Shakespeare and the New World - what can we learn from The Tempest?

Introduction

The Tempest is a complex, mysterious play. It is probably the last play he wrote and it is confident yet does not sit easily into Elizabethan (or rather by this point Stuart) categories. For example, is it a comedy or a tragedy? There are definite comic moments, but it doesn’t end with a wedding; besides which the overall tone is brooding and melancholic. Witness Prospero’s final speech, in which he addresses the audience directly, stripped of his magical powers:

Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

On the other hand, neither is it a tragedy, as it ends with forgiveness for past faults and the promise of change in the future, rather than death.

So what is The Tempest about? This short film explains the plot.

So hopefully you have an idea about the plot. Frankly, we could – and people have – find dozens of ways to interpret the play. And an advance apology, Ariel  fans – as a sop to some kind of brevity he will not be appearing in this talk as he’s just too complex a can of ethereal worms to do justice to in the time available.

The right to rule?

What I do want to focus on, perhaps not surprisingly as this is a meeting of a Marxist revolutionary organisation, is the issue of power politics. A key question that the play repeatedly raises is this: who has the right to rule?

There are clear attempts to explore this in terms of both the European, aristocratic experience and how these notions can be exported to the New World (which at this point in time was still pretty new from a European perspective).

Prospero, the protagonist of the play, is an exiled Duke, a learned aristocrat and a powerful magician (literally able to exercise magical powers to affect the world. The tempest of the title is created by him and he orchestrates most of the key events that ensue either directly or through his magical servants.

The 16^th Century was a tumultuous time that had questioned many of the certainties of feudal order. Europe had been convulsed by wars of religion, and radical experiments in proto-socialist democracy had been tried in some areas, such as the Anabaptist takeover of the city of Münster in 1534, which had attempted to create a holy commonwealth on earth and ended with an insane despotism that ended only with the sack of the city by Papal mercenaries. These experiments had ended either in failure or being crushed by various imperial forces, but had, along with the growth of Protestantism in the religious sphere seriously challenged many ruling-class ideas of the time.

This is reflected in the play in various ways. Prospero’s dukedom is stolen from him, which he regards as an unacceptable outrage. Yet he admits to his daughter that he had neglected his duties in pursuit of study – handing more and more power to his brother, and being taken utterly by surprised when said brother decided that he ought to have the title that went with the job. For Prospero, old world aristo, there can be no question that his right to rule is a natural one, which no circumstances can challenge.[1]

As might be expected from a play which was likely to be performed in front of a British monarch (command performances becoming a thing by this point in history), this world is not turned upside down, and Prospero’s plans to regain his Dukedom come to their due fruition. However, it is not plain sailing (much as there had been no clear succession to Elizabeth a few years earlier) and there is a real sense in which Shakespeare seems to ridicule such a notion.

Firstly there are the plots. We know that Prospero has been the victim of a successful plot at the hands of Antonio, in conspiracy with Alonso, King of Naples. However, now his enemies find themselves on the island, Antonio and Sebastian (Alonso’s brother) immediately begin a new plot against Alonso. So the impression we get is of an aristocracy with no sense of their natural place, undermining the idea of a natural right in itself.

As if one plot is not enough, we find that Prospero’s own slave rebels against him. At this point we need to introduce Caliban, who brings with him an enormous amount about the New World, so it is time for a digression.

 

Digression? The New World

When we come to think about the New World in more general terms we first need to meet Michel de Montaigne.

Not literally, he’s been dead for 500 years. However, it seems clear that Shakespeare is at least in part responding to his essay On Cannibals, where he ventures a view that the inhabitants of the new world, being uncorrupted by civilisation, may be far more civilised than the Europeans who have happened upon them:

I long had a man in my house that lived ten or twelve years in the New World, discovered in these latter days, and in that part of it where Villegaignon landed, which he called Antarctic France. This discovery of so vast a country seems to be of very great consideration. I cannot be sure, that hereafter there may not be another, so many wiser men than we having been deceived in this. I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.

… This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more likely to tell truth: for your better bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, 'tis true, and discover a great deal more, but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they deliver and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story; they never represent things to you simply as they are, but rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgment, and the better to induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something more than is really true, of their own invention.

… Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason, than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruit are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas in truth, we ought rather to call those wild, whose natures we have changed by our artifice, and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most useful and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate.

These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them: for to my apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary republic short of his perfection?

Montaigne imagines that the people of the still-mysterious New World embody the perfections that he sees lacking in his own civilisation, idealising them in his own terms. His own terms include simplicity of life, lack of commerce, honesty, leisure and lack of sovereignty – the New World is an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist place. This is the idea of the ‘noble savage’ – barbarian by our standards but nobler in body and mind than ourselves.

