essay for （Michael Smith）

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“Which first was mine own king”: Caliban and the Politics of Service

and Education in The Tempest

by Tom Lindsay

We can only fully understand Shakespeare’s Caliban if we consider his career as a ser- vant and student in Prospero’s “cell.” Critics have long acknowledged that this career is key to Caliban’s character in the play’s current moment, but they typically say little about the mundane ways that service and education were supposed to influence early modern young people. As training- grounds for life, early modern households and schoolrooms were supposed to equip servants and students with a hierarchical world- view and flexible capacities for political action. Caliban speaks and acts like someone who absorbed such training in Prospero’s “cell” and who subsequently became disillu- sioned by it. Reading Caliban in this way illuminates aspects of his fraught and criti- cally contested history with Prospero and Miranda as well as the play’s relationship with early modern cultures of service and education more generally.

OVER the course of The Tempest, Caliban adopts a range of differ-ent postures, some of which are deeply incompatible with one another. Sometimes, he is generous and freedom- loving—this is the Caliban who remembers sharing the entire island with Prospero and who can sing of “Freedom” soon after offering to lick Stephano’s feet.1 Sometimes, he is empowered and politically assertive—this is the Caliban who claims the island and schemes to have Prospero murdered (1.2.332 and 3.2.58–59). Sometimes, he is obsequious and servile—this is the Caliban who begs Stephano to be his god (1.2.372–75 and 146). Sometimes, he spews harsh, visceral curses—this is the Caliban who

1 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, 3rd series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 1.2.337–39, 2.2.181, and 2.2.149. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text by act, scene, and line number.

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wishes a “wicked dew” down on Prospero and Miranda (1.2.322). Some- times, he uses savvy and persuasive rhetoric—this is the Caliban who convinces Stephano to go along with his rebellion (3.2.87–103). And sometimes, he speaks arrestingly beautiful poetry—this is the Caliban who assures Stephano and Trinculo that “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.135–36).

Caliban’s variety as a character has helped twentieth- and twenty- first- century critics make a similar variety of arguments about him and about The Tempest. In older readings, Caliban is key to the play’s allegory. He represents evil, incivility, or wild nature in contrast to Miranda’s spiritual purity or Prospero’s humane virtue.2 For critics who read the play alongside the Jacobean court masque, Caliban is a creature of anti- masque or ribald comedy and thus a foil for the spectacular and stately forms Prospero uses to realize his own kingly projects on the island.3 For critics investigating the play’s relationship with early modern po- litical discourse, Caliban enacts a form of tyrannical absolutism when he tries to rape Miranda, while in meta- theatrical readings of the play his rebelliousness evokes real- world tension between actors and play- wrights on the early modern London stage.4 In feminist readings of the play, Caliban participates in a patriarchal power struggle with Prospero that marginalizes Miranda, or his rapine links him into an allegorical schema of morality that obfuscates Prospero’s coercive authority over both him and Miranda.5 Similarly, for postcolonial and new historicist critics, Caliban variously symbolizes the experience of colonized sub-

2 Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 109–10; Frank Kermode, introduc- tion, in The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, 2nd series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1961), xxxvii and liii; and E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938), 54 and 80.

3 R. C. Fulton, Shakespeare and the Masque (New York: Garland, 1988), 153; Ernest B. Gilman, “‘All eyes’: Prospero’s Inverted Masque,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 221–22; Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Los Ange- les: University of California Press, 1975), 47; and Kevin Pask, “Caliban’s Masque,” English Literary History 70 (2003): 750–51.

4 For the former reading, see Melissa E. Sanchez, “Seduction and Service in The Tem- pest,” Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 63–64; for the latter, see Douglas Bruster, “Local Tem- pest: Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse,” in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick M. Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 266–71.

5 Jessica Slights, “Rape and the Romanticization of Shakespeare’s Miranda,” Studies in English Literature 41 (2001): 372; Lorie Jerrell Leninger, “The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare’s Tempest,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Chicago: Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 1980), 289–91.

