition of The Tempest. While examining the Freudian interpretations of
Caliban's character, they write: "Caliban as 'id' became a palpable thread in twentieth-century
psychoanalytic interpretations of The Tempest, a notion more dramatically presented in the 1956
science-fiction film, Forbidden Planet. Now a cult classic, this postwar film transports its Prospero
figure to Altair-IV, a distant planet, where Professor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) continues his scien-
tific investigations, builds robots (Robby, the film's Ariel) and raises his daughter Altaira (the Mi-
randa figure played by Anne Francis). When a spaceship from earth invades the planet, Altaira falls
in love with its handsome captain (Leslie Nielsen), but their romance is threatened by an invisible
force that nearly destroys the spaceship and kills several of its crew. The dramatic finale reveals
that the mayhem is caused by the Professor's own inner psyche, projected on to an electromag-
netic force (Caliban), which implements Morbius's repressed anger at the man who would take
away his daughter and jealousy at her love for another man. Only with the destruction of Professor
Morbius can the calibanic force be quelled" (Vaughan and Vaughan in Shakespeare 111-12).
This, in a nutshell, is the plot of Forbidden Planet, together with a hint or two about some of its
themes. When the film came out, reviewers were uncharacteristically enthusiastic about its
strange blend of Shakespeare and 1950s science fiction. "Shakespeare takes a journey into
space," the headline above Alan Brien's review for London's Evening Standard proclaimed, and
Brien went on to argue that Cyril Hume, the film's scriptwriter, had "produced the most rumbus-
tiously enjoyable of all Hollywood planetary melodramas, apparently by dressing The Tempest in
space suits" (qtd. in Rosenthal 150). Today, after almost fifty years of continuous advances in spe-
cial effects technology, it is easy to watch Forbidden Planet with a feeling of nostalgia. This, how-
ever, is misleading. If we look more carefully, and if the technological state of the art of 1950s sci-
ence fiction cinema is factored in, not only will it become apparent that the film truly represents a
special effects tour de force, but we will also discover that the sense of wonder which is the cor-
nerstone of all good science fiction, greatly enriched in its scope and meaning by an intelligent use
of several of The Tempest 's main themes, is still by and large intact. Forbidden Planet has stood
the test of time much better than would appear at first sight, and in any case much better than
the great majority of contemporary science fiction productions. In fact, it is now regarded as one
of the most influential films in the history of sci-fi cinema, and not simply within the United States.
The American 1950s, the decade of Doris Day, Sandra Dee, Elvis The Young and the USA as po-
liceman of the world, where the sun of rationality and moral righteousness always shone, every-
body was affluent and happy, and problems were something that lasted a couple of hours' viewing
time and were never really serious to begin with.
In this paper, I present a brief analysis of the relationship between Forbidden Planet and The
Tempest in order to illustrate not only the extent of the latter's influence on the former, but also
the way in which the film's science-fictional setting significantly contributed to highlight some of
the play's main themes. It is better to start with this last point, because it constitutes the back-
ground for our more specific discussion. In order to clarify how Forbidden Planet 's outer space
setting is able to bring to the fore many of the central themes of The Tempest, one must ask a
couple of basic -- and at first sight rather foolish -- questions: first of all, what does Shakespeare
have to do with science fiction? And secondly, why The Tempest of all plays? In fact, both ques-
tions -- especially the first -- are by no means trivial. The Bard lived and wrote at a time during
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss1/11>
which at least ninety-five percent of the world's population still believed that the sun traveled
around the earth. The Elizabethan and Jacobean world picture provided people with a small, cozy
and earth-centered cosmos, arranged around the opposition between Heaven -- a luminous, fluffy
white sky realm way up above -- and Hell, a smoldering chasm of red flame situated in a fuzzily
specified below. Each of the five planets we knew about corresponded to an invisible heavenly
sphere that kept it aloft in a sky inhabited by angels, comets, stars, and other heavenly bodies, all
moving around our earth in a graceful, complicated dance whose sole reason for being was to
make us its center stage. Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy dictated how we were
supposed to interpret the world around us. Science as we know it today did not exist, and its first
great representatives were persecuted for trying to take away from us our earth-centered cosmos.
When Nicolaus Copernicus discovered that it was the earth which moved around the sun and not
the other way round, he was forced to flee to Holland in order to avoid the Inquisition, and thirty
years or so later Galileo Galilei would not fare any better. All this is a far cry from the universe re-
vealed by Newton and Einstein that today provides science fiction with most of its setting and sub-
ject matter. We exist within an expanding black void fifteen billion light-years wide, populated by
at least a hundred billion different galaxies, each with a population of stars ranging from one hun-
dred to four hundred billion. Our tiny sun and its complement of planets are situated in a peripher-
al arm of one of those galaxies, in no way special or different from all the others. Science has be-
come our most powerful and trusted instrument for interpreting reality, while religious and mytho-
logical thinking are constantly being attacked by rationalists denying the very existence of God.
How can we reconcile a form of fiction expressing the variables and problems of today's scientific
and technological society with the works of a writer like Shakespeare? Moreover, was the choice of
The Tempest as the basis of Forbidden Planet motivated by characteristics in the play itself that
made it the perfect choice for the task at hand?
