The Tempest and Puerto Rico

What would Shakespeare have thought of the news from Puerto Rico? It seems that the people there discovered that the local government was concealing hurricane relief supplies in some warehouses. The local anger is so great that Puerto Ricans are erecting guillotines in the public squares.

As with so much else, Shakespeare was already there, in a passage from The Tempest, where the townspeople attacked Sycorax, a witch who was Caliban's mother in a kind of villagers-attack-the-Frankenstein-monster scene.  Let's have a look:

Prospero: Where was she born? Speak. Tell me.

Ariel: Sir, in Argier.

Prospero: Oh, was she so? I must
Once in a month recount what thou hast been,
Which thou forget’st. This damned witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,
Thou know’st, was banished. For one thing she did
They would not take her life. Is not this true?
This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by th' sailors.

They were ready to take her life but thankfully (and let's hope for the same result for the governor of Puerto Rico) for one thing she did they would not take her life.

Specifically, Sycorax became pregnant with Caliban. Of course, she did this not out of love, but to avoid being killed by the people of Algiers, who had had enough of her sorcery and witchcraft. I'm not sure the governor of Puerto Rico can secure his constituents' sympathy in the same way.

Prospero's most famous speech comes at the end of the play, when he imagines something like the end of the universe as predicted by modern physics:

Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Let's hope that, in the interim, we deliver to each other more justice and kindness than seems to have been delivered recently by the government of Puerto Rico to its people.