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 16th 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
18th 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.”