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jects, or exemplifies early modern attitudes toward the Irish or the in- digenous cultures of the Americas.6 And for critics reading the play in the context of early modern humanism, he registers English cultural anxieties about the nature of humanity, the merits of the English lan- guage, or the goals of humanist pedagogy.7

Caliban’s heterogeneity as a character, and thus his ability to energize such a range of arguments about the play, derives from his experiences as Prospero and Miranda’s servant and student. This claim is not espe- cially novel, but it stands to be substantially deepened and expanded. Critics interested in the play’s relationship with early modern colonial- ism and humanism in particular have long made service and educa- tion central to their readings of Caliban and his place in the The Tem- pest. However, these readings attend very little to the fact that service and education operated as forms of social and professional training for young people in early modern England.8 Instead, they often turn ser- vice and education into functions of the larger cultural discourses with which they are concerned. Thus, postcolonial critics see service and education as tools of Prospero’s colonial dominance over Caliban and the island, while critics who read the play in the context of early mod- ern humanism read Prospero and Caliban’s educational relationship as a staging ground for some of humanism’s theoretical concerns, such

6 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish’: The Discur- sive Con- Texts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 206–7; Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cul- tural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1985), 60–63; Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Cul- ture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 32–35; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 143–46; and Stephen Orgel, “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1985), 44. For an overview of anticolonial appropriations and postcolonial criticism of The Tempest, see Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially their chapters on “The American School” (118–43) and “Colonial Metaphors” (144–71).

7 Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144–48; Hiewon Shin, “Single Parenting, Homeschooling: Prospero, Caliban, Miranda,” Studies in English Literature 48 (2008): 375; and Goran Stanivukovic, “The Tem- pest and the Discontents of Humanism,” Philological Quarterly 85 (2006): 102–3.

8 The one major exception to this critical trend is Shin. Her reading of The Tempest cor- roborates my own, but her historical lens is narrower. She focuses primarily on Caliban as a servant and on early modern attitudes toward corporeal punishment and mixed-gender education (“Single Parenting, Homeschooling,” 378–81).

400 Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education

as the relationship between language and civility, or the ideal mode of governance.9 But service and education were not merely functions of early modern colonialism or humanist theory. They were also practical, mundane systems of growing, learning, and training. And as Shake- speare imagines the play’s backstory, Caliban was a young person who grew up in those systems. Indeed, as much as The Tempest explores colo- nialist discourse and humanist values, it is also, in a more basic way, a drama about the workings of Prospero’s household and schoolroom, his “cell.”10

Caliban entered that “cell” as an apolitical subject committed to a non- hierarchical and egalitarian worldview, and he changed profoundly as a result of his experiences there. Once a member he encountered an en- vironment structured like an early modern aristocratic household and humanist schoolroom. In Shakespeare’s England, these spaces were de- signed to inculcate in their subjects a hierarchal worldview and a flex- ible set of capacities for political action—submissiveness and assertive- ness in particular. In The Tempest, Caliban repeatedly speaks and acts like someone who has both absorbed and been disillusioned by his training in Prospero’s “cell.” Over and over, through both words and deeds, he displays extreme forms of political submissiveness and asser- tiveness while also demonstrating a lingering commitment to his old, apolitical view of the world. Often, he does all three things at once. Such moments demystify major cruxes in Caliban’s character, clarify parts of his critically contested history with Prospero and Miranda, especially his attempted rape, and illuminate the play’s relationship with early modern cultures of service and education.

THE CANNIBAL AND THE DUKE

In several ways, Shakespeare signals that Caliban lived as an egalitar- ian and apolitical subject on the island before Prospero and Miranda ar- rived there. The most glaring of these signals is his name, an anagram of “cannibal.” The term “cannibal” names the indigenous Brazilian culture that Michel de Montaigne describes in his essay, “Of cannibals,” which is the source of Gonzalo’s fantasy vision for the island in scene 2.1. As

9 Brown, “‘This thing of darkness,’” 56–58; Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse,” 24–27; and Stanivukovic, “The Tempest and the Discontents of Humanism,” 93.

