Opting Out of The Tempest is a Tragedy
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, Montgomery County Public Schools created a formal process allowing parents to excuse their children from specific instructional materials they claim substantially interfere with sincerely held religious beliefs. Since then, parents have opted students out of several dozen books, including William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as reported by The Baltimore Banner.
The Tempest is currently the only Shakespeare text on Montgomery County parents' opt-out list. It has been occasionally seen on conservative lists of objectionable books since 2012, when the Tucson, Arizona School Board dismantled its Mexican American Studies program and, with it, prohibited a collection of books perceived to teach race-, ethnic-, or oppression-themed lessons. The Tempest's themes of colonization, enslavement, and racism were deemed unacceptable, and that decision has permeated other state and local opt-out actions.
Selectively carving The Tempest out of the curriculum makes no intellectual or educational sense. If The Tempest crosses the line, then the honest conclusion is that Shakespeare doesn’t belong in public school at all. There is no Shakespeare that is safe, sanitized, and thematically narrow. His plays are saturated with magic, violence, sex, bigotry, power abuse, gender ambiguity, and moral corruption.
In The Tempest, Prospero’s magic is restrained, purposeful, and ultimately used for reconciliation. Compare that to Macbeth, where witchcraft is the narrative’s engine. The witches' prophecies drive murder, tyranny, and psychological collapse. The cauldron scene alone contains more overt occult imagery than The Tempest does in its entirety.
In Hamlet, a ghost from Purgatory demands revenge and destabilizes the moral universe. Within the framework of opt-out logic, this implies that the temporary servitude of an ethereal, ambiguously gendered sprite is a transgression that must be renounced, while conjuring the spirits of the dead and interrogating the afterlife remains acceptable.
Critics of The Tempest have pointed to the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as evidence of colonial or oppressive themes. True, The Tempest engages those ideas, but it does so obliquely, allegorically, and with ambiguity. Compare that to Othello, where racial hatred is explicit, relentless, and devastating. That play is structured around dehumanization, sexual paranoia, and racialized fear. Then there is The Merchant of Venice, where antisemitism is not implied but argued openly in court, culminating in forced conversion. When it comes to themes of oppression, The Tempest is Shakespeare's gentle entry point.
Another objection to The Tempest involves Caliban’s reference to sexual violation. The dialogue is disturbing, but it is a single remark, neither depicted nor dwelled upon, and it exists within a play that ultimately rejects violence and domination. By contrast, Romeo and Juliet is built on sexual innuendo, adolescent desire, and street violence, and it ends with two teenagers killing themselves onstage. Macbeth features regicide, child murder, and psychological torture. Hamlet piles madness, suicide, incestuous implication, and mass death into its final act.
The Illusion of Control
Opting out of The Tempest while keeping the rest of Shakespeare creates the illusion of parental control without accomplishing its purported goal. Students are not being shielded from difficult themes; they are encountering them in harsher, more explicit forms elsewhere in the curriculum.
Shakespeare does not offer interchangeable content units where one work can be safely removed without consequence. The plays are variations on the same obsessions: power, desire, fear, identity, cruelty, and mercy. Remove one, and there is another waiting in the wings with twice the venom.
Pretending Shakespeare can be selectively tamed exposes the illogic of the opt-out choice. If The Tempest is too magical, political, and morally complicated, then the rest of Shakespeare is too. That is a defensible position, according to the Supreme Court, but it is an opt-out with tragic consequences.