In his anthology Age of Wonders, science fiction editor David Hartwell provides us with an ex-
cellent expression of one of the genre's chief characteristics: "A sense of wonder, awe at the vast-
ness of space and time, is at the root of the excitement of science fiction. Any child who has
looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or
outer edge to this place, this universe -- any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at
such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader. ... To say that sci-
ence fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth.
Science fiction is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales
of miracles, tales of great powers and consequences beyond the experience of people in your
neighborhood, tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit ours,
tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: all exist now as science
fiction" (Hartwell 42). Of course, Hartwell is not saying that the mythological tale, the traveler's
tale, medieval hagiography and other ancient forms of storytelling are science fiction. He is simply
suggesting that in their time they satisfied the same aesthetic and emotional needs scifi satisfies
today. The sense of wonder generated in the reader or viewer by the vicarious experience of ex-
traordinary events, or by the perception of forces and time-scales far greater than those which can
be commonly witnessed in the course of an individual's life, is the chief factor in science fiction's
appeal, much in the same way it was for earlier literary forms. Perhaps the most interesting of
those forms for our discussion is the traveler's tale, because with it we meet one of science fic-
tion's most recurring features. It does not need to be overly emphasized that one of the best ways
of generating the sense of wonder is to set a story in an exotic place, for the experiencing of unu-
sual events will naturally stimulate this ability. Whether it is Ulysses walking in the garden of the
Hesperides, Gulliver finding himself tied up in the country of the Lilliputians, David Bowman con-
fronting the two-kilometer-long black monolith at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Stephano
and Trinculo touring a strange island with Caliban, the sense of wonder is always there, ready to
put us face to face with the marvels of the possible.
In a very material way, the trope of the fantastic voyage is one of the determining factors in
the relationship between The Tempest and Forbidden Planet. Critics have argued for decades over
whether Prospero's island, which the play locates somewhere in the Mediterranean between Tunis
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and Naples, was originally intended by Shakespeare as a representation of the New World or as a
fictional counterpart of the African continent. The supporters of each position are perfectly bal-
anced with respect to each other, because while it is true that travel narratives to the Americas
could be found by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences in works like Richard Hakluyt's Principal
Navigations (1589, 1598-1600) and Samuel Purchas's Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), it is also true
that those same publications contained several accounts of travels to Africa, like John Evesham's
brief story of an English expedition to North Africa in 1586. Shakespeare was certainly familiar
with these works but since he left us no specific clue regarding this aspect of the play, it is impos-
sible to say with certainty who is right. All this critical back and forth, however, misses a more rel-
evant point: "Caliban's/Prospero's island lies literally in the Mediterranean between Tunis and Na-
ples, but its geographical location is less important than the fact that it is nameless, uncharted and
largely unexplored. This enchanted island harbours two Milanese castaways (Prospero and Miran-
da), two remarkable natives (Caliban and Ariel) and assorted spirits unlike anything the Europeans
(and we, the audience) have ever seen. Our sojourn on this enchanted island is akin to a trip to a
distant planet, where we find a world dramatically unlike our own" (Vaughan and Vaughan in
Shakespeare 4-5). In other words, the placing of Prospero's island in the Mediterranean works
very well as a conceptual basis for justifying its array of marvels, for peopling this virgin territory
of the imagination with all the strange things that would not have been plausible in Stratford or
London. Between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the New
World and the African continent represented the site of England's sense of wonder. They were the
frontier of civilization, peopled by saluages with strange, amazing, often horrifying customs, by
impossible creatures made of materials other than flesh and blood, and by powers men could only
guess at. Shakespeare left Prospero's island nameless precisely because this namelessness made
it easier for the viewer or reader to superimpose on it any conceivable imaginative imprinting, de-
pending on one's favorite dream landscape.
If Shakespeare found in Africa and the New World the perfect fantastic landscape, it was to
seventeenth-century Italy that he turned to in order to give us the perfect fantastic and adven-
turous plot. Renaissance Italy was, for the average English citizen, a place of danger and secret, a
sophisticated, violent geo-political scene of constantly shifting alliances and endlessly renewing
intrigue. From the point of view of a country that was still enjoying one of the most stable periods
in its history, Italy must have looked as much like a dream of exoticism, power, and culture as a
nightmare of anarchy and instability. Informed as it was by medieval notions of order and struc-
ture in all things, and used to thinking of Rome as the seat of religious corruption, the Elizabethan
mind looked at Italy with a mixture of fear and fascination; fear for the utterly chaotic and often
brutal nature of its political life, fraught with wars small and large into which major European pow-
ers were always more than willing to step, and fascination for the sophistication and depth of its
cultural intercourse, both within and without its borders (such as they were). Seen from afar, and
modified by the fantastic treatment of the fictional materials, it is small wonder that the characters
of the Tempest should be Italian. Prospero, with his abrupt, violent mood swings and his books of
arcane arts, always teetering on the brink between white and black magic, whose throne was
usurped by his brother; Alonso, a king who is more than willing to do a bad turn to someone he
does not happen to like very much; Antonio and Sebastian, cunning, corrupt, utterly immoral and
wholeheartedly devoted to the pursuit of power without consequences; these are only the most
relevant examples, not of Renaissance Italy as it really was, but as it looked like from England at
the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is, in other words, the imaginative translation of a
cultural makeup, and from this point of view it is wholly identical to the fictional synthesis of a ge-
ographic nexus like Africa or America. Both operate using the same principles, and both provide
the English imagination with locales, situations and opportunities that would have been far more
difficult to justify on one's own doorstep. It is, indeed, a very interesting group of people, full of as
yet untold potential, who remain stranded on Shakespeare's unnamed island. The island is not
simply unnamed, however. It is also unexplored, and this is where the experiences of Prospero's
unwilling guests come in. As the storm that brought their ship to the island subsides, the Neapoli-
tans find themselves split into three separate groups: Ferdinand, Alonso with the rest of the court
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party, and Stephano with -later- Trinculo and Caliban. For most of the play's duration, they all tour
the mysterious territory in an attempt to find any survivors other than themselves, and in the pro-
cess they discover the marvels it has to offer. They all keep hearing strange sounds and unearthly
music, coming from invisible sources up in the air. Ferdinand immediately meets Prospero and Mi-
randa, falls in love with the latter, receives a taste of the former Duke's powers before being en-
slaved and freed again, finds a wife and sees a wondrous masque with Prospero's spirits as actors.
Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo are put to sleep by Ariel (to protect Alonso and Gonzalo
from the others' murderous intentions); upon waking they are treated to a vanishing banquet, fol-
lowed by a terrifying troupe of harpies who engender in them a state of guilty stupor from which
only Prospero can free them. Stephano and Trinculo meet Caliban, who immediately proceeds to
show the stupefied seamen the natural marvels surrounding them; they hatch with him a plot to
kill Prospero and become lords of the island, are chased and stung by Ariel and the rest of the spir-
its, and are finally discovered by Prospero himself inside his house, wearing his robes. All this
moving about and stumbling on incredible things institutes a twin process of exploration and dis-
covery which, resulting as it does in a continuous stream of marvels parading in front of the char-
acters' -and our- eyes, constitutes one of the chief attractions of Prospero's domain. The island is,
in short, the perfect place to experience and exercise our sense of wonder, precisely because it
has no name and has never really been explored. A hypothetical definitive answer to the America
vs. Africa debate will therefore tell us nothing fundamental, for the same reasons that make it
pointless to pinpoint the precise location of Trantor, the techno-gothic city-planet of Asimov's
Foundation trilogy, or to find the exact inspiration for the sand-planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's
Dune.
The island is both Africa and America, at least as the Elizabethan and Jacobean imagination
represented them. It is the territory of fantasy, and as such it is at the same time nowhere (except
inside us) and everywhere (that is, anywhere our imagination sets up shop at any given time). It
is Miranda and Gonzalo who, at the end of the play, put the sense of wonder generated by this
process of exploration into words. At the end of act 5, soon after Prospero has drawn the curtains
that had been hiding Miranda and Ferdinand from the Neapolitans' eyes (itself an effective symbol
of the play's celebration of the joys of discovery, since Alonso had thus far thought his son dead),
Miranda exclaims "O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous man-
kind is! O brave new world / That has such people in't" (5.1.181-84). An interesting aesthetic in-
version is implied by what Miranda says, because her sense of the marvelous has been stimulated
by the sight of Alonso, Sebastian, Gonzalo, Antonio and their retinue -- in other words, people that
for us are absolutely normal. For her, it is Caliban, Ariel and Prospero's powers that are the norm,
for the only place she really knows is the island. Her sense of what is strange and unknown repre-
sents the mirror opposite of everybody else's, and that includes the audience. The Tempest seems
bent on providing everyone with a touch of the amazing. After a few lines, Miranda's words are
echoed by a more experienced, conventional observer when Gonzalo attributes the happy ending
of their tribulations to the gods "that have chalked forth the way/which brought us hither," and
goes on to invite everyone to "rejoice / Beyond a common joy, and set it down / With gold on last-
ing pillars: in one voyage / Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis; / And Ferdinand, her brother,
found a wife / Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom / In a poor isle; and all of us our-
selves, / When no man was his own" (5.1.203-04, 208-13).
A possible interpretation of Gonzalo's speech points to the fact that The Tempest seems to con-
figure the act of discovery as a morally positive factor in the characters' lives. Everyone leaves the
island in some way enriched by his/her experiences, or at least, in the case of Caliban, Antonio,
and Sebastian, not harmed by the logical consequences of their actions. Even the storm that
brings Alonso and the rest of his group to the island, the fearful spectacle of the harpies at 3.3,
and the spirits that chase Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban at 4.1, are subsequently revealed to be
illusions, scarecrow spectacles produced chiefly for didactic purposes rather than an honest-to-god
attempt at harming anyone. In Shakespeare's play, and in a relevant cross-section of scifi texts as
well, the contemplation of the wonderful and the miraculous seems to possess a special quality of
kindness, of mercifulness towards our human failings. As with Prospero when Ariel convinces him
Simone Caroti, "Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest" page 6 of 12
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to be lenient towards Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio, it has the ability to bend our thoughts toward
forgiveness rather than vengeance, and to make us willing to reexamine our personal convictions
in the light of something greater than us.
