Banishment and Exile as Forms of Dramatic Migration in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

While postcolonial criticism has influentially read William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a drama of imperial power and cultural domination, this article argues that such approaches, while productive, risk overlooking a more fundamental structural dramatic device: exile or banishment. Distancing itself from predominantly postcolonial frameworks and drawing on Stanley Vincent Longman’s notion of fluid stages, it reconceptualises banishment, exile, and circulation as forms of dramatic migration – a mechanism that generates the conditions of the plot and shapes its ethical development. The study draws on early modern definitions of banishment and exile and on contemporary theories of displacement, particularly those of Peter Burke, Zygmunt Bauman, Abdelmalek Sayad, and Julia Kristeva, framing these concepts as multidimensional processes encompassing legal, social, spatial, and psychic dislocation. Within this framework, banishment and exile emerge not merely as punishment or a colonial metaphor, but as dynamic forces that restructure identity, authority, and human relations across the play’s entire cast – each character embodying a distinct mode of response, from Prospero’s instrumentalisation of displacement to Caliban’s resistant suffering. In The Tempest, banishment and exile are not the resolution but the point of departure. Prospero’s political banishment is preceded by an inward estrangement rooted in his “secret studies”, suggesting that exile originates as internal division before manifesting externally. By integrating historical and theoretical perspectives, this article demonstrates how Shakespeare refigures exile as both origin and catalyst – a generative condition through which identity, power, and ethical awareness are collectively and differentially renegotiated.