10 On the island as a household, see Frances E. Dolan, “The Subordinate(’s) Plot: Petty Treason and Forms of Domestic Rebellion,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 321–22; and Shin, “Single Parenting, Homeschooling,” 374–75.

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Montaigne imagines them, the Brazilian cannibals live in an idyllic state of egalitarian and communal anarchy. Their homeland is temperate and abundantly fertile, and it furnishes its inhabitants with everything they need to survive.11 Accordingly, they lack the systems that cultures typi- cally use to control and apportion natural resources, systems that create various forms of social, economic, and political disparity. Specifically, Montaigne’s cannibals don’t have government, money, personal prop- erty, inheritance, trade, labor, servitude, or agriculture.12 Instead of de- veloping and living within such systems, Montaigne’s cannibals live in “repose and happiness,” and their days are full of pleasurable outdoor activities such as dancing, hunting, and gathering.13 Theirs is a world devoid of hierarchy and politics.

Before Prospero and Miranda arrived on the island, Caliban re- sembled Montaigne’s cannibals in more than just name. While not uni- formly verdant, like Montaigne’s Brazil, the island in The Tempest is rich in sources of food and fresh water, and like Montaigne’s cannibals, Cali- ban used to live freely off his homeland’s abundant natural resources. When speaking to Stephano and Trinculo in scene 2.2, he details the abundance of those resources and describes his skill at accessing them. Specifically, he says he knows where the island’s “best springs” and “fertile” areas are (2.2.157 and 145); where to find “crabs,” “berries,” and “clust’ring filberts” (2.2.164, 157, and 168); how to snare “marmosets” (2.2.167); and where to gather “pignuts” and “Young scamels” (2.2.165 and 169). Here, Caliban hints that his life on the island used to look much like the life of Montaigne’s cannibals, at least in practical terms. Like his namesakes, he had an intimate and sustaining relationship with his bountiful homeland, and he lived there while engaging in physical outdoor activities.14

More importantly, though, Caliban also resembled Montaigne’s can- nibals in his worldview and in his attitude toward other people. In scene

11 Montaigne, “Of cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 150–59. Montaigne writes that the cannibals live “in a country with a very pleasant and temperate climate,” that “they have a great abundance of fish and flesh,” and that they have “no riches or poverty” and “no partitions” (153).

12 Ibid., 153. 13 Ibid., 158 and 154. 14 This reading of Caliban’s cannibal- like nature goes against a postcolonial tradition

that often sees him more in line with colonialist stereotypes of drunken, lascivious, and treacherous New World natives. For instance, in “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” Orgel focuses on Caliban’s propensity for drunkenness and violence, claiming that he is nothing like the cannibals of Montaigne’s essay (“Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” 54).

402 Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education

1.2, he points out that he shared the entire island with Prospero and Miranda when they first arrived, and he takes special care to say that he showed them “all the qualities o’th’isle,” including “The fresh springs” and the “brine pits,” the “barren place” and the “fertile” (1.2.338–39). Caliban makes a similar offer to share the island when he encounters Stephano and Trinculo, but he qualifies it by saying he’ll only show them the island’s “fertile” areas (2.1.145). The reasons for this qualifi- cation become clear later in the play. When Trinculo angers him, Cali- ban threatens to withhold the location of the island’s “quick freshes” so that Trinculo will have to drink “nought but brine” (3.2.64–65). With Stephano and Trinculo, then, Caliban guards parts of the island and uses his intimacy with that place as a weapon. He might have behaved similarly when Prospero and Miranda first arrived, but he did not. In- stead, he provided Prospero with total access to the island and its re- sources, and he did so without fear of political disadvantage and usur- pation. Like his cannibal namesakes, then, Caliban did more than live an outdoorsy lifestyle while subsisting on the natural resources of his home. When he met other people, he accommodated his formerly soli- tary lifestyle and utilized his island’s resources according to an apoliti- cal ethic of egalitarian sharing.

