essay for （Michael Smith）

© 2007 The University of North Carolina Press

50

Seduction and Service   in The Tempest

by Melissa E. Sanchez

The Tempest  is  unique  among  Shakespeare’s  plays  in  that  it  lists only one female character in the dramatis personae. Yet Miranda’s isolation is neither inconsequential nor entire; in actuality, she is  the touchstone for the women who enter the play via its tissue of allu- sions and whose presence makes legible a contemporary political dis- course that likened the relation of sovereign and subject to that of hus- band and wife. The sixteenth century had seen critiques of Elizabethan  policy couched in the erotic entanglements of such influential romances  as Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s  late plays evoke similar narrative structures to participate in an ongoing  debate regarding the location and scope of sovereignty in early Stuart  England.�  Read  in  such  a  discursive  context,  The Tempest’s  attention  to  female  desire  and  consent  registers  the  participation  of  both  popu- lace and ruler, women and men, in sustaining structures of authority.  Miranda’s enactment of political subjection differs conspicuously from  that of Ariel, Caliban, or any of the shipwrecked Italians, for her femi- ninity  accentuates  an  erotic  dynamic  that  is  less  visible—but  equally  significant—in Prospero’s relations with his male subjects and rivals.   Given  the  prominent  conjunction  of  courtship  and  politics  in  early  Stuart discourse, it is surprising that female figures have generated little  interest in criticism of The Tempest, which has typically responded more  to the masculine struggles emphasized in the play’s comic subplot than 

� Critics have differed as to the relation of Shakespeare’s last four plays to the rest of his  oeuvre. E. M. W. Tillyard, for instance, argues that the romances incorporate the experi- ence of the tragedies in order to transcend it, while Howard Felperin suggests that in their  emphasis on disenchantment and human limitation, these plays actually produce effects  more  akin  to  the  epics  of  Spenser or  Milton  than  to  Shakespeare’s  own  previous  work.  See Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938), 16–20 and 81–89;  and Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 53–58.

Melissa E. Sanchez 51

to the male and female negotiations staged by its romantic main plot.  Early twentieth-century readers saw The Tempest as a struggle over the  angelic—but passive—soul (Miranda), between the forces of divine en- lightenment (Prospero), on the one hand, and bestial desire (Caliban),  on  the  other.�  As  numerous  postcolonial  adaptations  of  the  play  have  demonstrated,  such  mythic  interpretations,  far  from  being  apolitical,  are saturated with precisely the ideological mystifications that helped  justify the brutalities of colonial regimes.� Drawing on these identifica- tions  of  Caliban  with  the  insurgent  native,  Prospero with  the  ruthless  colonizer,  Shakespearean  critics  of  the  past  few  decades  have  tended  to  see  The Tempest  less  as  a  simple  encomium  to  humanist,  European  values  than  as  an  imaginative  arena  of  political  struggle  and  ambiva- lence.�  While  postcolonial  criticism  of  The Tempest  has  offered  an  im-

� Works  that  tend  implicitly  to  justify  imperial  and  colonial  projects  by  interpreting  Prospero as the beneficent voice of education, civility, and providence include G. Wilson  Knight’s The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (New York:  Barnes and Noble, 1961) and Colin Still’s The Timeless Theme (London: Ivor Nicholson &  Watson, 1936).

� In  1960,  George  Lamming  presented  an  analogy  shared  by  a  number  of  postcolo- nial readers: “I see The Tempest against the background of England’s experimentation in  colonisation . . . The Tempest was also prophetic of a political future which is our present.  Moreover, the circumstances of my life, both as colonial and exiled descendant of Cali- ban in the twentieth century is an example of that prophecy” (The Pleasures of Exile [Ann  Arbor:  University  of  Michigan  Press,  1992],  13).  A  number  of  theorists  have  embraced  this association of Caliban with colonized peoples in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa,  Asia, and Ireland; see, for instance, Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New  York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1992); Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays,  trans.  Edward  Baker  (Minneapolis:  University  of  Minnesota  Press,  1989);  Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1968); and Octave Mannoni,  Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (New York:  Praeger, 1956).

� For  Shakespearean  criticism  responding  to  issues  introduced  by  such  adaptations,  see Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Dis- course  of  Colonialism,”  in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism,  ed.  Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985);  Thomas  Cartelli,  “Prospero  in  Africa:  The Tempest  as  Colonialist  Text  and  Pretext,”  in  Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F.  O’Connor (London: Metheuen, 1987); Peter Hulme, “Prospero and Caliban,” in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Metheuen, 1986); Stephen  Greenblatt,  Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance En- gland  (Berkeley:  University  of  California  Press,  1988);  and  Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990). Meredith Ann Skura and David Scott  Kastan have challenged postcolonial readings of The Tempest; see Skura, “Discourse and  the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989):  42–69; and Kastan, “‘The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son’: Old Histories and New in  The Tempest,” in Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999). Harry Berger and  Stephen Orgel have offered critiques of the play’s politics that explore the complexities  of the histories and struggles it represents; see Berger, “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of 

52 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

portant corrective to the naïve politics of mythic readings, it has often  shared  with  early criticism  the  tendency  to  consign  female  characters  to  the  status  of  passive  objects  within  the  play’s  politics,  rather  than  the active participants they in fact are. And the consequent location of  political struggles in an exclusively masculine realm almost inevitably  overlooks  the  play’s  focus  on  the  erotic  relation  as  both  real  and  ana- logical matter of seventeenth-century debates on sovereignty.   My argument follows recent feminist work that has brought Miranda  and her ghostly surrogates, the “widow Dido,”� Sycorax, and Claribel,  from  the  margins  of  The Tempest  to  its  center,  and  I  propose  that  the  erotic dimension these figures bring to the play disrupts simple narra- tives of dominance, submission, and revolt.� Because women introduce  the  possibilities  of  marriage,  courtship,  and  sexual  desire,  the  female  figures  of  The Tempest  remind  us  that  politics—particularly  in  the  do- mestic  sphere—are  not  reducible  to  purely  rational  calculation  but  driven in large part by desire, fantasy, and identification. In particular,  the  play’s  attention  to  Miranda’s  marriage  negotiations  demonstrates  that subjects will, ideally, consent to be ruled at the same time that such  a focus acknowledges the precarious nature of narratives that base po- litical order on fickle desire rather than resolute force.� From the second 

Shakespeare’s  Tempest,”  Shakespeare Studies  5  (1969);  and  Orgel,  “Shakespeare  and  the  Cannibals,” in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Gar- ber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

� The Tempest,  ed.  Stephen  Orgel  (Oxford:  Oxford  University  Press,  1987),  2.1.76.  All  subsequent references are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the  text by act, scene, and line.

� See  Ania  Loomba,  Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama  (Manchester:  Manchester  Uni- versity Press, 1989); Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2002);  and  Kim  Hall,  Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Lorrie Jerrell Leininger, Jyotsna G.  Singh, and Jean Slights have noted the tendency of Tempest critics to treat Caliban’s and  Miranda’s  rights  as  mutually  exclusive;  see  Leininger,  “The  Miranda Trap:  Sexism  and  Racism  in  Shakespeare’s  The Tempest,”  in  The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shake- speare, ed. Gayle Green, Ruth Swift Lenz, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1980); Singh, “Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Post- colonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerg- ing Subjects, ed. valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Slights, “Rape and the Romanticization of Shake- speare’s  Miranda,”  Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900  41  (2001):  357–79.  Donna  B.  Hamilton argues that echoes of virgil’s Aeneid in The Tempest participate in contemporary  arguments for constitutional, rather than absolute monarchy; I would like to extend her  detailed analysis of the play’s contractual negotiations to show how the erotic discourse  employed in these debates disrupts clear narratives of authority and submission (Virgil and “The Tempest” [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990]).

� Erotic relations have long provided metaphors for political situations, but narratives 

Melissa E. Sanchez 53

scene of the play, in which we recognize that we have shared Miranda’s  perception  of  the  storm  and  thus  also  occupy  her  role  as  spectator  to  be both manipulated and pleased, the congruent analogies of audience  and woman as political subjects merge in the figure of Prospero’s nubile  daughter. Prospero’s insistence that he has “done nothing but in care of  thee”  (1.2.19),  however  cynical,  is  true  insofar  as  Miranda  represents  the populace upon whose compliance and approval stable order rests.  The  inconsistency  between  Miranda’s  and  Prospero’s  perceptions  of  her  betrothal,  however,  also  registers  tensions  between  the  absolutist  theories expressed by James I and the real and continuing struggles be- tween king and parliament over both practical and ideological issues,  one  that  the  Great  Contract  failed  to  solve  in  1610.  And,  even  as  the  audience “objectively” witnessing the events onstage, we remain uncer- tain as to where Prospero’s control ends and Miranda’s begins. The play  thus  contemplates  the  difficulty of  defining  and  sustaining  legitimate  authority in a political climate where the practical limits of even uncon- tested  areas  of  sovereign  prerogative  are  increasingly  up  for  debate.� 

of sexual conquest typically either de-eroticize rape by attributing it to reproductive ne- cessity (as in the Roman rape of the Sabines) or identify sexual desire with tyranny and  chastity with liberation (as in Livy’s description of the rape of Lucretia as the prelude to  Roman Republicanism or the tale in Judges 19–20 of a concubine’s rape as the event that  united the tribes of Israel against the licentious Benjamites). Feminist work on the literary  representation of sexual violence has repeatedly cautioned that political readings of rape  can mask its physical brutality and psychological consequences and therefore implicitly  sanction the gendered inequalities on which rape depends. Stephanie Jed offers a detailed  analysis  of  the  dissociation  of  sexual  desire  and  political  action  that  she  terms  “chaste  thinking” (Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism [Bloomington:  Indiana  University Press, 1989], chapter 1); see also the Introduction to  Rape and Repre- sentation,  ed.  Lynn  A.  Higgins  and  Brenda  R.  Silver  (New  York:  Columbia  University  Press,  1991);  Jocelyn  Catty,  Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: un- bridled Speech  (New York:  St.  Martin’s,  1999);  and  the  Introduction  to  Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature,  ed.  Elizabeth  Robertson  and  Christine  M.  Rose  (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Moving beyond the traditional feminist positions offered by  writers such as Susan Brownmiller, Catherine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin, Ann J.  Cahill has argued that rape, as a sexual act charged with political and bodily meanings,  is distinguishable from both non-sexualized acts of violence and consensual sex (Rethink- ing Rape [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001], 15–49). For foundational work on  gender and  violence,  by  the writers  just  listed,  see  Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Penguin, 1975); MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Dworkin, Pornography: Men Pos- sessing Women (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981).