A large-scale version of Prospero's island can be found in ancient maps of the known world,
anytime from the first age of cartography to the beginning of the eighteenth century. As soon as
mapmakers ventured beyond the boundaries of the known lands, they invariably put markers on
their charts that signaled the beginning of the unknown. Anybody who has taken an even cursory
glance at those charts will recognize them; the rough outlines of largely unmapped or newly dis-
covered continents, so different from the painstakingly precise contours of today's maps, and in-
side them, or in the seas and oceans bounding them, all kinds of fantastic creatures: whales, sea-
serpents, hydras, gryphons, giants, and on into the sunset. These images are something more
than a simple embellishment of the words "sorry, we don't know what's there." They represent a
powerful statement in favor of our need to replace the profoundly frightening emptiness of the un-
known with an aesthetic construct representing our hopes, dreams, and nightmares. Representing,
in short, a marvelous version of us, and the ancient cartographers knew that anybody who hap-
pened to look at their maps would have no trouble understanding the symbolic message lying un-
derneath these images. We are all, in our hearts and minds if not in actuality, explorers, and we
have constructed many of our strongest myths (the Aeneid and the Odyssey spring to mind) to
express our craving for the marvelous. We apparently need to project our imaginative faculties
onto the unexplored, to make sense of it if nothing else, so it was only fitting for these mythologi-
cal creatures to adorn ancient maps.
Fast-forward four hundred or so years from the writing of The Tempest, and the world is a very
different place. We have mapped every inch of our planet, explored every nook and cranny with
survey ships, photo reconnaissance aircraft, submarines, satellites, microscopes. We have landed
on the moon and watched our earth rotate with stately calmness on its moderately inclined axis,
continents, oceans and cloud formations coming into view as it turned. As the pace of human dis-
covery kept reducing the frontier of the unexplored, we gradually started losing interest in our
planet. We found no strange island in the Mediterranean, containing a cavern with "Caliban was
here" carved on its walls and the desiccated remains of a fat, ugly old witch thrown into a corner.
In much the same way, no fabulous sea-creatures could be found in the depths of the oceans, and
the Americas, Australia and Africa yielded no monsters hiding inside forests, roosting on the tops
of inaccessible mountains, or lurking under the muddy bed of dark, isolated lakes. Even Marco
Polo's Cathay failed to deliver. When those of us who had gone westwards to explore realized that
now they could materially shake hands with the fellows who had decided to go the other way, we
knew the age of discovery was over and done with. So where is Prospero's island now? Enter outer
space and faster-than-light travel. In the nineteenth century, Jules Verne decided it would be a
nice idea to send men to the moon by having their spaceship shot from a really powerful cannon,
and wrote a story about it. Forty years or so later, H.G. Wells did the same, this time using anti-
gravity. Ever since then, science fiction writers have found several excuses to send their charac-
ters out there, but the most powerful boost for their imagination came in 1929, when the English
astronomer Edwin Hubble looked at the sky with his telescope and discovered that Einstein's uni-
verse was not static, as Einstein himself had thought at the beginning, but was instead expanding
at a speed that increased with distance. He also found out that it was much larger than had been
assumed until then. When Hubble took a close look at the size of the universe as revealed by his
calculations, he must have felt a little dizzy, for he had come up with a figure of about ten billion
light-years. Later measurements would extend this figure to fifteen billion. After we had found the
ideal playground for the sense of wonder (not only impossibly large, but expanding to boot), the
only thing we needed was an imaginative expedient for getting there. There is thus little to be
wondered at if it only took a small step for science fiction writers to imagine the construction of an
engine that could kick the light-speed problem in the teeth. Whether one calls it warp engine, hy-
per-light thruster, dimensional jump capacitor, grid-deficient Heisenberg-Klapat thingamajig or
Really Fast Way of Sauntering Along makes no difference. What the faster-than-light drive repre-
sents is the equivalent of Alice's rabbit hole and Dorothy's twister, or again of the storm that
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brings Alonso's ship to Prospero's island: an effective way of taking people to otherworldly realms
of the imagination.
During the seventy years that followed Hubble's discovery, we have seen the universe. The
Mariner, Voyager, and Galileo missions have brought back incredible images of our solar system,
while ground-based telescopes have watched as far as they could and discovered a majestic dance
of stars, nebulas and galaxies involving time-scales and the production of energies that we simply
cannot make sense of. The Hubble Space Telescope has peered even further, and for every light-
year it covers there is something unprecedented and wonderful that reveals itself to us. The prom-
ises of 1929 turned out to be even greater than we imagined. So now it is 1956, and even before
the space probes and HST everybody knows that the universe is, in that immortal champion of all
understatements, a pretty big place. Scriptwriter Hume and director Fred McLeod Wilcox want to
make a film based on The Tempest that can preserve the play's sense of wonder, together with a
few other themes the two happen to be keen on. What better way of doing so than placing Pros-
pero's island in outer space and enlarging it a little bit? Instead of a lonely patch of earth in the
middle of the Mediterranean we now have Altair IV, so called because it is the fourth nearest plan-
et to its parent star, Altair, and instead of a wooden brig being tossed by the elements we have a
saucer-shaped starship calmly traveling toward the planet at an appreciable multiple of the speed
of light. Prospero is now Doctor Morbius, a philologist stranded on Altair IV with his daughter
Altaira when the survey ship of which he was a member, the Bellerophon , is destroyed with all its
crew by an invisible force of unknown nature. The Ferdinand character is now Commander Adams,
captain of the "United Planets cruiser C-57-D, now more than a year out from Earth base on a
special mission to the planetary system of the great main sequence star, Altair." The mission is, of
course, to rescue the crew of the Bellerophon, from whom Earth has not received a single trans-
mission in nineteen years. We have the island and the characters. We have also retrieved our pre-
viously lost sense of wonder, and naturally there will be lots of incredible things happening on the
planet.