Shakespeare’s myriad hints about Caliban’s old worldview point up the extent to which the islander and Prospero began their early rela- tionship with wildly different expectations and values. While Caliban behaved like an egalitarian and apolitical cannibal out of Montaigne’s essay, Prospero acted like an early modern aristocratic patriarch. Such men frequently took young people into their homes, either as foster children, wards, apprentices, or servants.15 Ideally, they were supposed to provide their young charges with food, clothing, shelter, and moral supervision. They were also supposed to provide education, profes- sional training, or employment, depending on the child’s status in the household.16 Prospero acted in these ways when he showed Caliban af-

15 Ilana Krausman Ben- Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 170–75; Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Ser- vants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 14–16; Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 68–73; Linda A. Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” in The History of the European Family, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 207–9.

16 On the responsibilities of masters toward their young charges, see Ben- Amos, Ado- lescence and Youth, 103–4; Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 198–203; and Shin, “Single Parenting, Homeschooling,” 378–79.

Tom Lindsay 403

fection, fed him, and began educating him. Indeed, he admits to treat- ing Caliban like a young servant when he says to the islander, “I have used thee” with “humane care” and “lodged thee / In mine own cell” (1.2.346–48). The words “use” and “lodge” might refer to general treat- ment or hospitality, but Prospero is a self- identified “prince of power” who ran a substantial household in Milan and who currently depends on Caliban for domestic services, such as building fires (1.2.54 and 312– 13).17 Out of his mouth, “used” and “lodged” are politically and pro- fessionally charged. They suggest the hierarchical and transactional relationship of household service wherein masters employ, or “use,” servants for work and “lodge” them in their homes in order to control, care for, and compensate them.18 As we’ll see, Caliban’s experiences as Prospero’s servant and student fundamentally altered his worldview and made him the character we experience during the play.

PROSPERO’S CELL

Prospero offers two historical models for understanding the experi- ences Caliban had as a member of the island’s “cell” household. In scene 1.2, he calls himself Miranda’s “schoolmaster” and says he’s been a better instructor to her than other “princes” and “tutors” could have been (1.2.172–74). Here, Prospero casts his “cell” as an early modern grammar schoolroom, with himself as the presiding “schoolmaster.” In grammar schools, schoolmasters taught oratory, rhetoric, and clas- sical languages—especially Latin—to prepare young men for positions of service and authority in the ranks of the bureaucratized Tudor and Stuart states.19 Not surprisingly, Prospero also casts his “cell” as an aris-

17 Prospero implies that he ran a large household full of domestic servants when he says that Miranda used to have more than five female attendants (1.2.46–48).

18 The definitions of “use” and “lodge” current in the Renaissance accommodate both usages for each word. See OED Online, s.v. “use, v.” (Oxford University Press, 2013), http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/Entry/220636?rskey=dAoWXI&result= 2&isAdvanced=false (accessed December 10, 2013). See also OED Online, s.v. “lodge, v.” (Oxford University Press, 2013), http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas. edu/view/Entry /109703?rskey=nLbQMb&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed December 10, 2013).

19 On the vocational and socially ascendant aims of early modern grammar school edu- cation, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 44–72; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth- Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 93–115; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rheto- ric, Discipline, and Punish (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 16–19; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth- Century Europe (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986),

404 Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education

tocratic household. In such environments, “princes” and other aristo- cratic patriarchs employed servants to do domestic work, hired “tutors” to educate their children, and sometimes acted as tutors themselves, overseeing household academies of varying sizes.20 In some cases, aris- tocratic in- house education encompassed a household’s servants as well.21 For domestic servants, work in an aristocratic house was ideally supposed to be a vital step toward marriage and adult livelihood.22 For the children of such households, education was ideally supposed to be an important source of training for membership in England’s ruling elite.23

Accordingly, grammar schools and aristocratic households were nec- essarily politicizing environments where young people had to develop flexible capacities for political self- understanding and action. Specifi- cally, they had to learn to be both assertive and submissive. For young domestic servants, this necessity derived from two social ideals that governed their growth into adulthood.24 On one hand, early modern English culture expected the children of laboring families to marry and form independent households by their mid- twenties. Domestic service helped many young people meet this expectation by enabling them to earn money, gain experience in household husbandry, generate social ties, and meet potential spouses.25 On the other hand, the dictates of

xiii– xvi; Walter J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 108–9; and Paul Sullivan, “Playing the Lord: Tudor Vulgaria and the Rehearsal of Ambition,” English Literary History 75 (2008): 189–90. Usefully, Richard Halpern contrasts those aims with the reality of early modern pedagogical practice. Spe- cifically, he observes that early modern grammar schools focused so exclusively on rheto- ric that they didn’t always function particularly well as sources of real- world vocational training (The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture, and the Geneal- ogy of Capital [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991], 29).