� For general backgrounds on early modern tensions between absolutist and communi- tarian ideas of sovereign power, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century  (Cambridge:  Cam- bridge  University  Press,  1957);  J.  P.  Sommerville,  Politics and Ideology in England, 1603– 1640 (London: Longman, 1986); C. C. Weston and J. R. Greenburg, Sovereigns and Subjects:

54 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Below, I examine the conjunction of erotic, economic, and political vo- cabularies of servitude in The Tempest to propose that the central plot,  in which the marriage of Miranda to Ferdinand will ostensibly secure  public  harmony and  stability,  demonstrates  that  political  authority  in  the  seventeenth  century  is  hardly  a  monolithic  structure,  but  instead  is  dispersed  across  an  intricate  network  of  seduction  and  constraint,  desire and deference.

G R O U N D S   O F   A U T H O R I T Y

In both practical and theoretical debates over sovereign prerogative in  the  late  sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth  centuries,  the  language  of  af- fection  and  consent  proved  a  useful  tool  for a  range  of  positions.  Per- haps  most  prominently,  James  I  emphasized  the  reciprocal  duties  of  man  and  woman,  ruler  and  ruled,  to  postulate  a  relation  in  which  a  feminized English populace not only passively accepts but also actively  embraces its subordinate status. In The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies: Or the Reciprock and Mvtvall Dvetie Betwixt a Free King, and His naturall Sub- jects, for instance, James discusses the origin of monarchy as it is pre- sented in 1 Samuel, in which God responds to the Israelites’ “importu- nate crauing” for a king with the warning that their divinely appointed  ruler  may  be  a  tyrant  who  will  use  them,  their  offspring,  and  their  property  to  “serue  his  priuate  vse,  and  inordinate  appetite.”�  In  spite  of  the  divine  caveat,  the  Israelites  insist  on  trading  liberty  for  protec- tion. James implicitly rejects the arguments for resisting evil rulers that  such Marian exiles as Christopher Goodman had drawn from the same  biblical passage, even as he brushes past the condemnation of tyranny  printed in the margins of the Geneva translation that he quotes.�0 Cen-

The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England  (Cambridge:  Cambridge  University Press, 1981); and Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (College  Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992).

� James vI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge  University  Press,  1994),  66  and  69.  Unless  otherwise  noted,  all  quotations  of  James  I’s  speeches and writings will be from this edition.

�0 Next to the passages describing a ruler’s potential outrages, the Geneva Bible asserts  that  it  is  “Not  that  kings  haue  this  authoritie  by  their office,  but  that  such  as  reigne  in  Gods wrath should vsurpe this ouer their brethren, contrary to the law.” The Geneva casts  tyranny not as an arbitrary and irremediable condition but as a situation that arises “Be- cause ye repent not for your sinnes, but because ye smart for your afflictions, whereinto  ye cast yourselues willingly” (1 Sam 8, in The 1599 Geneva Bible, facsimile ed. [Ozark, MO:  L.  L.  Brown,  2003],  n.  p.).  It  is  not  surprising  that  James  ignores  these  comments;  what  is surprising is that he uses the Geneva translation at all, as reports of his request for a  new translation at the Hampton Court conference not only singled the Geneva Bible out 

Melissa E. Sanchez 55

tral to James’s argument is the Israelites’ unprompted pursuit of a ruler,  so  that  human  agency  supplements  divine  command:  “it  is  not  only  the ordinance of God, but also your selues haue chosen him vnto you,  thereby renouncing for euer all priuiledges, by your willing consent out  of your hands.”�� In invoking this mythical demand for rule, James cru- cially locates the origin of sovereignty in the active desire of the subject,  which, in its logical conclusion, is really the wish to become fodder for  the king’s lust. Rather than simply respond to heavenly fiat, the consent  of  the  Israelites  inspires  it.  The  creative  popular  will  has  irrevocably  bound itself.   Once he has completed his argument for absolute royal prerogative,  however,  James  assures  his  readers  that  in  an  ideal  commonwealth  monarch  and  people  will  gladly  bridle  their  tyrannous  impulses  to  forge  a  stable  relationship  of  mutual  love  and  care,  one  more  akin  to  the service of courtship than to the slavery of conquest. The distinction  between king and tyrant lies in the ruler’s quest for his people’s love,  not  just  their  grudging  obedience,  and  his  consequent  placing  of  “the  well-fare  and  peace  of  his  people”  before  his  own  desires.��  Accord- ingly, James’s first speech to Parliament envisions the people’s response  to his 1603 succession as evidence of just the idealized relationship he  had described in the Trew Lawe: Or  shall  it  euer  bee  blotted  out  of  my  minde,  how at  my  first  entrie  into  this  Kingdome,  the  people  of  all  sorts  rid  and  ran,  nay  rather  flew  to  meet  mee:  their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection, their mouthes and tongues  vttering  nothing  but  sounds  of  ioy,  their  hands,  feete,  and  all  the  rest  of  their  members in their gestures discouering a passionate longing, and earnestnesse  to meete and embrace their new Soueraigne. Quid ergo retribuam?��

In  blazoning  the  “passionate  longing”  evinced  by  his  subjects’  eyes,  mouths, tongues, hands, feet, and “all the rest of their members,” James  depicts a populace erotically aroused at the mere sight of royalty. Their  almost helpless ravishment, however, also implies a bit of a threat inso-

as the “worst of all” English translations but specifically ordered “that no marginal notes  should  be  added,  having  found  in  them  which  are  annexed  to  the  Geneva  translations  .  .  .  some  notes  very  partial,  untrue,  seditious,  and  savouring  too  much  of  slanderous  and traitorous conceits” (quoted in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 5). For a contemporary reading of  1  Samuel  that  is  more  akin  to  that  offered  by  these  marginal  notes,  see  Goodman,  How Superior Powers ought to be Obeyed (Geneva, 1568), 49–50.

�� James I, Trew Lawe, 69. �� James I, Basilicon Doron, 20. �� James I, Speech to Parliament of 19 March 1604, 133.

56 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

far as  it  demands  satisfaction.  James’s  concluding  rhetorical  question,  “What, therefore, shall I do in return?”, seems to acknowledge as much  by  promising  that,  unlike  the  tyrant  described  by  Samuel,  he will  re- ward rather than exploit his subjects’ love. In fact, his capacity to do so  appears to mirror the people’s earnest adoration.��   Because of its emphasis on consent and reciprocity, the language of  erotic investment was as useful to proponents of common law and lim- ited monarchy as it was to those arguing for absolute royal prerogative.  When  members  of  the  House  of  Commons  opposed  certain  Jacobean  policies,  they  frequently  took  up  a  complimentary affective  discourse  to argue that participation in English government was theirs by ancient  right  not  monarchal  grace.  “The  Form  of  Apology  and  Satisfaction,”  delivered towards the end of the 1604 parliament, for instance, insists  that “our privileges and liberties are our right and due inheritance, no  less than our very lands and goods.” Connecting grievances over what  many saw as abuses of the Crown’s feudal rights of wardship and pur- veyance to an inappropriate expansion of royal powers, the Commons  “Apology” drew a connection between property, liberty, and love. Ac- cording to the following formulation, the nation’s love for James both  legitimates protest and protects royal authority: There was never prince entered with greater love, with greater joy and applause  of all his people. This love, this joy, let it now flourish in their hearts for ever. Let  no suspicion have access to their fearful thoughts, that their privileges, which  they think by your Majesty, should be protected, should now by sinister infor- mation or counsel be violate or impaired. . . . The voice of the people in things  of their knowledge is said to be as the voice of God. And if your Majesty shall  vouchsafe at your best pleasure and leisure to enter into gracious consideration  of our petitions for ease of these burdens under which your whole people have  of long time mourned, hoping for relief by your Majesty, then you may be as- sured to be possessor of their hearts for ever, and if of their hearts, then of all  they can do or have.��

The Commons “Apology” begins with the same premise of a voluntary  and affective bond between sovereign and subjects that James depicted 

�� For discussions of contemporary perceptions of the relation between affection and  rule,  see  Jonathan  Goldberg,  James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, and Their Contemporaries  (Baltimore:  Johns  Hopkins  University  Press,  1983).  See  also  vic- toria  Kahn’s  discussion  of  the  significance  of  the  passions  to  seventeenth-century  con- tract theory, in Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

�� “The  Form  of  Apology  and  Satisfaction,”  20  June  1604,  in  The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 1993), 31, 35.

Melissa E. Sanchez 57

but  draws  very different  conclusions.  It  identifies  the  MPs’  privileges  of counsel and debate with the more general property rights of the na- tion they represent. Love, liberty, and economy are all bound up here;  if James fails to reform abuses to protect his subjects’ property, then he  will lose not only their affection but also its tangible effects. By stressing  that affection and self-interest are implicated in one another, the Com- mons  “Apology”  resists  James’s  idea  that  he  is  a  “free”  monarch.  It  is  hardly surprising, then, that despite mutual assurances of love between  Crown  and  Parliament,  the  session  of  1604  concluded  on  an  acrimo- nious  note,  with  James  casting  outspoken  members  of  Parliament  as  feminized figures with “an itching humour ever to be talking” and ex- pressing his wish that “you would use your liberty with more modesty  in time to come.”��   The discourse of love, with its implicit demand for reciprocation, re- mained a useful means of critiquing James’s fiscal and political policies  throughout the first decade of his reign. In 1607, for instance, the vene- tian Ambassador Nicolo Molin described in terms of unrequited affec- tion the subjects’ dismay at James’s obsession with hunting. According  to Molin, by frustrating the very desire he provokes, James has become  an object of popular resentment: He loves quiet and repose, has no inclination to war, nay is opposed to it, a fact  that little pleases many of his subjects, though it pleases them still less that he  leaves all government to his Council and will think of nothing but the chase. He  does not caress the people nor make them that good cheer the late Queen did,  whereby she won their loves: for the English adore their Sovereigns, and if the  King passed through the same street a hundred times a day the people would  still run to see him; they like their King to show pleasure at their devotion, as the  late Queen knew well how to do; but this King manifests no taste for them but  rather contempt and dislike. The result is he is despised and almost hated.��

Molin’s  report  appeals  to  the  language  of  affect  to  fuse  practical  and  ideological objections to Jacobean policy. James’s sojourns to the coun- try, which by 1605 kept him away from London for up to six months out  of the year, may have been unpopular in part because they removed him 

�� James I, Speech at the Prorogation of Parliament, 7 July 1604, in The Stuart Constitu- tion, ed. Kenyon, 37.