Annoying as it certainly seems, the question of why Hume and Wilcox chose The Tempest and
not, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream, remains. After all, the night-time woods of the Dream har-
bor the same kind of wonders that people Prospero's island: elves and fairies, magical potion and
strange transformations, Titania, Oberon, and Puck. The occurrences detailed in the play belong
certainly to that category of larger-than-life events we have defined as the cornerstone of the
sense of wonder, and thus of science fiction, and the act of stepping into the magical woods cer-
tainly feels like falling down the rabbit hole or being taken away by a twister. Why, then, did it
have to be The Tempest and not the Dream? For that matter, why not Macbeth or even Hamlet?
Let us assume that there really is a reason that explains the choice of this particular play for a sci-
ence fiction film. If this is true, it must necessarily follow that the element of the sense of wonder
is not enough to define the field of science fiction with sufficient accuracy. What else do we need?
If we look at the kind of marvels featured in A Midsummer Night's Dream, we will discover that in
their general outline they are almost identical to those portrayed in such modern-day works as
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, Terry Brooks's
Shannara series and countless others. What all these works have in common, beyond obvious
thematic similarities, is the umbrella label of the genre they belong to: fantasy. True, if we go to a
bookstore and look for science fiction and fantasy, we will discover that these two categories are
invariably put together on the shelves, since fans of the one have a passable chance of being in-
terested in at least taking a look at the other. This, however, does not mean they are the same.
What are the differences?
Possibly the most influential definition of science fiction of the last thirty years was given in
1979 by Darko Suvin (see also Wiemer). Mindful of the necessity of establishing once and for all a
clearly defined critical identity for the genre, Suvin proceeded to the task of identifying a set of
characteristics that would immediately include everything that was science fiction, while at the
same time excluding anything that was not. The key factor in his separation of science fiction from
other different but similar genres, like fantasy and horror, lies in his use of the twin elements of
estrangement and cognition: "SF is a literary genre," Suvin writes, "whose necessary and sufficient
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conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal
device is an imaginative alternative to the author's empirical experience" (7-8).
We have already encountered the first of the two terms. As defined by Suvin, estrangement is
an imaginative agent that excites the reader's sense of wonder by presenting him with a reality set
that is radically different from the one he or she is used to. Depending on the work of fiction one
reads or sees, the level of estrangement of this alternative reality set varies, ranging between two
extremes: a single new element in an otherwise normal setting on the one hand, and a thoroughly
altered environment -- complete with a different timeline -- on the other. Estranging factors are an
indispensable element in all aspects of fantastic fiction and can therefore be found everywhere,
from the great mythological cycles and The Lord of the Rings to Greg Bear's Eon and Gregory
Benford's Timescape. As we have seen, however, this element alone is not sufficient to fully distin-
guish SF from fantasy or the mythological tale, and it needs the second term of the pair, cognition.
Quoting from Suvin's work, Edward James writes: "Estrangement is offered by the fairy tale and
other literary genres as well, but sf is distinguished also by cognition, the process of acquiring
knowledge and of reason. 'It sees the norms of any age, including emphatically its own, as unique,
changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view,' unlike, for instance, the myth or the fairy
tale, which offer absolutes, not enquiry. 'Cognition' is, in fact, frequently the main subject of sf:
the investigation, for instance, of possible social systems or new forms of science. A cognitive -- in
most cases strictly scientific- element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality, of the specific
pleasure to be sought in SF" (James 108).
The crucial difference between science fiction and fantasy lies here. The act of cognition, of ra-
tionally making sense of -and coming to terms with -- the estranging elements, increases the
sense of wonder inherent in the former, whereas it destroys the pleasure of reading the latter.
Magic as represented by writers like Tolkien is best left unexplained, because it belongs to the
realm of the irrational. Like a fairy, it is a fragile thing, and trying to rationalize it or explain it
away will kill it. On the other hand, a rationally constructed estranging element thrives on cogni-
tion, as will readily become apparent when a typical example of the genre is examined. Greg
Bear's Blood Music (1985) is set in our times, and at the beginning of the novel no difference from
the world we know is offered. However, estrangement soon rears its head in the form of a biolo-
gist's development of a new strain of sentient bacteria. When the private lab he is working for cuts
his funds and fires him, deeming his experiment illegal and dangerous, this modern-day Victor
Frankenstein injects himself with he latest batch of his creations and goes away. In only a few
days, these bacteria spread from their original host to contaminate half the population of the plan-
et. As the novel nears its completion, the world has indeed become estranged from what the read-
er is used to, but this is nothing compared to the discovery lying in wait at the very end, when the
true nature of this biological agent is revealed. Far from being just another outlandish example of
malevolent disease (like the monstrous alien virus in John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing), these
bacteria have in fact evolved into a completely new life-form inhabiting an entirely different plane
of existence, and have taken with them all the human beings who were thought dead. After finish-
ing the last page, the sense of wonder is still with us, even stronger than before. The cognitive
discovery of the new life-form's true nature implies a series of revelations regarding our under-
standing of reality and our place in the universe. Far from diminishing our sense of wonder, these
revelations greatly increase it, first of all by grounding its presence within a plausible rational
framework, and then by extending the implications of this framework far beyond what we had at
first imagined.