20 On domestic servants in early modern aristocratic households, see Ben- Amos, Ado- lescence and Youth, 150–58; Burnett, Masters and Servants, 79–89; and Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 207–9. On aristocratic households as educational environments, see Sara Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Women as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially her chapter on “Household Academies in Venice and London” (53–94).

21 For instance, Sir Thomas More ran an expansive household academy at Chelsea that included his biological children, his wards, his consecutive spouses, and his servants (Ross, Birth of Feminism, 69).

22 Ben- Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 215–22; and Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 207–9.

23 Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 202–5. 24 For a particularly concise overview of the two competing expectations governing

youthful domestic service in early modern England, see Ben- Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 236–42.

25 Ibid., 226–35.

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English patriarchy demanded that young people submit to their par- ents and masters.26 Of course, young people could not live up to both of these social ideals at once. In order to meet the former, they had to flout the latter—that is, by leaving their parents’ homes or by leaving bad masters for better ones. As they negotiated their society’s conflict- ing expectations, then, they experienced a form of youthful employ- ment and training in which deference and empowerment went hand in hand. Inserting themselves into positions of servitude required asser- tiveness and autonomy. Then, once in service, their willing subordina- tion became the mechanism through which they moved toward adult independence.

As a way to reconcile or mediate between these two expectations, masters were supposed to act according to an ethic of paternalistic solicitude and edifying care.27 Specifically, masters were supposed to treat their servants just as Prospero first treated Caliban. Acting in this way, in loco parentis, meant overseeing a young servant with the same kind of practical and moral authority that parents wielded over their own children. It meant providing for a young person’s basic physical and spiritual needs. It meant avoiding corporeal punishment or using such punishment only rarely and with the young person’s moral or spiritual interests at heart.28 Most importantly, it meant employing a young servant in practically edifying work that was skill- and gender- appropriate. Ideally, a master who acted according to this ethic ensured that his young charges could be away from home and transitioning into adulthood while also living, learning, and training under the supervi- sion and care of a parent- like authority figure.

In grammar schools and aristocratic households, students faced a different and more intense version of the conflicting expectations that governed the careers of young servants.29 In such environments, stu-

26 Ben- Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 238–40; and Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 191–98.

27 Ben- Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 103–4; Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 207–10; and Shin, “Single Parenting, Homeschooling,” 378–89.

28 Pollock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 198–99. 29 Critics and historians have long debated whether grammar school education was

liberating and empowering or conservative and oppressive. In A Culture of Teaching, Bush- nell shows how this debate reflects the complexity and heterogeneity of early modern humanism, the larger theoretical and pedagogical culture that governed grammar school and aristocratic education. English humanism, she argues, consisted of an unstable and heterogeneous mixture of theories and practices. It wasn’t just liberating or oppressive but both (10–22). For a similarly balanced take on the goals and outcomes of early modern humanist education, see Colin Burrow, “Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture,” in Shake-

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dents trained for professions in the state bureaucracy or for member- ship in England’s ruling aristocracy. Accordingly, early modern educa- tors formulated their pedagogical programs as mechanisms for upward socio- political mobility or rule.30 They also insisted that good students possess a measure of curiosity and intellectual assertiveness in the class- room.31 However, these same educators also insisted that schoolrooms function according to a strict hierarchy, with the schoolmaster or tutor at the top, advanced students in the middle, and neophyte students at the bottom.32 They naturalized and reinforced this hierarchy by align- ing the instructor with the monarch and God.33 And in practice, many instructors enacted their authority with corporeal violence.34 Thus, stu- dents were supposed to train for upward socio- political mobility and to be intellectually assertive in rigidly hierarchical environments that subordinated them, sometimes violently, to the power of their instruc- tors.35 Such environments demanded that students be submissive and deferential but also made those postures a means toward intellectual achievement, independence, and political power.