�� “Report  on  England  presented  to  the  Government  of  venice  in  the  year  1607,”  in  James I by his Contemporaries, ed. Robert Ashton (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 10. Molin’s  comments  are  corroborated  by  Peck’s  note  that  the  English  minister  John  Burgess  was  imprisoned for reporting murmurings that James did not appear in public (“The Mental  World of the Jacobean Court: An Introduction,” in Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jaco- bean Court, 7).

58 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

from his subjects, but they were also a focus of criticism because they  consistently  encouraged  abuses  of  purveyance.  As  Pauline  Croft  has  shown, demands for purveyance during James’s hunting trips drained  regional  supplies  and  prompted  local  protests—in  one  particularly  bizarre incident, locals kidnapped James’s favorite greyhound Joler and  typed a letter of complaint on him.�� James’s perceived lack of concern  for  his  subjects’  desires,  needs,  and  rights  disturbed  many,  especially  in comparison to Elizabeth I, who by the middle of the first decade of  his reign had acquired an increasingly roseate reputation. As the king  himself  had  so  often  argued,  love  could  only  manifest  itself  through  concrete action. Perceived abuse of even undisputed prerogatives thus  could  be  taken  as  a  sign  of  “contempt  and  dislike”  that,  as  numerous  MPs pointed out in the debates of 1610, the people might begin to emu- late by refusing supply.��   The Tempest participates in debates over the relative duties and rights  of  sovereign  and  subject  by  adopting  these  contemporary  vocabular- ies  of  love  and  service. The  ambivalence  of  the  affective  ties  between  ruler and ruled emerges in the play’s second scene, where we meet all  three of Prospero’s subjects, Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban, and witness  increasingly  cynical  depictions  of  Prospero’s  power.  Prospero’s  inter- actions with Miranda frame his encounters with his two male servants,  so that Ariel’s and Caliban’s responses to Prospero’s rule both prefigure  and comment on Miranda’s subsequent rebellion on behalf of her lover.  In all three cases, Prospero’s fantasy of his subjects’ unquestioning obe- dience to his benevolent rule is promptly discredited in favor of more  dynamic  engagement. The  first  indication  that  Prospero’s  equation  of  love and servitude may contain the seeds of mutiny occurs with the en- trance of Ariel, whose first lines appear to suggest his voluntary, even  joyful, submission:

All hail, great master, grave sir, hail! I come To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl’d clouds.                                                        (1.2.189–92)

�� Croft, “Robert Cecil and the Early Jacobean Court,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, 137.

�� See, for instance, speeches by Nicholas Fuller on 23 June 1610, and Samuel Lewknor  on 16 November 1610, both in Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, ed. Elizabeth Read Foster,  2  vols.  (New  Haven  and  London:  Yale  University  Press,  1966),  2:152–65  and  400–404,  especially 165 and 402.

Melissa E. Sanchez 59

Even  in  this  seemingly  enthusiastic  greeting,  Ariel  betrays  his  desire  to escape Prospero, for he proposes to go just about anywhere that his  “great master” is not. Although Ariel’s offer to serve Prospero by brav- ing  the  elements  of  air,  water,  and  fire  appears  to  evince  his  limitless  devotion, he conspicuously omits the terrestrial setting in which Pros- pero’s plan must unfold. By focusing on the many spheres that are be- yond  Prospero’s  knowledge  or  emphasis,  Ariel  also  suggests  that  his  master’s limitations are greater than his own and thereby subtly inverts  their relative roles of protector and dependent.   Although  he  proudly  recounts  his  success  in  creating  the  illusory  storm with which the play began, Ariel quickly reminds Prospero that  he  performed  this  service  out  of  self-interest,  not  affection.  Ariel  con- firms  his  desire  to  escape  and  thus  the  coercive  nature  of  his  relation  to Prospero, when he realizes that his labor is not yet complete. In the  ensuing exchange, Ariel casts their relationship as a mutually binding  contract rather than unilateral servitude:

Ariel:  Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains,     Let me remember thee what thou has promis’d,     Which is not yet perform’d me. Prospero:  How now? moody? What is’t thou canst demand? Ariel:  My liberty.                                                                                     (1.2.242–45)

Ariel here abandons his animated vows to respond to Prospero’s “best  pleasure” in favor of equating such “toil” with “pain.” Service to Pros- pero is the antithesis of liberty, itself a loaded word in the seventeenth  century, resonating as it did with the “ancient liberties” that many com- mon  lawyers  and  MPs  increasingly claimed  against  perceived  expan- sions  of  royal  prerogative.  As  Henry  Hastings,  Earl  of  Huntingdon,  darkly  commented  in  1610,  “The  King  will  not  acknowledge  his  pre- rogative to be inferior to law, and therefore no good assurance and tie  can be made but his prerogative will be above it.”�0 In suggesting that  Prospero has independently altered the terms of their original contract, 

�0 Quoted in Foster, ed., Proceedings in Parliament, xx. See also Thomas Hedley’s insis- tence in his speech to Parliament on 28 June 1610, that “this appeareth yet more plainly in  the great Charter of the liberties of England, that the law is not only to protect us against  the  absolute  power  and  prerogative  of  the  king  in  life  and  member,  but  also  in  lands  and  goods”  (Proceedings in Parliament,  ed.  Foster,  2:189).  J.  P.  Sommerville  discusses  the  increasing alarm expressed by the Commons over perceived increases in royal power in  the first decade of James’s reign in “James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics  and Continental Theory,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, 55–70.

60 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Ariel  casts  him  in  the  role  of  a  tyrant  who  maintains  power  by  arbi- trarily denying  innate  liberties  rather  than  a  protector  whom  subjects  lovingly serve.   Prospero initially attempts to dismiss this challenge by attributing it  to Ariel’s moodiness. But when Ariel continues to insist on their origi- nal terms (“Thou did promise / To bate  me a full year”), Prospero re- sponds  not  by defending  the  legitimacy of  his  claim  to  Ariel’s  service  but  with  reminders  of  the  spirit’s  agony  under  the  island’s  previous  ruler,  Sycorax  (1.2.250–51).  As  numerous  critics  have  noted,  Prospero  inadvertently highlights the similarities between himself and the “blue- eyed hag” (1.2.269) he reviles: both were exiled from their native lands  because of a magical practice improper to their respective social roles;  both  claimed  rule  of  the  island  for  themselves  and  their children  and  enslaved Ariel, the native  inhabitant; both fly into “unmitigable rage”  when  challenged;  and  both  use  confinement  and  torture  as  a  favored  means of discipline.��  Because Prospero  claims greater power, he may  be  even  more  tyrannous  than  his  predecessor:  the  soft  pine  in  which  Sycorax  incarcerated  Ariel  for a  dozen  years  is  exceeded  by  the  hard,  unyielding  oak  in  which  Prospero  threatens  to  deposit  him  (1.2.277– 96). Whereas Prospero clearly intends Sycorax as a foil for himself, the  structural  similarities  between  them  emphasize  that  Ariel  is  as  reluc- tant to perform Prospero’s “earthy and abhorrent commands” (1.2.273)  as he was to obey Sycorax.   The memory of Sycorax also addresses the issue of sexual hierarchy  that  so  frequently  figured  political  order  in  the  seventeenth  century.  Prospero’s vitriolic outburst in response to Ariel’s demand for liberty  may focus on Sycorax because for many, female rule signified an inver- sion of the patriarchal order on which Prospero’s power rests. Perhaps  even worse, Sycorax’s pregnancy manifests a sexual liberty that refuses  to submit itself to the controlling influences of husband or father, even  as it evinces the reproductive capacities that Prospero lacks. Prospero’s  need  to  see  his  own  legitimate  rule  reflected  in  purportedly  natural  gender  roles  may  help  explain  his  curious  command  to  the  newly  re- pentant Ariel:

Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea; be subject To no sight by thine and mine, invisible To every eyeball else. Go take this shape And hither come in’t.                                                                      (1.2.301–4)

�� See, for instance, Orgel, ed., The Tempest, 20.

Melissa E. Sanchez 61

The costume serves no purpose in either Prospero’s plan or the larger  plot  of  the  play;  it  is  useful  to  Prospero  only  insofar  as  it  provides  a  visible sign that Ariel will indeed “be correspondent to command” in  the  future  (1.2.297).  Ariel’s  costume will  physically embody  the  femi- nine compliance that Prospero demands, while his invisibility will con- firm an eroticized fidelity that makes him entirely Prospero’s own. Be- yond the grudging performance of his duty, Ariel promises to make his  will  “correspondent”—conforming  itself  naturally  and  voluntarily— to  that  of  his  master.  It  is  only  when  Ariel  enters  “like a water-nymph”  (1.2.316)  that  Prospero  puts  him  to  work,  and  the  spirit’s  subsequent  appearances  as  the  Harpy  (3.3)  and  as  Ceres  (4.1)  continue  to  enforce  associations between eager service and feminine submission.   Ariel  reappears  in  his  nymphlike  attire  in  the  middle  of  Prospero’s  summons to Caliban, a formal juxtaposition that situates the two “ser- vants” as interchangeable even as it makes more vivid the contrast be- tween Ariel’s surrender and Caliban’s resistance. Whereas Ariel’s self- interested  capitulation  to  Prospero  lacks  any  emotional  foundation,  Caliban’s relationship to his master is suffused with ambivalent affect.  Caliban’s more complex position further establishes the tension between  consent  and  coercion  that  mark  the  play’s  depictions  of  sovereign- subject bonds. As this exchange reveals, Prospero and Caliban’s current  relation  was  founded  on  seduction,  even  if  it  is  sustained  by  physical  force. The  two  men  agree  on  the  general  outline  of  the  story—mutual  service  turned  to  tyranny and  slavery—but  each  blames  the  other  for  betraying the initial bond. Caliban charges that Prospero has forced him  into servitude, but the very language in which he describes their meet- ing fuses sexual and geopolitical conquest in a single erotic terrain:

This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee, And showed thee all the qualities o’th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile— Cursed be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’th’ island.                                                                                  (1.2.331–44)

62 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Stephen Orgel has argued that Caliban’s protest registers the distinction  between his own inherited title to the island and Prospero’s self-created  power, and later readers have found in Caliban’s speech a challenge to  the force and fraud that establish colonial rule.�� Yet the story that Cali- ban tells is not of simple conquest but of mutual fondness, with Pros- pero’s  caresses  and  instruction  encouraging  Caliban’s  eager  requital.  While  it  is  unclear  how  sincere  Prospero’s  own  gestures  of  kindness  were, Caliban makes evident the voluntary nature of his initial subordi- nation, with the subjective pronoun of his self-curse emphasizing that  he was agent rather than object of that decision. Caliban’s explicitly po- litical  description  of  their current  relation  as  king  and  subject  syntac- tically  situates  his  own  loss  of  political  sovereignty as  a  consequence  of an erotic attachment expressed in voluntary service—a choice later  echoed not only in his own intoxicated subservience to Stephano (2.2)  but also in Ariel’s anxious inquiry “Do you love me, Master?” (4.1.48)  and in Miranda and Ferdinand’s mutual promises of servitude (3.1). As  each of these encounters suggest, hierarchies founded on consent and  desire may be no more beneficent than those that originate in conquest  or  violence;  indeed,  voluntary  servitude  may  prove  even  more  perni- cious  in  that  it  lends  a  veneer  of  legitimacy  to  unjust  orders  of  rule.  Consequently, the play warns, even the consensual subordination that  James I envisioned may leave subjects cursing themselves.   The definition of Caliban’s relationship to Prospero remains blurred  throughout  The Tempest,  and  will  be  echoed  in  the  more  explicitly  romantic  relations  to  follow,  emphasizing  the  unstable  nature  of  the  sovereignty  that  Prospero  claims.  Caliban  here  describes  himself  as  Prospero’s  “subject,”  a  political  relationship  that  could  imply  varying  degrees of domination, and he will later classify his bond to Prospero  as  that  of  “man”—which  can  mean  vassal,  manservant,  or  suitor—to  master,  a  relation  of  contractual  servitude,  not  unconditional  slavery  (2.2.180).��  And  Prospero’s  repeated  descriptions  of  Caliban  as  his  “slave”  hardly  solve  the  problem,  for as  the  early  English  translations  of  the  Latin  word  for  slave  (servus)  suggests,  the  terms  “servant”  and  “slave”  were  often  used  interchangeably  in  Renaissance  England,  and  the  precise  distinction  between  them  is  hard  to  pinpoint. The  defini- tions offered by the Oxford English Dictionary only underline their simi- larity at this time; a servant is “one who is under obligation to work for 

�� Ibid., 37. �� Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed., s.v. “man.”

Melissa E. Sanchez 63

the  benefit  of  a  superior,  and  to  obey  his  or  her  commands,”  while  a  slave is “one who submits in a servile manner to the authority or dicta- tion of another or others; a submissive or devoted servant.”�� This philo- logical  indeterminacy,  reflected  in  the  interchangeability  of  the  terms  “subject,”  “servant,”  and  “slave”  throughout  The Tempest,  emphasizes  the  difficulty of  finding  a  precise  account  of  the  origins  and  extent  of  authority,  whether political, domestic, or erotic. Instead, the play reg- isters the possibility that authority can be defined only insofar as it is  resisted.   In  response  to  Caliban’s  condemnation  of  the  methods  by  which  Prospero acquired and maintains his dominance over the island, Pros- pero casts Caliban himself as a potential tyrant who, as James I might  put it, serves only his own appetite. While the dispute between Caliban  and  Prospero  over  the  nature  of  Prospero’s  rule  and  Caliban’s  subju- gation  has  received  much  critical  commentary,  the  extent  to  which  it  centers on contemporary erotic ideologies that saw rape as an analogue  for political tyranny not just an isolated sexual threat or a metaphor for  colonial acquisition has received little comment. In Prospero’s account,  Caliban’s  loss  of  personal  sovereignty  is  a  direct  result  of  his  attempt  to “violate / The honour of my child” (1.2.344–48). Previous critics are  correct  in  pointing  out  that  Prospero  manipulates  the  event  to  justify  his  own  brutality.  But  read  in  the  context  of  domestic  debates  about  tyranny rather than that of imperial conquest, Caliban’s response also  underscores the centrality of eros to political debate:

O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else This isle with Calibans.                                                         (1.2.348–50)

Here, Caliban gleefully mingles political and sexual triumph in a fan- tasy of not a single violation but an enduring possession of Miranda’s  body  that  will  augment  his  hereditary  claim  to  the  island.��  The  age-

�� Ibid.,  s.v.  “servant”  and  “slave.”  “Slave”  did  not  carry  racial  connotations  until  the  late seventeenth century.

�� Critics have often read this exchange in the context of a history of racism that shame- lessly exploits the pretext of protecting the fairer sex to justify extraordinary acts of dis- crimination and brutality; such arguments offer an important reminder of the extent to  which the mythical equation of women with fragile, white, desexualized civility may be  manipulated  for  political  and  ideological  ends.  Loomba  and  Hall  are  particularly  per- suasive  here;  (Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama,  150–56;  and  Things of Darkness,  142–44).  Richard  Strier’s reading of the play locates Caliban’s guilt in the context of the colonial  situation and the salutary anxiety it produces (“‘I am Power’: Normal and Magical Poli-

64 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

old association of rape with tyranny, prominent in such earlier Shake- spearean works as Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, is crucial to  understanding the significance of Caliban’s utterance in the context of  a play obsessed with the connection between sexual and political con- sent. Because Caliban’s rape fantasy offers Miranda no opportunity for  choice, the union he imagines would be one of domestic tyranny, which  was  most  typically  understood  by contemporaries  as  a  state  in  which  the sovereign acts for his own good rather than that of his subjects. Cali- ban’s aspiration to remake the island in his own image, filled with “little  Calibans,” implies as much. Similarly, in his conspiracy with Stephano  to  murder  Prospero  and  abduct  Miranda, Caliban  advises  “that  most  deeply to consider is / The beauty of his daughter” who, he promises  his new master, “will become thy bed, I warrant, / And bring thee forth  brave brood” (3.2.96–97, 103–4). Caliban’s objectification of Miranda re- peatedly  casts  doubt  on  his  ability  to  rule  any  more  moderately  than  Prospero, for he, like Prospero, dismisses her right to consent to the use  of her body, the ultimate form of personal property.�� Prospero behaves  equally tyrannically, and the similarity of these two contestants for the  island and its lone female inhabitant bespeaks the difficulty of finding  a single point of political or moral identification in the play. Prospero  “wins” the political struggle not because he is ontologically, culturally,  or morally superior to Caliban but because he finally acknowledges that  legitimacy requires some form of consent, however deluded. In allowing  Miranda to choose her own husband, a right that Caliban would deny  Miranda and that Alonso has denied his own daughter Claribel, Pros- pero  attempts  to  distinguish  himself  from  those  he  would  overcome.  Nonetheless, the circumstances of Miranda’s “choice” blur the lines of  the very free will they appear to celebrate. For Prospero’s psychologi- cal  manipulation  of  his  daughter  suggests  that  internal  affect,  which 

tics in The Tempest,” in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed.  Derek Hirst and Richard Strier [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999]).

�� See Jean Bodin’s distinctions between king and tyrant in his Six Bookes of a Common- weale, which achieved widespread dissemination in England after Richard Knolles trans- lated it in 1606: “the one of them accounteth his owne goods to be the goods of his people;  the other reckoneth not only the goods, but even the bodies of his subjects also to be his  owne . . . the one of them favoureth (savoureth) the honour of modest matrons, and other  mens  wives;  the  other  triumpheth  in  their  shame  and  dishonour  .  .  .  the  one  reposeth  his estate and fealtie in their love towards him; the other in their feare” (The Six Bookes of a Commonweale [London,  1606],  212).  Rebecca  Bushnell  offers  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  association  of  sexual  indulgence  with  political  tyranny  in  Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990),  1–36.

Melissa E. Sanchez 65

should be the most certain index of true, autonomous consent, may rest  on delusions that transform it into an instrument of coercion.   Miranda’s  intrusion  into  the  political  debate  between  the  two  men,  like  her  initial  questioning  of  Prospero’s  violence  against  the  sailors,  establishes  her  as  an  independent  agent  who  voluntarily  accepts  her  subordinate domestic and political status.�� Disturbingly punitive as it  is, her denial of Caliban’s claim to her body is as important to asserting  her  status  as  a  subject  as  is  her  later  self-betrothal  to  Ferdinand;  both  suggest that even if her actions accord with Prospero’s plans, she is not  an inert vessel for them. Here, she asserts her own independence from  Prospero and, by analogy, the rights of the subject as distinct from those  of the ruler:

Abhorrèd slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race— Though thou didst learn—had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved more than a prison.                                                                                     (1.2.350–61)

Miranda’s  outburst  contradicts  the  innocence  and  passivity  imagined  not only by the men who surround her but also by many editors as well;  as Orgel notes, these lines were attributed to Prospero by commentators  such  as  John  Dryden,  Lewis  Theobald,  and  George  Lyman  Kittredge  and continue to be reassigned in modern productions of the play.�� A  more subtle silencing of Miranda occurs in readings of The Tempest that  turn  her  rage  into  a  response  against  the  threat  that  Caliban  poses  to  Prospero’s  rule  rather  than  to  a  potential  violation  of  her own  bodily  boundaries.�� While she may indeed approve the unjust hierarchies that 

�� Slights  also  notes  Miranda’s  assertion  of  independence  but  focuses  on  its  ethical  significance rather than its implications for Stuart debate (“Rape and the Romanticization  of Shakespeare’s Miranda,” 365).

