Authors: William Shakespeare
Natural magic could never escape its demonic shadow. For every learned mage such as Agrippa or Cardano, there were a thousand village “wise women” practicing folk medicine and fortune-telling. All too often, the latter found themselves demonized as witches, blamed for crop failure, livestock disease, and the other ills of life in the premodern era. Prospero is keen to contrast his own white magic with the black arts of Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, but the play establishes strong parallels between them. He was exiled from Milan to the island because his devotion to his secret studies gave Antonio the opportunity to usurp the dukedom, while Sycorax was exiled from Algiers to the island because she was accused of witchcraft; he arrived with his young daughter, while she arrived pregnant with the child she had supposedly conceived by sleeping with the devil. Each of them can command the tides and manipulate the spirit world that is embodied by Ariel. When Prospero comes to renounce his magic, he describes his powers in words borrowed from the incantation of another witch, Medea in Ovid’s great storehouse of ancient mythological tales, the
Metamorphoses
. Thus Prospero: “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves.…” And Medea in Arthur Golding’s Elizabethan translation of the
Metamorphoses
, one of Shakespeare’s favorite books: “Ye elves of hills, of brooks, of woods alone, / Of standing lakes, and of the night.…”
Prospero at some level registers his own kinship with Sycorax when he says of Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.” The splitting of subject and verb across the line ending here, ensuring a moment’s hesitation in the acknowledgment, is an extreme instance of the suppleness with which late Shakespeare handles his iambic pentameter verse.
Shakespeare loved to set up oppositions, then shade his black and white into gray areas of moral complexity. In Milan, Prospero’s inward-looking study of the liberal arts had led to the loss of power and the establishment of tyranny. On the island he seeks to make amends by applying what he has learned, by using active magic to bring repentance, restore his dukedom, and set up a dynastic marriage. Yet at the beginning of the fifth act he sees that to be truly human is a matter not of exercising wisdom for the purposes of rule, but of practicing a more strictly Christian version of virtue. For humanism, education in princely virtue meant the cultivation for political ends of wisdom, magnanimity, temperance, and integrity. For Prospero what finally matters is kindness. And this is something that the master learns from his pupil: it is Ariel who teaches Prospero about “feeling,” not vice versa.
Ariel represents fire and air, concord and music, loyal service. Caliban is of the earth, associated with discord, drunkenness, and rebellion. Ariel’s medium of expression is delicate verse, while Caliban’s is for the most part a robust, often ribald prose like that of the jester Trinculo and drunken butler Stephano. But, astonishingly, it is Caliban who speaks the play’s most beautiful verse when he hears the music of Ariel: “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.…” Even in prose, Caliban has a wonderful attunement to the natural environment: he knows every corner, every species of the island. Prospero calls him “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick,” yet in the very next speech Caliban enters with the line “Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not hear a footfall,” words of such strong imagination that Prospero’s claim is instantly belied.
Caliban’s purported sexual assault on Miranda shows that Prospero failed in his attempt to tame the animal instincts of the “man-monster” and educate him into humanity. But who bears responsibility for the failure? Could it be that the problem arises from what Prospero has imprinted on Caliban’s memory, not from the latter’s nature? Caliban initially welcomed Prospero to the island and offered to share its fruits, every bit in the manner of the “noble savages” in Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals,” which was another source from which Shakespeare quoted in the play (Gonzalo’s Utopian “golden age” vision of how he would govern the isle is borrowed from the English translation of Montaigne). Caliban only acts basely after Prospero has printed that baseness on him; what makes Caliban “filth” may be the lessons in which Prospero has taught him that he is “filth.” According to humanist theory, the learning of language is what makes man godlike as opposed to beastlike, but Caliban’s only profit from the language lessons delivered to him by Prospero and Miranda is the ability to curse.
Caliban understands the power of the book: as fashioners of modern coups d’état begin by seizing the television station, so he stresses that the rebellion against Prospero must begin by taking possession of his books. But Stephano has another book. “Here is that which will give language to you,” he says to Caliban, replicating Prospero’s gaining of control through language—but in a different mode. Textual inculcation is replaced by intoxication: the book that is kissed is the bottle. The dialogic spirit that is fostered by Shakespeare’s technique of scenic counterpoint thus calls into question Prospero’s use of books. If Stephano and Trinculo achieve through their alcohol what Prospero achieves through his teaching (in each case Caliban is persuaded to serve and to share the fruits of the isle), is not that teaching exposed as potentially nothing more than a means of social control? Prospero often seems more interested in the power structure that is established by his schoolmastering than in the substance of what he teaches. It is hard to see how making Ferdinand carry logs is intended to inculcate virtue; its purpose is to elicit submission.
Arrival on an island uninhabited by Europeans, talk of “plantation,” an encounter with a “savage” in which alcohol is exchanged for survival skills, a process of language learning in which it is made clear who is master and who is slave, fear that the slave will impregnate the master’s daughter, the desire to make the savage seek for Christian “grace” (though also a proposal that he should be shipped to England and exhibited for profit), references to the dangerous weather of the Bermudas and to a “brave new world”: in all these respects,
The Tempest
conjures up the spirit of European colonialism. Shakespeare had contacts with members of the Virginia Company, which had been established by royal charter in 1606 and was instrumental in the foundation of the Jamestown colony in America the following year. Some time in the autumn of 1610, a letter reached England describing how a fleet sent to reinforce the colony had been broken up by a storm in the Caribbean; the ship carrying the new governor had been driven to Bermuda, where the crew and passengers had wintered. Though the letter was not published at the time, it circulated in manuscript and inspired at least two pamphlets about these events. Scholars debate the extent to which Shakespeare made direct use of these materials, but certain details of the storm and the island seem to be derived from them. There is no doubt that the seemingly miraculous survival of the governor’s party and the fertile environment they discovered in the Bahamas were topics of great public interest at the time of the play.