In my opinion, the reason Wilcox and Hume chose The Tempest as the basis for their film is
that the play is a very fertile ground for a science-fictional treatment of Shakespearean themes. To
suggest that the play is science fiction would probably be a little too much, but I do not think that
describing it as a form of proto-sci-fi would be too far-fetched. Consider the title, first of all: in
Shakespeare's time, the term "tempest" represented "the alchemical term for the boiling of the
alembic to remove impurities and transform the base metal into purest gold; if we see Prospero's
goal as the transformation of fallen human nature -- Caliban, Antonio, Sebastian and Alonso- from
a condition of sinfulness to a higher level of morality, the play's episodes mirror the alchemical
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process" (Vaughan and Vaughan in Shakespeare 64-65). When Prospero comments that "My
charms crack not" (5.1.2) and later invites Alonso to "cure thy brains/(now useless) boiled within
thy skull" (5.1.59-60), he is referring to the refining of his project of psychological and moral engi-
neering, for which he had been preparing himself ever since he and his infant daughter were
stranded on the island, twelve years before the events narrated in the play. Like every self-
respecting mad doc scientist, Prospero has studied, planned and waited, and has not acted until
the times were ripe and his powers were at their peak. We could therefore see The Tempest as a
prototypical representation of a pseudo-scientific experiment, a process of cognition employing
estranging factors with rationally conceived means for rationally conceived ends.
If The Tempest represents a proto-experiment, it necessarily follows that Prospero is a proto-
scientist. First of all, the Folio edition of the play capitalizes the term "Art" when it refers to Pros-
pero's powers. "Art" implies study, intellectual labor and hours of practice, not the association one
would have in mind when thinking of magic (which is usually something one has either been given
or just has), and moreover, Prospero's powers also derive from his books and his staff, in other
words from his tools. A further layer of believability is provided while the former duke is reminding
Ariel of his suffering at Sycorax's hands: "It was a torment / To lay upon the damned, which
Sycorax / Could not again undo. It was mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, / That made
gape the pine and let thee out" (1.2.289-93). Here Prospero is not simply saying that his powers
are stronger that Sycorax's. He is also referring to a series of treatises written by such neo-
Platonic scholars as Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus (translated by Marsilio Ficino) on the differ-
ence between the black arts and the white arts. Those works were certainly familiar to Shake-
speare, who wove them into the texture of the play because he knew that his audience would have
recognized them as well. The result is a clear definition of the abilities and limitations (admittedly
very few) inherent in Prospero's powers, not so much to define them with respect to those of
Sycorax (who after all has been dead for more than twelve years at the moment the play opens),
but rather to clarify his abilities and moral stature vis-à-vis the situation that is about to develop
with the arrival of the Neapolitans: "Prospero is often described as a theurgist, a practiser of 'white
magic,' a rigorous system of philosophy that allows the magician 'to energize in the gods or control
other beneficent spiritual intelligences in the working of miraculous effects.' The antithesis of
theurgy is 'goety' or 'black magic:' its evil practitioner produces magic results by disordering the
sympathetic relationships of nature or by employing to wicked ends the powers of irrational spirits"
(Vaughan and Vaughan in Shakespeare 62).
While the evil magician uses the powers of the irrational, the good theurgist studies a rationally
constructed "rigorous system of philosophy" that enables him to work with nature, not against it.
In The Tempest, irrationality (epitomized by Caliban, Sebastian and Antonio) is evil, rationality
(Prospero, Ariel, Gonzalo, Ferdinand) is good. The same kind of conflict between morally upright
rational attitudes and the evils of an irrational behavior features prominently in Forbidden Planet,
but as the Vaughans recognize in their introduction to The Tempest, Hume and Wilcox gave it a
new twist. Linking the Suvinian twin elements of estrangement and cognition to Freud's theories,
they used this strange hybrid as the carrier wave for a psychoanalytical treatment of the clash be-
tween the two conflicting sides in the Janus face of human nature: the Apollonian, rational world-
view of the conscious mind and the Dionysian, rabidly-instinctual-and-proud-of-it irrationality of
the unconscious. A brief look at the film's plot will quickly clarify the issue: Forbidden Planet is, for
all intents and purposes, a multi-layered compendium of cognitively validated marvels. First of all,
it is already set in the future, which of course is extraordinary for the audience but not for the
characters. This situation, together with the matter-of-fact attitude the crew of the starship dis-
plays towards such exotic elements as faster-than-light drive, teleportation and beam weapons,
further excites our sense of wonder. The perception of a plausible, rational environment is
strengthened by the characters' use of well-structured 20th -century terminology to indicate hier-
archies within the command structure of the ship, engineering problems, physical principles and
biological factors. The behavior of the starship's crew is exactly what one would expect from the
crew of a vessel on a rescue mission, and their reactions to what happens on Altair IV is a more
than educated extrapolation of what a normal group of people would do in a similar situation.
