You could swap the whole lot of them and make it work, but if you just swap Prospero you undo the balance of the play.
Privilege is real, and characters who have always had privilege behave in ways that assume they have it. I mean to start with, how come Prospera inherits as duchess when she has a younger brother? So it's a different world, OK. And then you have the relationship between Prospero and Miranda, which is a fairly bad relationship between father and daughter and an appallingly abusive one between mother and daughter. And then you have the whole Sycorax/Caliban/Ariel thing. You can reverse everyone and change the world. Or not.
But the arrogance Prospero has is unchallenged privilege that lets him carry on thinking he was right even when he's been cast adrift on a boat for being a neglectful idiot and spent fifteen years on a desert island -- and while you can have a woman scholar wizard duchess, the world you need to get her to have that assumption of privilege is so far from the world that story can happen in that you've lost something essential.
When I do my character workshop with people the thing I ask about gender is "What is the interesting gender to make this character?" "How does it change the story?" I once for about half an hour thought about making Taveth in Lifelode male. It made her a lot more interesting, which completely defeated the point -- men doing traditional women things are subversive and exciting, women doing them are invisible and boring. The way to make them interesting is not to give them to men.
Lear, I think, would reverse quite easily. And I've thought a lot about what Hamlet would need.
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You could swap the whole lot of them and make it work, but if you just swap Prospero you undo the balance of the play.
Privilege is real, and characters who have always had privilege behave in ways that assume they have it. I mean to start with, how come Prospera inherits as duchess when she has a younger brother? So it's a different world, OK. And then you have the relationship between Prospero and Miranda, which is a fairly bad relationship between father and daughter and an appallingly abusive one between mother and daughter. And then you have the whole Sycorax/Caliban/Ariel thing. You can reverse everyone and change the world. Or not.
But the arrogance Prospero has is unchallenged privilege that lets him carry on thinking he was right even when he's been cast adrift on a boat for being a neglectful idiot and spent fifteen years on a desert island -- and while you can have a woman scholar wizard duchess, the world you need to get her to have that assumption of privilege is so far from the world that story can happen in that you've lost something essential.
When I do my character workshop with people the thing I ask about gender is "What is the interesting gender to make this character?" "How does it change the story?" I once for about half an hour thought about making Taveth in Lifelode male. It made her a lot more interesting, which completely defeated the point -- men doing traditional women things are subversive and exciting, women doing them are invisible and boring. The way to make them interesting is not to give them to men.
Lear, I think, would reverse quite easily. And I've thought a lot about what Hamlet would need.