�� Orgel, ed., The Tempest, 17. �� Joan Pong Linton, for instance, characterizes Miranda’s response to the rape as that 

of “outraged humanism.” Linton’s reading, while offering an important reminder of the  violence of cultural imperialism and Miranda’s participation in it, nonetheless diminishes 

66 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

both benefit and constrain her, Miranda repeatedly uses the first person  singular  to  emphasize  her  identity apart  from  Prospero  by describing  her earlier relationship to Caliban without any reference to Prospero’s  presence at all. And, while her description of Caliban as a “slave” might  be  taken  to  signify  his  literal  enslavement  to  herself  and  Prospero,  it  may just as well be used as a conventional term of contempt. Her use  of passive voice further excludes Prospero from her reaction to the rape  attempt, for it obscures the agent of Caliban’s subsequent incarceration,  making  the  punishment  a  result  of  harsh,  inexorable  law  rather  than  sovereign  will.  As  her  earlier  response  to  her  father’s  command  that  they visit Caliban (“‘Tis a villain, sir, / I do not love to look on” [1.2.308– 9]) indicates, Miranda sees her relation to Caliban in primarily affective  rather than imperial terms. And in asserting her right not to be sexually  subjugated,  she  likewise  asserts  the  significance  of  her  consent  to  the  interwoven domestic and political orders of the play.   Miranda  further  demonstrates  her  independence  from  Prospero  in  her response to Ferdinand. The larger narrative situation makes it dif- ficult to separate Prospero’s will from Miranda’s—though she believes  that she is rebelling, she is in fact acting out a predetermined role in her  father’s plot, for Prospero’s restoration hinges on her marriage. None- theless,  Miranda’s  spontaneous  attraction  leaves  no  doubt  that  she  is  entering into this union willingly—so willingly, in fact, that she begins  to  echo  Ariel  and  Caliban’s  defiance  of  Prospero’s  authority.  Despite  her father’s earlier description of Ferdinand’s father as “an enemy / To  me  inveterate”  (1.2.121–22)  and  a  key  player  in  Antonio’s  seizure  of  Milan and his current charge that Ferdinand himself is an usurper and  imposter, Miranda is adamant in her affection. Miranda’s switch of alle- giance from the father who has nurtured and educated her to “the third  man that e’er I saw, the first / That e’er I sighed for” suggests that her  bond to Prospero may have been as tenuous as those of Ariel or Cali- ban. Moreover, her persistent defense of Ferdinand despite Prospero’s  repeated interdictions indicates that she has similar potential for insur- rection. We in the audience may be privy to Prospero’s real intentions,  but Miranda takes his orders at face value and disobeys anyway.

the danger of sexual violence posed by Stephano if not by Caliban (The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism  [Cambridge:  Cambridge  University Press, 1983], 155).

Melissa E. Sanchez 67

F R O M   D I D O   T O   L Av I N I A

The Tempest’s  frequent  allusions  to virgil’s  Aeneid  have  typically  been  understood  in  the  contexts  of  either  Renaissance  discovery  narratives  that pictured Dido and Aeneas as early colonizers or Stuart propaganda  that employed Augustan imagery, but the play’s uneasy incorporation  of virgil’s epic equally insists on both the necessity and the danger of  individual desire in narratives of political legitimacy.�0 For Prospero’s  own manipulation of his daughter’s marriage for political ends would  seem to liken him not only to Caliban but also to his enemies, Alonso  and Antonio, who have achieved their rule by violence. Miranda’s con- sent  to  the  marriage  on  which  Prospero’s  political  restoration  hinges  is thus essential to establishing the legitimacy of that return to power.  Accordingly, in order to distinguish his own imperial plot from those  of  his  rivals,  Prospero  combines  Aeneas’s  illicit  affair  with  Dido  and  his  political  union  with  Lavinia  into  the  loving  courtship  of  Miranda  and Ferdinand. The difficulty of such a project, however, emerges in the  sailor’s argument over the status of “widow Dido,” which embeds the  Aeneid ’s abandoned queen in The Tempest as a figure of the disruption  that woman and the erotic bonds they represent pose to “rational,” lin- ear narratives of political conquest:

Gonzalo:  Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we        put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the        King’s fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis. Sebastian:  ’Twas a sweet marriage, and we prosper well in our        return.

�0 Graham Parry and Howard Erskine-Hill both discuss the seventeenth-century asso- ciation  between  Stuart  England  and  Augustan  Rome;  see  Parry, The Golden Age restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981);  and Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983).  For  analyses  of  the  conjunction  of  racial  and  gendered  anxieties  in  the  “widow  Dido”  exchange,  see  Marjorie  Raley,  “Claribel’s  Husband,”  in  Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance,  ed.  Joyce  Green  MacDonald  (London:  Associated  University  Press,  1997),  95–119; and Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 68–86. Jeremy Brotton reviews the importance of the  Aeneid to the old-world context of The Tempest (“‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contest- ing Colonialism in The Tempest,” in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin  Orkin  [London:  Routledge,  1998],  23–42).  Most  recently,  David  Scott  Wilson-Okamura  has  argued  that  Dido  is  significant  to  English  imperial  discourse  because  early  settlers  of  virginia  took  Carthage  not  Rome  as  a  model  of  colonial  success  (“virgilian  Models  of  Colonization  in  Shakespeare’s Tempest,”  ELH  70  [2003]:  709–37),  while  Deanne Wil- liams has examined the resonances of the Dido legend with representations of Elizabeth  in Tudor and Stuart England (“Dido, Queen of England,” ELH 73 [2006]: 31–59).

68 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Adrian:  Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to         their queen. Gonzalo:  Not since widow Dido’s time. Antonio:  Widow? A pox o’that. How came that widow in?         Widow Dido! Sebastian:  What if he had said ‘widower Aeneas’ too? Good lord,        how you take it! Adrian:  ‘Widow Dido’ said you? You make me study of that.        She was of Carthage, not of Tunis. Gonzalo:  This Tunis, sir, was Carthage. Adrian:  Carthage? Gonzalo:  I assure you, Carthage.                                                                                               (2.1.68–84)

The sailors’ confusion over Dido’s marital status responds to the incom- mensurability of the competing versions of her story readily available  in the Renaissance. The Dido described in the histories of Timaeus and  Justin is a paradigm of heroic, even masculine, chastity and leadership;  after the murder of her husband, Dido left Phoenicia and founded Car- thage  but,  refusing  the  Libyan  king  Iarbus’s  attempt  to  force  her  into  a  second  marriage,  ended  her  life.  virgil  incorporates  this  version  of  Dido’s story but adds to it a divinely inspired passion for Aeneas that  transforms the queen’s funeral pyre from an emblem of chaste loyalty  to one of frenzied lust.��   Like Dido’s devotion to Aeneas, which was inspired by the gods but  sustained by the queen’s own will, the basis of Miranda’s devotion to  Ferdinand is ambivalent; Prospero has set the conditions for her attrac- tion but, in order to establish her sincerity, forbids her to see her chosen  suitor.  What  Miranda  believes  to  be  subversive  desire  crucially  dis- tinguishes  consensual  alliances  from  tyrannous  conquests,  but  it  also  threatens  to  disrupt  the  order  her  marriage will  legitimate. The  play’s  emphasis on the dual role of female will thus accentuates the primacy  of  the  passions  to  the  establishment  and  stability  of  authority.  More-

�� For discussions of the Dido legend, see Mary Louise Lord, “Dido as an Example of  Chastity: The Influence of Example Literature,” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969): 22–44,  216–32; Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluations: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragi- comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Ralph Hexter, “Sidonian Dido,” in  Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992);  Marilynn  Desmond,  Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval “Aeneid”  (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and James Davidson, “Domesticating Dido:  History and Historicity,” in A Woman Scorn’d: Responses to the Dido Myth, ed. Michael Bur- den (London: Faber and Faber, 1998).

Melissa E. Sanchez 69

over, Dido’s incursion into The Tempest brings to the play the palimpsest  of  the  Carthaginian  legend  barely  removed  from  Claribel’s  new Tuni- sian home and so emblematizes the danger that eros poses to political  projects; just as the historical Dido refused the imperative of male appe- tite  and  the virgilian  Dido  exposed  the  sacrificial  foundations  of  em- pire, so Miranda exhibits an unruly passion that has the potential to im- pair Prospero’s designs. For if Miranda’s marriage is successful, it will  be a legitimate version of Dido’s unhappy relationship with Aeneas and  of Claribel’s with the King of Tunis, a manifestation of the loving politi- cal union described by James I.�� Such an ending hinges on Miranda’s  simultaneous conformity to and defiance of Prospero’s commands: she  must merge the historical Dido’s sacrifice to patriarchal rule—exempli- fied  in  the  chaste  Claribel—with  the virgilian  Dido’s  challenge  to  the  same—embodied by the promiscuous Sycorax.   As  the  Milanese  sailors’  confusion  indicates,  however,  disengaging  submission  and  rebellion  is  not  easy,  for  Prospero’s  romance  ending  depends upon the same passion that it restrains. The militant chastity of  the historical Dido, admirable as it was, also suggests an autonomy that  may be as dangerous as the virgilian Dido’s overwhelming passion, for  the  repeated  epithet  of  “widow”  registers  Dido’s  independence  from  both father and husband. Much as Miranda supersedes Claribel, Ferdi- nand, and Caliban in The Tempest, the Latin princess Lavinia displaces  Dido  as  the  conduit  for  Aeneas’s  imperium sine fine  in  virgil’s  epic.  While  Prospero  imagines  Miranda  in  the  same  instrumental  position  as  Lavinia—and  as  Claribel—Miranda’s  actions  refuse  this  role  even  as  they coincide with  her  father’s  scheme.  Miranda’s  gift  of  herself  to  the man that her father has already chosen does not itself disrupt Pros- pero’s  plans  and  is  in  fact  crucial  to  them.  But  her  revolt  against  his  command  that  she  shun  Ferdinand,  like  her  independent  rejection  of  Caliban,  indicates  that  the  same  erotic  autonomy  that  permits  her  ro- mance ending also threatens it, for if “too light winning / Make[s] the  prize light,” Ferdinand may discard Miranda as readily as Aeneas aban- doned  Dido,  turning  Prospero’s  romance  into  a  tragedy  (1.2.452–53).  Miranda must therefore fit the structural role not of the abandoned Car- thaginian  queen  but  of  the  Latin  princess  Lavinia,  destined  to  marry  Aeneas  and  become  the  mother  of  the  Roman  race.  However,  unlike 

�� Orgel makes a similar argument in his introduction to The Tempest (The Tempest, 42).  See  also  Berger’s  discussion  of  the  connections  between  Miranda’s  and  Claribel’s  mar- riages (“Miraculous Harp,” 272).

