The Tempest

1. The Tempest Third lecture: a “postcolonial” Tempest?

2. “The first work of American literature” • This is how Leo Marx, a scholar of American lit., described The Tempest over 40 years ago (The Machine in the Garden, 1964). • What he had in mind is the way the play seems to meditate on the discovery of a new world. • And in the past 20 years, some critics have found a colonizing theme in the play. • Prospero has wrested the island from Caliban. • “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother/ Which thou tak’st from me” (I.2.351-53), C. says. • “For I am all the subjects that you have,/ That first was my own king.” • And Prospero has enslaved him. • Prospero thus seems a colonizing European master, or despot, who has taken the isle from its aboriginal inhabitant, whom he has made to serve him. • And Caliban’s account of how Prospero originally “made much of me” becomes a narrative of the colonizing process. • Naming “the bigger light” and “the less/ That burn by day and night” (echoing Genesis) seems almost archetypal in its bringing of European knowledge to native peoples.

3. The island’s location • Officially the island must be in the Mediterranean: The ship is on the way back from Tunis to Naples. • And Prospero was presumably set adrift in the Tyrrean sea. • But then we recall that Shakespeare had been reading accounts of shipwreck in Bermuda – of a ship in a fleet bound for Virginia. • And Ariel says he’s moored the ship in “the deep nook where once/ Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew/ From the still-vext Bermudas” (I.2.227-29). • So the island has imaginatively some New World associations. • (Bermuda was originally uninhabited.) • The island’s imaginary character makes it a kind of virtual space, to be filled by whatever we imagine.

4. Caliban • The name seems related to Carib, the latter name coming from the Spanish caribe, the indigenous people of the West Indies. • Whom Columbus called cannibales. • Is he human? • Prospero seems to think so: “Then was this island/ (Save for the son that she [Sycorax] did litter here,/ A freckled whelp, hag-born) not honored with a human shape” (I.2.281-83). • Prospero calls him simply “my slave” and, in his anger, “the beast Caliban.” • Stephano and Trinculo call him a “monster” and remark on his fishy smell. • But is this, the question of his humanity, very point of Caliban? • Early sixteenth-century Europeans immediately wondered whether the inhabitants of the New World were human. • Just as they doubted the humanity of the black inhabitants of West Africa, whom they enslaved. • Miranda says he originally “wouldst gabble like/ A thing most brutish” until she “endowed thy purposes/ With words that made them known” (I.2.356ff). • A colonial reading would see this as imposing a European language on the “brutish” native tongue.

5. The horror of miscegenation? • The breaking point of Prospero’s colonial endeavor: Caliban tries to rape (in Prospero’s understanding) Miranda. • He used Caliban “with humane care, and lodged thee/ In mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate/ The honor of my child.” • “O ho, O ho! Would’t have been done!/ Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/ This isle with Calibans.” • Can we imagine Caliban’s understanding of this? • Can he be understood simply to have misinterpreted Miranda’s pity and kind intentions? • (In asking these questions, of course, we’re moving outside the play.) • The bitterness between the master and slave derives from this attempted sexual encounter. • And justifies, for Prospero, the enslavement of Caliban.

6. The indigenous Caliban • Caliban says that in the beginning he loved Prospero “And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,/ The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile” (I.2.357f). • And his offer to transfer his knowledge to Stephano and Triculo, confirms this sense of his being at one with island’s natural phenomena: II.2.156ff. • Some of the most lyrical poetry of the play is associated with Caliban. • In response to Ariel’s “tune on a tabor and pipe” Caliban says, “Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not . . .” (III.3.134ff). • It’s the one moment when Caliban responds to Ariel. • In the end Caliban repents his folly in taking up with S & T. • “And I’ll be wise hereafter,/ And seek for grace.” • “What a thrice-double ass/ Was I to take this drunkard for a god/ And worship this dull fool!” • And the island is returned to him with the withdrawal of Prospero and the ship. • The play becomes then literally “post-colonial”?

7. The status of this reading • How much of this reading of the play could have been intended by Shakespeare? • Or available to his first audiences? • We notice how it tends to subvert other readings of the play. • Moving the focus from Prospero and his transformation to Caliban. • The “Caliban problem” perhaps analogous to the “Shylock problem” in Merchant. • Which raises the question of the mutability of interpretation of classic texts, plays. • What exactly does “classic” mean? • Are there texts that “transcend” their own time and culture? • But can human art really evade the culture of which it’s a part, and through which expresses its meanings? • Or does “classic” mean an excess of meaning, a sort of spilling over of meanings, in such a way that other periods, other cultures, can reinterpret? • Caliban is imagined at the very beginning of English imperialism. • And because he was made not only a figure of threat and danger, but also of fascinating connection with new worlds, he continues to seem interesting. • And as attitudes toward imperialism, colonialism alter over the subsequent 400 years, our attitudes toward Caliban, Prospero can alter. • Do we have to choose definitive interpretation? • Or can we hold alternative interpretations and meanings in our minds?