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When Commander Adams tells Morbius that the cruiser is there to rescue him, he is warned by the
doctor to avoid landing on the planet. Morbius appreciates their concern for his safety but he is all
right, thank you very much. This time, Prospero wants to remain in exile. Who will not be all right
if they land on Altair IV, they are informed, are the Captain and his crew. As Adams and his two
highest-ranking officers finally meet Morbius, they discover that the only living beings on the plan-
et are himself and his daughter. Everybody else is dead. The force that destroyed them is -- in an
interesting inversion of Ariel's power- invisible, incomprehensible, unstoppable, and soon begins to
attack the starship, killing many of its crew. This force is something nobody is able to understand -
- not the audience, of course, but not the characters either.
The hunt for the truth is on then, and in the way Adams and his men set about finding it For-
bidden Planet reveals its fundamental nature. Footprints and energy signatures are examined,
even the readings of the instruments connected with the cruiser's protective energy barrier at the
time of the creature's attacks, while Adams engages in some old-fashioned pumping of witnesses
for information. In the process, he manages to fall in love with Altaira, who naturally reciprocates.
It is Adams's tactics that yield the best results. When he and his officers enter Morbius's inner
sanctum, the doctor is finally forced to show them his discovery: a great number of planet-sized
generators built by an unimaginably evolved alien race, the Krell. After a million years of continu-
ous evolution, the Krell were annihilated in one single night, just as they were on the verge of an
evolutionary breakthrough that would have allowed them to leave their baser instincts and physi-
cal bodies behind. By connecting their minds to the generators and tapping the well-nigh infinite
energies these machines were able to muster, they would have become pure psychic energy,
sheer quanta of unadulterated rationality free of the physical constraints of a messy, inefficient
body as well as of the irrationality of the unconscious, the ultimate rationalist's dream. Predictably
enough, their murderer is the same force that destroyed the Bellerophon and is now busy trying to
slaughter Adams's crew. The final revelation comes as a result of yet another act of cognition: the
ship's medical officer and Adams pool their mental efforts and discover that the Krell were annihi-
lated by their own subconscious. As the monstrous generators were connected to the minds of
every Krell individual, their "id" recognized the threat of annihilation they posed and protected it-
self, using the unimaginable energies produced by the machines to destroy everyone on the plan-
et. Of course, when all the Krell died their subconscious died with them, but now there is Morbius.
During their first meeting, the doctor had told Adams that he was the only one of the Bellerophon's
crew who did not want to leave the planet, owing to his enthusiasm for the alien artifacts, an en-
thusiasm that the others did not share. The truth was a little different: the doctor had been the
first to stumble on the discovery, and had been quick to connect his mind to the generators
(which, of course, were still in perfect working order); what he had found was nothing less than
the combined power of a dozen stars, all at his disposal. The Krell were an entire population, con-
ceivably numbering several billions, and their minds, Adams and his men are told, were immeas-
urably more advanced and capable than ours. Yet they were destroyed in one single night. What
would happen if one mere human being were to receive all that power in one single gulp, without
intermediaries or sharers? As far as Morbius' conscious mind is concerned, nothing beyond a great
enthusiasm for an unprecedented scientific discovery, and possibly a strong conviction of the need
to advocate its careful study in the strongest possible terms. For the doctor's "id," however, it is a
different story altogether. One does not share power, plain and simple. In the course of our all-
too-often-barbaric history, we have come to learn this lesson quite well, almost always at a terrible
price. Roman Emperors, Asian Khans, Medieval warlords, and twentieth-century dictators of all
kinds and descriptions, have never failed to do the utmost to amass as great a quantity of person-
al power as possible, irrespective of whether a single human being could actually do something
with this much at his disposal. This has nothing to do with rational considerations, of course, but it
has everything to do with the Freudian irrational, the child-king that wants everything his way and
is more than happy to annihilate any obstacle barring him from his goal. Fantasies of empower-
ment are extremely seductive, and once satisfied, practically impossible to let go of. Doctor
Morbius faces this situation on Altair 4: when his companions decide to leave the planet to what-
ever fate awaits it, his subconscious is well aware that to agree to such a course of action would
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mean severing its connection to the machines that make it near-omnipotent, and the incalculable
de-powering that would result would equal death, or something even worse. It is simply unac-
ceptable. Of course, Morbius constructs a series of rational arguments against leaving, but they
are only a smoke-screen to cover the real reason: one does not share power, or let go of it. When
the crew of the Bellerophon is ready to leave, safely tucked in their anti-g hammocks on board the
ship, the doctor's "id" sucks power from the generators and defends itself, destroying everyone
and everything.
It is nineteen years after the Bellerophon's destruction now, and Commander Adams and his
men have come to Altair IV, charged with the mission of rescuing the doctor and his daughter and
taking them back to earth. The forces of the irrational are threatened once again, and once again,
they wake from dormancy. They want to survive, and like every threatened animal, they lash out.
For all those readers of The Tempest who root for Caliban and wish he would not be so impotent in
front of Prospero's arts, this is a dream scenario. Sycorax's deformed, helpless offspring is now
connected to dozens of planet-sized generators. He is well-nigh omnipotent, and he is not happy.