70 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Claribel, whose helpless acquiescence to a dynastic match recalls that  of the virgilian Lavinia, Miranda emulates the Lavinia of the medieval  Roman d’Eneas,  which  was  adapted  by  William  Caxton  in  the  late  fif- teenth century and remained popular throughout the Renaissance.�� In  this  romance  version  of  the  famous  epic,  Lavinia  and  Eneas  not  only  get to see each other before the wedding but even exchange clandestine  letters and wistful sighs like traditional courtly lovers. Such a revision  of  Aeneas’s  epic  conquest  understands  Lavinia  as  a  consenting  agent  rather than a passive object of male exchange and adds to the Aeneid ’s  cold dynastic union the flames of mutual desire. At the same time, how- ever, the Roman d’Eneas implies Lavinia’s defiance in choosing a lover  from the enemy camp, a choice that disturbingly situates her as a second  Helen,  or an  Ovidian  “altera  Dido”—a  role  that  Miranda  dangerously  courts in pursuing the son and heir of the man who helped to depose  her father.��   In The Tempest, the epic sacrifice of Dido and manipulation of Lavinia  coalesce in the figure of Claribel, whose situation demonstrates that en- forced  obedience  may  be  as  problematic  for  ruler  and  state  as  is  un- checked sedition. While Gonzalo recalls the historical queen who was  a  “paragon”  (presumably of  virtue), Claribel  differs  from  this  Dido  as  a  result  of  her  wedded  state;  rather  than  resisting  the  African  King,  Claribel has married him, albeit at her father’s command.�� Alonso and  Prospero  are  both  willing  to  exploit  their daughters  for  political  uses,  but  whereas  Alonso  reveals  his  tyrannous  potential  by  compelling  Claribel  to  marry  against  her  will,  Prospero  demonstrates  his  legiti- macy  by  treating  Miranda’s  passion  and  duty  as  one.  Alonso’s  regret  for the marriage into which he has forced Claribel confirms the ill con- sequences of disregarding his subjects’ rights in his quest for political  success:

�� For a  discussion  of  the  medieval  Eneas  that  was  handed  down  to  the  Renaissance  through Caxton, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century through Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

�� According  to  the  Heroides’s  Dido,  Aeneas  does  not  depart  for an  imperium sine fine  (empire  without  end)  that  he  will  never  enjoy  but  hastens  to  another  romantic  liaison:  “scilicet  alter amor  tibi  restat  et  altera  Dido;  quamque  iterum  fallas  altera  danda  fides”  (clearly, a second love waits in reserve for you, a second Dido; another promise will be  given, you will deceive a second time) (Ovid, Heroides and Amores, ed. and trans. Grant  Showerman,  rev.  and  ed.  G.  P.  Goold,  Loeb  Classical  Library  41  [Cambridge:  Harvard  University Press, 1986, 1996], Heroides 7.17–18; my translation).

�� As Berger points out, Africa has lost a Sycorax and gained a Claribel (“Miraculous  Harp,” 267).

Melissa E. Sanchez 71

. . . Would I had never Married my daughter there, for coming thence My son is lost, and, in my rate, she too, Who is so far from Italy removed I ne’er again shall see her.                                                               (2.1.105–9)

Alonso’s  lament  for  Claribel  also  addresses  the  power  of  the  Tuni- sian  king  over  Naples,  a  political  strength  expressed  through  sexual  demand.��  The  trading  of  Claribel  signifies  Alonso’s  lack  of  political  dominance, one made especially legible with the loss of Ferdinand, his  only son and heir. The two events—Claribel’s marriage and Ferdinand’s  death—are causally linked in Alonso’s mind: the first is a sign of poor  judgment,  the  second,  its  consequence.  Moreover,  as  the  play’s  audi- ence knows (even if Alonso does not), Claribel’s marriage has also in- directly placed him in Prospero’s power. The comparable trajectory of  Alonso’s and Caliban’s situations constructs a narrative logic in which  sexual force both exposes and undoes the potential tyrant.   Sebastian’s condemnation of his brother aligns Claribel with the rest  of Alonso’s court to amplify the potential consequences of both sexual  force and political tyranny:

Sebastian:  Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,     That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,     But rather lose her to an African,     Where she, at least, is banished from your eye,     Who hath cause to wet the grief on’t. Alonso:  Prithee, peace.  Sebastian:  You were kneeled to and importuned otherwise     By all of us, and the fair soul herself     Weighed between loathness and obedience at     Which end o’th’ beam should bow. We have lost your        son,     I fear, for ever. Milan and Naples have     More widows in them of this business’ making     Than we bring men to comfort them.     The fault’s your own.                                                                                            (2.1.121–33)

�� Claribel has been married not only to a person but to a culture whose threat to male  European domination is figured in the loss of all of Alonso’s heirs in one African voyage.  Hulme usefully notes Alonso’s confusion of cultural with geographical distance: Naples  is  closer  to  Tunis  than  to  Milan,  so  the  removal  that  Alonso  laments  is  not  so  much  a  physical as an ethnic, religious, and racial one (Colonial Encounters, 112).

72 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Sebastian’s  depiction  of  the  courtiers  helplessly  kneeling  before  their  sovereign on behalf of Claribel reiterates the structural congruence be- tween femininity and political subjecthood that we have seen elsewhere  in The Tempest. In this scenario Claribel is an emblem of Alonso’s tyranny;  ignoring  her  desires  and  those  of  his  subjects,  he  has  “banished”  her  from Italy against the will of the populace. Yet Claribel’s own consent,  however coerced, was vital to the marriage negotiations. Sebastian’s as- sessment  of  her own  conflicted  “loathness  and  obedience”  admits  the  possibility  of  her  defiance,  which  would  have  defended  her  country.  Insofar as it takes up the humanist belief that resistance may sometimes  be  a  sign  of  loyalty  (one  memorably  embodied  in  Kent’s  behavior  in  King Lear),  Sebastian’s  intimation  of  Claribel’s  insufficient  opposition  may  just  as  easily  be  directed  against  the  Neapolitan  court. The  pun  on “lose” and “loose” suggests not only Claribel’s absence but her con- version  into  something  of  a  whore—the  proverbial  “loose”  woman— as  a  result  of  a  passivity  that  permits  her  to  be  transferred  from  one  man  to  another. While  there  is  clearly  a  misogynistic  subtext  in  such  a  claim,  the  connection  that  Sebastian  draws  between  Claribel’s  inter- ests and the court’s allows his pun also to evoke Renaissance anxieties  about  the  pliability  of  male  courtiers;  as  their  common  root  suggests,  the  courtier  and  the  courtesan  may  not  be  entirely  unlike. The  ambi- guity of Claribel’s agency is nicely inscribed in the ambivalent voice of  the verb “to wet,” which can mean either “to suffuse with tears” or “to  bedew with weeping.”�� It is unclear whether Claribel’s presence would  cause Alonso himself to weep—an active suffering on his part signify- ing  repentance  and  sympathy—or  if  she  would  drench  him  with  her  own crying—an impassiveness suggesting that her pleas cannot pene- trate  her  sovereign  and  father.  And  Sebastian’s  final  reference  to  the  production of widows—a group of women beyond paternal or marital  rule—recalls not only the difficulty of separating the mournful and the  merry  widows  Dido,  but  also  the  hazard  that  the  conjunction  of  eros  and politics represented by Claribel’s marriage poses to the relations it  mediates.

A   C O N T R A C T   O F   T R U E   L O v E

Miranda’s betrothal to Ferdinand offers both an idealized vision of the  mutual service missing in other of the play’s relations and an intricate 

�� OED, s.v. “wet.”

Melissa E. Sanchez 73

scene of erotic and political sedition. The lovers’ idyllic romance is shad- owed  by  its  echoes  of  the  events  in  act  2,  the  debates  over  the  sexual  status  of  Dido  and  Claribel  and  Caliban’s  alliance with  Stephano  and  Trinculo,  both  of  which  convey  the  ambiguous  relation  of  individual  passion  to  public  order.  In  opposition  to  the  clear  line  that  previous  characters  have  attempted  to  draw  between  volition  and  submission,  Ferdinand and Miranda adopt the romance language of mutual erotic  bondage  that  defies  any  clear  narrative  of  mastery  and  subjugation.��  Yet  Ferdinand’s  very  first  vow  of  service  to  Miranda  emphasizes  the  difficulty of such an equation:

The very instant that I saw you did My heart fly to your service, there resides To make me slave to it, and for your sake Am I this patient log-man.                                                       (3.1.64–67)

The  confusing  grammar  of  the  above  compliment  emphasizes  the  inanity  of  Ferdinand’s  all-too-conventional  words.  Ferdinand  claims  that  his  heart  has  flown  to  Miranda’s  “service,”  which  grammatically  must  be  the  “there”  where  the  heart  is  currently  residing.  But,  again,  Ferdinand  must  also  grammatically  be  the  “slave”  to  Miranda’s  “ser- vice,”  an  illogical  redundancy  that  emphasizes  the  emptiness  of  such  hackneyed tropes. The more mundane conclusion that it is because of  Miranda that he is doing manual labor seems to suggest that the work  itself is largely divorced from the transcendent passion that he claims  occasioned  it.  But  in  this  final  clause  of  Ferdinand’s  declaration,  the  slavery  he  so  romantically  proclaims  becomes  uncomfortably  literal,  degrading a prince to the status of a laborer. Here, the eagerness with  which Ferdinand’s heart “flew” into his enslavement and the “patience”  with which he bears it emphasize that love may very well be the best  source  of  obedience  and  service. Unlike  Caliban,  whose  first  words— “There’s  wood  enough  within”  (1.2.314)—indicate  his  bitter  disillu- sionment with his formerly beloved master (and mistress?), Ferdinand,  under the influence of eros, gladly accepts his job.   It  is,  significantly,  Miranda  who  makes  the  transition  from  courtly  compliment to conjugal reality. Although she appears to be relinquish- ing power, Miranda situates herself as the source of the bond, so that the 

�� Hamilton also notes the centrality of Miranda and Ferdinand’s marriage to the play’s  politics,  but  sees  it  as  replacing  hierarchy  with  reciprocity,  rather  than  establishing  an  unstable dialectic between them (Virgil and “The Tempest,” 94–103).