The British Empire, the slave trade, and the riches of the spice routes lay in the future. Shakespeare’s play is set in the Mediterranean, not the Caribbean. Caliban cannot strictly be described as a native of the island. And yet the play intuits the dynamic of colonial possession and dispossession with such uncanny power that in 1950 a book by Octave Mannoni called
The Psychology of Colonisation
could argue that the process functioned by means of a pair of reciprocal neuroses: the “Prospero complex” on the part of the colonizer and the “Caliban complex” on that of the colonized. It was in response to Mannoni that Frantz Fanon wrote
Black Skin, White Masks
, a book that did much to shape the intellectual terrain of the “postcolonial” era. For many Anglophone Caribbean writers of the late twentieth century,
The Tempest
, and the figure of Caliban in particular, became a focal point for discovery of their own literary voices. The play is less a reflection of imperial history—after all, Prospero is an exile, not a venturer—than an anticipation of it.
In terms of real political power, the British Empire at the time of the play extended no farther than Ireland. That island of colonial “plantations” and supposedly savage yet poetic natives may lie in the hinterland of Shakespeare’s imagination, but the main political emphasis of the play is court intrigue rather than imperial endeavor. As in so much drama of the age, Italy—the land of courtly sophistication and cunning, of Castiglione and Machiavelli—serves as backdrop. Italy did not become a unified nation until the nineteenth century. In Shakespeare’s time, it was dominated by five separate city-states: Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples, and Rome. Each was marked by rivalry with the others, internal factional division, and external pressures from Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. By setting their plays amid the Italian maelstrom of the earlier sixteenth century, Shakespeare and his contemporaries could engage in theatrical debate about monarchy and republicanism, idealism and realpolitik, dynastic liaison and internecine strife, without offending the Master of the Revels who cast an austere censor’s eye over every play script with a view to the suppression of any contentious matter concerning Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and religious controversy.
The first recorded performance of
The Tempest
took place on the evening of All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1611, in the presence of King James at Whitehall. Just over a year later, in February 1613, the play was one of fourteen performed by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, as their contribution to court celebrations marking the marriage of the king’s daughter Elizabeth to Prince Frederick, Count Palatine and later King of Bohemia. It has sometimes been supposed that the wedding masque staged by Prospero’s spirits for Miranda and Ferdinand was an addition to the script especially for this occasion, but there is no evidence for this supposition.
The Tempest
is no more and no less a courtly play than any of Shakespeare’s other dramas. It was not commissioned for any particular court occasion, but—like all the other plays written for the King’s Men—it was created in the knowledge that it would at some time be played at court.
Given his theater company’s status as the king’s own players, Shakespeare remained politically guarded but made it his business to show an interest in the things that the king was interested in, such as witchcraft (
Macbeth
) and the question of the number of kingdoms into which Britain should be divided (
King Lear
). In the years when he was writing his last plays, the king and his courtiers were much preoccupied with royal marriages and the potential of dynastic liaisons to heal Europe’s divisions. King James of Scotland and England was in the unique position of sitting on two Protestant thrones while being the son of a famous Roman Catholic (Mary, Queen of Scots). His wife, Anne of Denmark, had Catholic sympathies. He was therefore well qualified for his chosen role as an international peacemaker: the marriage of his son to a Catholic princess from Spain and his daughter to a Protestant prince from the Germanic territories would have been a strong strategic move. Though Shakespeare rigorously eschewed topicality and did not take the risk of seeking to advise his monarch on matters of policy,
The Tempest
is very much a drama of the moment: the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples, together with the rivalry and intrigue of their rulers, stand as shorthand for the fractured polity of Europe, while the union of Miranda and Ferdinand embodies the hope that royal marriage might bring peace and stability. The game of chess was a powerful symbol for skillful statecraft and diplomatic maneuvering. Miranda and Ferdinand’s banter over their chessboard has typically Shakespearean equipoise: does the accusation of cheating suggest the fragility of the alliance between Milan and Naples or does the good humor of the exchange suggest that Italy will be in safe hands?
As regular players in the Whitehall Palace, the King’s Men knew that from the end of 1608 onward, the teenage Princess Elizabeth was resident at court. A cultured young woman who enjoyed music and dancing, she participated in court festivals and in 1610 danced in a masque called
Tethys
. Masques—performed by a mixed cast of royalty, courtiers, and professional actors, staged with spectacular scenery and elaborate music—were the height of fashion at court in these years. Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, working in conjunction with the designer Inigo Jones, was carving out a role for himself as the age’s leading masque-wright. In 1608 he introduced the “antimasque” (or “antemasque”), a convention whereby grotesque figures known as “antics” danced boisterously prior to the graceful and harmonious masque itself. Shakespeare nods to contemporary fashion by including a betrothal masque within the action of
The Tempest
, together with the antimasque farce of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo smelling of horse piss, stealing clothes from a line, and being chased away by dogs. One almost wonders whether the figure of Prospero is a gentle parody of Ben Jonson: his theatrical imagination is bound by the classical unities (as Jonson’s was) and he stages a court masque (as Jonson did). Perhaps this is why a few years later, in his
Bartholomew Fair
, Jonson parodied
The Tempest
in return.
The masque also provides the occasion for Shakespeare to continue his meditation upon the power of “art.” Sometime schoolmaster Prospero has turned himself into a theatrical impresario. Having first staged the harpy’s banquet, now he educates Ferdinand and Miranda into virtue (which in their case he makes synonymous with chastity) through dramatic spectacle. The hope here is that theater can do what humanism traditionally relied on books to do. But—as is the way with live theater—things do not go quite according to plan: to Prospero’s irritation, the performance is interrupted by the entrance of Caliban and company.