As soon as Morbius realizes what he has let himself do, he also knows how to stop himself: in an
act of sacrifice that mirrors Prospero's giving up of his powers, the doctor steps directly in the path
of the calibanic force he has unleashed. As his own unconscious kills him, he triumphs over it. Just
before dying, he gives Adams the necessary instructions for the destruction of the generators. A
force of this magnitude cannot be left in the hands of the unprepared, and mankind has a long way
to go before it can hope to use it without the terrible consequences that sealed the fate of the
Krell. As the United Planets starship heads back home, with Adams at the helm and Miranda at his
side, everybody is treated to the final explosion that marks the end of Altair IV and their adven-
ture. As the captain himself remarks, their encounter with the marvelous has given them a num-
ber of valuable lessons, and it is their responsibility to face the future with greater wisdom.
Both Forbidden Planet and The Tempest represent an intelligent reflection on the uses and mis-
uses of power, and every character has a role to play in it, from minor figures like the ship's boat-
swain (rather amusingly mirrored by Earl Holliman's perennially thirsty cook) to major players like
Alonso or Antonio (who are without direct counterparts in Forbidden Planet). However, its corner-
stone is once again represented by the twin character of Prospero/Morbius. In the play, this theme
is introduced right at the beginning. When Gonzalo approaches the ship's boatswain to give him
advice, the man answers back: "You are / a councilor; if you can command these elements to /
silence and work the peace of the present, we will not / hand a rope more. Use your authority! If
you cannot, / give thanks you have lived so long and make yourself / ready in your cabin for the
mischance of the hour, if it / so hap. -- Cheerly, good hearts -- Out of our way, I say!" (1.1.20-
23). Evidently, not even the wise Gonzalo knows when it is time to let others do their job. The Ne-
apolitans' arrogant assumption that they can give advice to experienced seamen during a storm is
only the first in a long line of instances where the dangerous nature of power is examined. In fact,
it is Prospero himself who recognizes that his exile on the island was caused by his excessive dedi-
cation to his arcane arts: "those being all my study, / The government I cast upon my brother /
And to my state grew stranger, being transported / And rapt in secret studies" (1.2.74-77).
It is fundamental to understand that those same powers that make Prospero so terrible on his
island cost him his dukedom in the first place. If he had not engaged himself in them, he would
have remained powerful. As it is, the end of The Tempest merely reinstates him in his former con-
dition without any increase in power, except perhaps greater wisdom. The dangerous nature of his
studies is definitively asserted by his decision to get rid of them once his aims have been reached,
as well as by his imploration of our forgiveness in his final speech. On the other hand, Doctor
Morbius must sacrifice his own life to get rid of his powers, and from this point of view the Freudi-
an elements of The Tempest become a useful critical tool. Prospero is able to willingly give up his
Arts because he has never repressed them; alternately gentle and raging, optimistic and morose,
he is well aware of what he has left happen to himself and Miranda, and knows that his powers
represent a danger for both. Painful as it was for him, his decision to let them go represents a sub-
stantial growing up on his part. His two Freudian alter-egos, his superego and his "id," are both
outside, represented by Ariel and Caliban respectively, and his fondness for the former as well as
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his hostility towards the latter allow him to maintain a sane relationship with himself. When Pros-
pero lets Ariel convince him that forgiveness is better than vengeance, he is listening to the better
part of his nature, and he can do that because he can also see very well what his worst part looks
like. Morbius, on the contrary, has been granted no such luxury. For someone who is supposed to
be the very embodiment of rational enlightenment, he goes by a rather unsettling name:
"Morbius" is a slight reconfiguration of the Latin morbus and the Italian morbo, both names mean-
ing "disease," both of the body and of the mind, and the dangerous duality such a name implies is
mirrored in the doctor's relationship towards the two aspects of his nature. Morbius has kept his
Caliban inside, repressed and unrecognized for more than nineteen years. His apparently rational
discourse conceals a seething, raging psyche over which he has no control. To further compound
the problem, his Ariel is a robot, not a human being. It cannot help him. When he finds his life on
Altair IV (his powerful life, with the energy output of a dozen suns at his command) threatened,
and when he finds that his daughter has found another man, he unleashes a force which he, lack-
ing as he does Prospero's greater psychological awareness, will only be able to stop by killing him-
self. That Morbius does so, that he is finally able to make the ultimate unselfish decision and de-
stroy himself in order to let others live, testifies to the basically good nature of the character.
Works Cited
Hartwell, David G., ed. Age of Wonders: Exploring the Worlds of Science Fiction. New York: Walker, 1984.
James, Edward. Science Fiction in the 20th Century. London: Oxford UP, 1994.
Rosenthal, Daniel. Shakespeare on Screen. London: Hamlyn, 2000.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Thomas Nel-
son and Sons, 2000.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1979.
Wiemer, Annegret. "Utopia and Science Fiction: A Contribution to Their Generic Description." Canadian Re-
view of Comparative Literature 19.1-2 (1992): 171-200.
Author's profile: Simone Caroti graduated in Anglo-American Literature at the University of Trieste, Italy, in
2002 with a thesis on H.P. Lovecraft's geography of the fantastic. He is currently pursuing a Master of Arts de-
gree in comparative literature and science fiction at Purdue University and plans on following his studies with a
PhD. E-mail: <
scaroti@purdue.edu>.