74 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

feminized  subject  has  the  creative  power  so  stridently  proclaimed  by  defenders of absolutism.�� When, Juliet-like, she proposes to the son of  her father’s enemy, Miranda suggests that Ferdinand himself has little  choice in the matter:

I am your wife if you will marry me; If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant Whether you will or no.                                                         (3.1.83–86)

This  description  of  marriage  gives  consent  a  foundational  role  absent  from romantic metaphors of erotic thralldom or patriarchal theories of  natural hierarchy. Miranda introduces two sets of oppositions: wife and  maid,  fellow  and  servant. The  distinction  between  being  Ferdinand’s  wife/fellow and being his maid/servant depicts forms of hierarchy dif- ferentiated only by their degree of mutuality; while she will inevitably  be subordinate to Ferdinand, if he withholds love he will make Miranda  into  a  servant.  She  likewise  complicates  the  chivalric  trope  of  erotic  supplication in which men are active lovers, and women inanimate ob- jects of adoration. Earlier in the scene, the connection between romance  ideals  and  patriarchal  privilege was  established  in  Ferdinand’s  narra- tive  of  his  rather  sketchy  history of  sexual  conquest,  in  which  “bond- age”  to  his  previous  loves  repeatedly  perished  with  the  discovery  of  their human imperfections. Even if he believes that Miranda is “so per- fect and so peerless” that his passion for her will endure, Miranda rec- ognizes that without a contract such a vow cannot prevent Ferdinand  from abandoning her as easily as he has “full many a lady” in the past  (3.1.39–48).   Nonetheless, Miranda’s freely offered servitude parallels Ferdinand’s  own and thereby establishes their relationship as one of love and reci- procity  that  contrasts  with  Alonso’s  match  of  Claribel  to  the Tunisian  king  or  Caliban’s  attempts  to  bind  Miranda  to  himself  or  Stephano.  Miranda dispenses with the mediatory powers of father or king as she  secures her pact with Ferdinand in an almost seamless cognation of the  courtly and the contractual:

Ferdinand:  My mistress, dearest,     And I thus humble ever.

�� Paul  Christianson  argues  that  while  James  was  not  an  absolutist  per  se,  his  vision  of the English constitution stressed the creative initiative of kings in establishing law and  custom (“Royal and Parliamentary voices on the Ancient Constitution c. 1604–21,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, 71–95).

Melissa E. Sanchez 75

    He kneels Miranda:  My husband then? Ferdinand:  Ay, with a heart as willing     As bondage e’er of freedom. Here’s my hand. Ferdinand:  And mine, with my heart in’t.                                                                                (3.1.85–90)

Because Miranda is herself under the impression that her father forbids  her  even  to  tell  Ferdinand  her  name,  her  betrothal  to  the  Neapolitan  prince  emphasizes  both  the  earnestness  of  her  unwitting  conformity  to Prospero’s plans and her potential for revolting against his explicit  orders. The  play  avoids  frankly  confronting  the  ambivalent  nature  of  erotic  or  political  choice  by  situating  Prospero  as  an  approving  voy- eur of his daughter’s tryst, but the extent to which Miranda directs her  betrothal  to  Ferdinand  is  nonetheless  quite  prominent,  suggesting  an  inversion  of  the  male-female,  and  by  analogy,  sovereign-subject  rela- tion. This  reversal  is  made visible  by  Ferdinand’s  kneeling  before  her  as she dictates the terms of their betrothal, so that chivalric compliment  is subordinate to legal contract. Yet Miranda tempers the purely formal  aspect of their union by emphasizing that it is not a mere treaty that will  “free” his desire from the “bondage” under which her father has placed  him but a mutual exchange that will bind hearts as well as hands and  supplement service with affection.   In celebrating this betrothal in a masque, the most royalist of theatri- cal genres, Prospero both reasserts his own creative authority and dis- plays  its  benevolence.�0  The  masque  allows  him  to  rewrite  the  lovers’  disobedience as a sign of virtue and to explain the implications of their  actions  in  retrospect.  By  situating  himself  as  author  of  a  narrative  in  which  faithful  devotion  produces  abundant  joy,  Prospero  stresses  his  role in forging this union, if only by opposing it:

All thy vexations Were but trials of thy love, and thou Hast strangely stood the test.                                                 (4.1.5–7)

�0 Discussions  of  the  politics  of  the  early  Stuart  masque  are  offered  by  Roy  Strong,  Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theatre of Power (Boston: Houghton, 1973);  Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and  David Lindley, Court Masques: Jacobean and Carolinian Entertainments, 1605–1640 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995). Recently, Kevin Pask has shown the resonance between  the aesthetic, political, and sexual dimensions of the masques in The Tempest (“Caliban’s  Masque,” ELH 70 [2003]: 739–56).

76 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

Prospero adopts the romance language of erotic trial to explain his brief  enslavement  of  Ferdinand,  but  his  attempt  to  assert  mastery over  the  play’s  narrative  also  inadvertently  sanctions  resistance  to  sovereign  will  as  a  sign  of  loyalty  to  a  higher  principle.  Authentic  love  is  more  powerful  than  rote  obedience,  for  it  allows  lovers  to  endure  torments  that would otherwise defeat them. The passion that legitimates political  hierarchies may thus also prompt subjects to resist: as Prospero warns  Ferdinand,  “The  strongest  oaths  are  straw  /  To  th’  fire  i’  the  blood”  (4.1.52–53).   The masque itself, like Miranda and Ferdinand’s vows, merges con- tract  and  love  but  also  suggests  the  struggle  involved  in  sustaining  a  balance between them. Prospero replaces the typical Jacobean masque  setting of a locus amoenus with a foisoning plantation that requires ap- parently endless labor to keep it from rot and excess. The masque also  conspicuously banishes venus—whose description as “Mars’s hot min- ion” links excessive passion and bellicose behavior—and her “waspish- headed son” Cupid. Along with its emphasis on agriculture, this exclu- sion attempts to obscure the intense passion on which legitimate union  depends. It is notable that Ariel, who experiences the earth as a place  of  endless  toil,  should  play  Ceres  in  delivering  Prospero’s  vision  of  a  blessing that is not entirely unmixed:

Earth’s increase, foison plenty, Barns and garners never empty, vines with clust’ring bunches growing, Plants with goodly burden bowing; Spring come to you at the farthest, In the very end of harvest! Scarcity and want shall shun you; Ceres’ blessing so is on you.                                                  (4.1.110–17)

The increase and foison that Ceres promises will keep scarcity and want,  frustration  and  desire,  at  bay  in  Miranda’s  marriage  with  Ferdinand.  But, as the series of eye-rhymes implies, sustaining this seductive view  of  coterminous  spring  and  autumn  will  entail  tremendous  effort. The  fruits  of  the  relentlessly  pregnant  soil  must  be  harvested,  processed,  and  stored  in  the  barns  and  garners,  and  the  inexorable  agricultural  process  produces  an  exhaustion  pictured  in  the  plants  bowing  under  their “goodly burden.” This winterless world will come about not as an  inevitable result of spontaneous love but through the very human and  social invention of contract; their marriage, as Iris twice reminds us, is 

Melissa E. Sanchez 77

a  “contract  of  true  love”  (4.1.84,  132).  As  in  Ferdinand  and  Miranda’s  betrothal, hearts and hands, passion and compromise must accompany  one another in order to create a union that is both legitimate and stable.  Without sincere consent and affection, their marriage will be cold and  sterile, but this passion requires diligent restraint.   The  abrupt  and  clumsy  termination  of  the  revels—the  very  mo- ment when illusion and reality should merge—further accentuates the  struggle  required  to  sustain  the  masque’s  seductive vision.  It  is  Pros- pero’s  recollection  of  Caliban’s  conspiracy  that  leads  the  masquers  to  “heavily vanish” “to a strange hollow and confused noise” (4.1.138.5, 4). Cali- ban’s  plot  does  not  disrupt  the  masque  because  it  is  a  real  threat  but  because it reminds Prospero that none of his subjects—Ariel, Caliban,  Miranda—obey him without coercion. The erotic contract that the per- formance has celebrated hinges on independent choice, which in both  Caliban’s and Miranda’s cases has led to active dissent and the election  of a new sovereign. The guilt and terror inspired by Ariel’s antimasque  of the Harpies in the previous scene may be a more accurate depiction of  Prospero’s habit of rule, and that it immediately follows Miranda and  Ferdinand’s clandestine betrothal indicates Prospero’s ultimate lack of  trust in the romance narrative he purports to embrace.   The  repetition  of  the  word  “contract”  in  a  masque  first  performed  in 1611 must also have called to mind the previous year’s debates over  the  Great  Contract,  many  of  which  were  printed  and  made  available  to  an  increasingly  literate  public.  According  to  the  terms  of  the  Great  Contract, a plan encouraged by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, in hopes  of  reducing  the  Crown’s  debts,  the  king  would  relinquish  his  feudal  rights to the hotly contested privileges of wardship and purveyance in  exchange for a fixed annuity of £200,000.�� The contract stumbled over  both  practical  and  constitutional  issues:  Salisbury  and  the  Commons  disagreed about the type and extent of taxation that would be used to  raise  the  money;  James  was  reluctant  to  barter  away  what  he  saw  as  privileges crucial to sustaining the royal prerogative; and a number of  MPs feared that Parliament would become obsolete if the king did not  need to request supplies periodically. Both king and Commons used the  language of love to describe their positions, and as The Tempest shows  us, this erotic vocabulary registers conflicting notions about the relation 

�� For a  detailed  account  of  the  negotiations  over  the  contract,  see  Alan  G.  R.  Smith,  “Crown, Parliament and the Great Contract of 1610,” in The English Commonwealth, 1547– 1640: Essays in Politics and Society Presented to Joel Hurstfield,  ed.  Peter  Clark,  Alan  G.  R.  Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), 111–27.