How does Shakespeare use Montaigne’s ideas, especially in terms of the nature of government? Quite cruelly. Here’s Gonzalo, who voices Montaigne-style ideas about the island on which they find themselves.

 

As you can see, Shakespeare has other characters point out what might be seen as the logical flaws in his argument – that in order to create this utopia he would have to exercise the power of a sovereign, and that more fundamentally he is saying meaningless nothings anyway (probably a familiar experience when trying to explain socialism to people whose ideological horizons are the ‘common-sense’ of capitalism). But of course, death of the author etc – what does the play itself tell us about Montaigne’s ideas?

Well, Shakespeare explores further the noble savage, centrally through the character of Caliban (a near-anagram of cannibal, referring neatly back to Montaigne’s essay title. Clever, eh?). Who is Caliban? Well, here’s how we meet him.

So Caliban is a motley monster, a savage far from noble – see how without civilisation he is no simple embodiment of primitive virtue, and even taints the civilisation he is taught with his use of it. This is an anti-Montaignist view, full of the cynical attitudes common to common-sense capitalism of today. Interestingly it also contains precisely the same flaws as later capitalist parables. Capitalist favourite Robinson Crusoe, for example, has precisely this flaw: just as Crusoe does not reproduce 18^th Century English civilisation by accident, Caliban is not the product of primitive civilisation. He is in fact the product of loneliness, isolation and the torture visited upon him by civilised Prospero.

Hence the play allows the development of interesting complexity in unpicking the link between Caliban’s savagery and both his origins and his current material conditions – echoes of Marx here, as Caliban in the play will make his own, doomed history, but not just as he pleases.

 

Back to the right to rule

In the midst of this tension between the nature of government and human nature, Caliban forms an alliance with two lower-class characters (we can tell they’re lower class because of the two telltale characteristics: drunkenness and speaking in prose) who have also survived the shipwreck, and plans to overthrow Prospero, creating an inverted empire with the ignorant savage in the place of the refined, studious and powerful torturer.

Here he is doing that very thing.

Caliban is not innocent, but he is easily fooled by Old World tricks and shouts of freedom whilst accepting another despotism in place of the despotism he wishes to shake off.

There are shades of Münster here, with the audacity of these people in taking a right to rule, first over Prospero’s slave and secondly in the attempt to usurp Prospero once more. Shakespeare hints at the same truth which appealed to St Augustine – that the right to rule is a fiction and that in reality power depends upon the ability to exercise violence.

Yet even this is not final only usurpation which Shakespeare gives us. We have also discovered that Prospero gained rule of the island by murdering Caliban’s mother and assuming the right to rule over Caliban. Prospero does not seem to question his right to the island at all – this natural right extends unreflectively into the New World!

 

So …?

This is all very interesting, but what does it add up to? I think when we look at The Tempest that it deals with changing power relations at a point where feudalism was being challenged both by theological changes undermining the intellectual rationale for rule and the social changes that the new mercantile capitalism was bringing about – a new proto-bourgeoisie of merchants, traders and bankers was emerging, and people from lower orders beginning to exercise significant political power because of the financial capital that they possessed. In England, the succession after Elizabeth’s death had not been straightforward either. At the same time, the birth of western empires was being witnessed and the slave trade had been becoming steadily more important. The attitudes displayed and criticised in the play would shape the development of capitalism itself, and one thing which it does demonstrate is that rulers do not question their own right to rule, and that the only time they consider limits to their rule it is with other members of their own class (as the relationship between the Duke of Milan and the King of Naples shows) – and that there can be no question of the inhabitants of the New World deserving that same kind of consideration whatever.

Post-script

In the discussion one comrade suggested that what Caliban and the island reveal most to us is not the foreign but the European approach to themselves – that what may appear to be about the alien is in fact only a reflection of the concerns of ourselves.

This idea has perhaps been best brought out in the 1956 version of The Tempest, the science fiction interpretation The Forbidden Planet. In this, Caliban is seen as projection of the bestial parts of ourselves – a monster from the id!

Perhaps this is the final indictment of empire: that its subject peoples become simply an extension of the rulers’ conversations about themselves. Anyone who has seen the way in which criticism of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been framed, or The Sun’s Help for Heroes campaign can see that this is something which hasn’t changed in 400 years.

 

 

 

 

[1] I mean a natural right rather than a divine right, because Shakespeare and his part-inspiration Montaigne (of whom more later) are both more interested in the classical world than the Christian one, and there are more echoes of Plato and Cicero in the play than Christianity. Having said this, the idea of a divine right was not automatically accepted by Christians either. For example, St Augustine once wrote: Indeed,

that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”