78 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

between royal prerogative and popular consent. In June of 1610, Salis- bury assured MPs that James was bargaining in good faith and “mea- suring your affections to him by his own to you”; when the Commons  continued to haggle a month later, he warned them that “I have heard  my master say that unless you marry his virgin, you shall have her no  longer in your hands.”�� By November, the contract had been effectively  defeated, and Samuel Lewknor employed similarly erotic language to  describe the Commons’ frustrated desire for political participation: I did ever fear that concerning this contract for tenures we did but please our- selves with a vain imagination, as Pygmalion pleased himself with his image or  Narcissus with his shadow, and the event hath now proved that the fear was not  altogether causeless, for let us consider how we now stand. We have not only  lost that which with so great charge and so much expense of time we so eagerly  pursued,  but  it  is  commonly  bruited  abroad  that  we  ourselves  were  only  the  authors of the breach. I remember the last session this contract was by a great  and honorable lord termed the fair Helen that we all courted. It is true we all  did court her, but not as men court wanton ladies with shew, only to pass away  the time withal. But we became suitors with a firm purpose and resolution to  wed  her,  might  we  have  enjoyed  her at  the  price  she was  once  offered  us,  no  fear, no jealousy, no distrust could, I think, have caused us to forsake her. But  if our forwardness of desiring her hath caused her to be set at higher rate than  our abilities could possibly reach unto, may we be justly blamed if we thought  her parents were not willing to part from so dear a child, or may we justly be  condemned  for  rejecting  that  which  certainly  by  all  means  willingly  was  not  rejected?��

Lewknor bemoans the failure of the contract in terms that suggest that  the  Commons’  dream  of  a  truly  reciprocal  relation  between  king  and  parliament  was  mere  narcissistic  fantasy,  a  projection  of  parliament’s  own  image  of  government  that  had  little  to  do  with  James’s  or  Salis- bury’s real intentions. By casting the negotiations over the contract as  a  legitimate  courtship  rather  than  a  forceful  rape  of  Helen,  Lewknor,  as Shakespeare would the following year, replaces the conquest of epic  with the mutual consent requisite to romance. In this formulation, the  nation is a bride over whom suitor (parliament) and parents (king) bar- gain;  unfortunately  the  tyrannical  parents  are  determined  to  thwart  true love by unnaturally keeping possession of their daughter.   The  ongoing  negotiations  required  by  erotic  narratives  of  rule  are 

�� Salisbury, 11 June 1610, and 16 July 1610, in Proceedings in Parliament, ed. Foster, 2:138  and 1:141.

�� Speech of Samuel Lewknor, 16 November 1610, in ibid., 2:400–401.

Melissa E. Sanchez 79

perhaps  most  clearly  manifested  by  our  final  vision  of  Miranda  and  Ferdinand.  As  a  conclusive  demonstration  of  his  magic,  Prospero  re- veals to the newly repentant Alonso that his son has not only survived  but also fallen in love with Miranda. When Prospero “discovers” them  to his former enemies, the lovers are playing chess, a visible metaphor  of both their active and mutual engagement in the political game that is  their marriage and the potential that such equity may foment discord.��  Specifically,  Miranda’s  emphasis  on  her  own  choice  to  play  along  at  what should be the play’s most magical moment again asserts the value  of voluntary consent to orders of authority:

Miranda:  Sweet lord, you play me false. Ferdinand:  No, my dearest love, I would not for the world. Miranda:  Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,     And I would call it fair play.                                                                                     (5.1.172–75)

Miranda’s  address  to  Ferdinand  as  her  “sweet  lord”  conveys  an  affec- tionate  submission  that  her  subsequent  accusation  undermines.  Much  as her marriage established the grounds for creating union, her assent  to Ferdinand’s actions here gives Miranda the last word. Immediately  dismissing his denial that he would swindle his “dearest love,” Miranda  nonetheless  sanctions  Ferdinand’s  behavior  and  makes  it  conditional  on her cooperation. Miranda’s willingness to be cheated implies a right  to counsel and approve her husband’s private and public actions, par- ticularly  those  that  may  benefit  him  at  her expense. This  emphasis  on  the  complicity  of  subjects  in  sovereign  decisions  again  underscores  a  complex politics of seduction that must “wrangle” for the upper hand  and suggests the continuity of force and suasion—and the prospect that  Miranda,  like  Claribel,  Ariel,  and  Caliban  can  consent  and  therefore  might refuse.

P I E R C I N G   P R AY E R S

Prospero’s  epilogue  locates  political  order  in  the  sovereign’s  recogni- tion  that  love  and  fear,  acquiescence  and  surrender,  are  more  closely  connected  than  suggested  by  the  Machiavellian  oppositions  that  The Tempest  rejects.  Because  he  has  relinquished  control  of  his  subjects 

�� In a recent essay, William Poole discusses in detail the sexual and political connota- tions of chess in the Renaissance (“False Play: Shakespeare and Chess,” Shakespeare Quar- terly 55 [2004]: 50–70).

80 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

through  physical  force,  Prospero  must  now  depend  on  his  ability  to  create the proper affective response in his audience—the epilogue fol- lows his words to the Neapolitan courtiers whom he has promised to  regale with his stories (“Please you draw near” [5.1.318]). He begins by  admitting his powerless thralldom, for the success of his plea depends  on the audience’s own willingness to be seduced. Prospero replaces the  staff he has broken and book he has drowned with appeals for approval  and  identification,  which  may  be  more  potent  forms  of  control  than  any  “rough  magic”  in  that  they  rest  on  the  subjects’  consent  (5.1.50– 57).�� Like Prospero’s fictional subjects, we in the audience feel the soft  strokes of his overture, recognizing in uncanny fashion that we are now  the objects of an ambivalent seduction:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now ’tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell, But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. 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. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.                                                   (5.1.319–38)

�� Critics have differed as to the significance of Prospero’s renunciation of power and  plea for mercy. Barbara Mowat argues that the Ovidian speech with which Prospero gives  up his powers would have been instantly recognizable as a setpiece that places the play’s  magic within the realm of poetry and fancy (“Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52  [2001]:  28).  Berger  and  Orgel  see  the  epilogue  as  a  final  assertion  of  mastery  over  the  play (“Miraculous Harp,” 276–79, and The Tempest, 51–53), while Margarita de Grazia sees  Prospero’s desire for forgiveness as a sign of his reintegration into human society (“The Tempest: Gratuitous Movement or Action without Kibes and Pinches,” Shakespeare Studies  14 [1981]: 261).

Melissa E. Sanchez 81

As in our structural alignment with Miranda at the play’s opening and  with  the  courtiers  at  the  play’s  conclusion,  we  are  again  placed  in  the  role of an audience whose attentiveness to Prospero is a sign of properly  human compassion and mercy. Even his earlier insistence that “Every  third thought shall be my grave” equates the conclusion of the play with  the conclusion of his life, so that his plea for applause is also a plea for  retroactive approval of actions in which we have had no say, even if all  was done in care of us (5.1.311).�� Ariel, of course, took his freedom as  soon as he could get it, but the tricksy spirit is, in the end, not an appro- priate analogue to the audience—as he acknowledges in act 5, he lacks  the human feelings that make living with others desirable. We are, in- deed, more akin to Caliban or Miranda in our instinctual need for social  bonds. The absence of applause would demonstrate not only the failure  of the narrative of restored order that we have just witnessed but also  our own merciless refusal of compassion to a supplicant. Prospero thus  simultaneously gives us power and takes it away. We play, as it were,  Dido to his Aeneas: we are in the position both to relieve suffering and  to become objects of conquest.   In  admitting  his  own  weakness,  Prospero  reinforces  the  imperative  voice of the epilogue, which demands only that we enjoy the pleasures  that  he  offers.  However,  as  did  Gonzalo’s  own  premature  and  naïve  epilogue,  Prospero’s  prayer  conspicuously  neglects  the  actual  events  of the play (5.1.206–13). Most obviously, his pardoning of the deceiver  was equivocal if not vindictive, and his project to please dovetails a bit  too neatly with his quest for political power. Moreover, the seemingly  disparate acts of enforcement and enchantment are set in conspicuous  parallel to one another, suggesting their equal and inseparable roles in  sustaining authority. The passive voice with which Prospero describes  himself in the first few lines of the epilogue grows increasingly active  and  threatening  as  his  speech  reaches  its  conclusion.  Even  if  he  is  a  supplicant,  his  prayer  will  pierce  and  assault  a  feminized  mercy—as- sociated  with  the  audience  to whom  he  appeals—a  mercy  that  might  unfairly  withhold  favors.  The  slippery  nature  of  the  epilogue’s  voice  and metaphors concludes the play with a reminder that indulgence and  assault, seduction and force, are not opposites but simply different ex- pressions of the claim to erotic, and hence political, agency.

�� According  to  Suetonius’s  account,  which  was  widely available  in  the  Renaissance,  Augustus made a similar request on his deathbed: “Since well I’ve played my part, all clap  your hands / And from the stage dismiss me with applause” (Suetonius, ed. and trans. J. C.  Rolfe, 2 vols. [London: W. Heinemann, 1914], 1:280).

82 Seduction and Service in The Tempest

  The optimistic note of forgiveness and liberty that closes The Tempest  stresses that when subjects assent to their own domination that agency  gives them a certain amount of power over the sovereign and therefore  opens the way for the same rebellion that such desire should preclude.  By speaking directly to the audience, Prospero disrupts the illusion we  have been witnessing and abruptly reminds us that this has only been a  play, that the character before us is an actor, not a duke. But he also indi- cates how hard it is to tell the difference by reiterating the conflation of  statecraft and stagecraft invoked by James I, who advised Prince Henry  that “it is a trew old saying, That a King is as one set on a stage, whose  smallest  actions  and  gestures,  all  the  people  gazingly  doe  behold.”��  Given this dependence of power on affection and trust, a ruler’s project  must be to please; otherwise, he or she risks exile or deposal. The literal  need  of  acting  companies  to  satisfy  paying  audiences  shades  into  the  equally real need for rulers to sustain the cooperation of their subjects.  Both require a degree of self-deception not unlike that of love, the suc- cess of which is as much in the hands of the subject as the sovereign. As  both theatrical and political subjects, our status is not only that of inert  audience but also that of active players whose participation both shapes  and endangers Prospero’s narrative of rule.

The university of Pennsylvania

�� James I, Basilicon Doron, 49.