Many early modern educators reconciled these two conflicting goals through the principle of imitation. Students were supposed to imitate their instructors’ behaviors, intellectual capabilities, and facility with language and rhetoric.36 As a principle for education, imitation reified classroom hierarchy while also making it climbable. It turned instruc- tors into authoritative models that students necessarily had to follow

speare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15.

30 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Charlottesville, VA: Univer- sity of Virginia Press, 1967), 134; William Kempe, The Education of Children in Learning, in Four Tudor Books on English, ed. Robert D. Pepper (Gainsville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), 215; and Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free- Born Youth,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. Craig W. Kallendorf (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5.

31 Ascham, Schoolmaster, 30–31; and Juan Luis Vives, On Education (Totowa, NJ: Row- man and Littlefield, 1971), 100 and 116.

32 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (New York: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1962), 17; Desiderius Erasmus, Upon the Right Method of Instruction, in Desi- derius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Method of Education, ed. William Harrison Wood- ward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 173; and Vives, On Education, 10.

33 Ascham, Schoolmaster, 35 and 91; Kempe, Education of Children, 225 and 237–38; and Vergerio, “Character and Studies,” 25.

34 Bushnell, Culture of Teaching, 24–25; and Ong, “Latin Language Study,” 111–13. 35 Ascham, Schoolmaster, 88 and 99; Kempe, Education of Children, 213 and 237; and

Vives, On Education, 107 and 139. 36 Though, as Enterline notes, imitation was not a universally accepted practice

amongst early modern Latin teachers (Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 33–34).

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and respect. At the same time, it gave students a sanctioned way to master and display the kinds of knowledge, skills, and power that made their instructors authoritative in the first place.37 In grammar schools, for instance, students were supposed to imitate their instructors’ Latin during classroom exercises. These exercises often involved public or theatrical elements, such as memorizing, reciting, or acting out pas- sages from classical texts. Students were also supposed to imitate the practical authority their instructors wielded over the classroom. For in- stance, as tutors and classroom monitors, advanced students had to in- struct, judge, and punish their classmates just as their schoolmasters instructed, judged, and punished them. In these ways, the principle of imitation created an environment in which empowerment and submis- sion reinforced one another. Students were encouraged to submit to, desire, identify with, and enact the intellectual and institutional power of the very authority figure that subordinated, taught, policed, and as- sessed them.

The interplay between empowerment and subordination that struc- tured early modern classroom dynamics shows up in the materials that educators used to teach language. In addition to classical sources, some grammar school students used short sentences called vulgaria to prac- tice translating, parsing, memorizing, and speaking Latin. Vulgaria dealt with issues of real- world interest, and many of them expressed overtly political sentiments, either about the local classroom environment or about civic and national politics. As they worked with these sentences, students often had to ventriloquize deference and assertiveness, the very postures that their education encouraged them to learn more gen- erally.38 Amongst other collections, Robert Whittinton’s 1520 Vulgaria is especially notable for the frequency and the depth with which it in- vites students to articulate subordination and power simultaneously. For example, one of Whittinton’s sentences reads like a truant student who anticipates being confronted by his schoolmaster. It says, “These or like he will lay again to my charge: this is a counterfeit excuse what wit- ness hast thou?”39 Similarly, in another set of sentences, the imaginary speaker is a student who has pulled a prank on his schoolmaster and

37 For discussions of this paradox, see Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 33–61; and Sullivan, “Playing the Lord,” 183–88.

38 Sullivan, “Playing the Lord,” 185–86. 39 Whittinton, Vulgaria, in The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whit-

tinton, ed. Beatrice White (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1932), 218b. I have modernized the spelling of Whittinton’s sentences.

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been beaten as punishment.40 When memorizing and speaking these sentences, students had to imagine defying their schoolmasters while acknowledging his vigilance, his authority, and his power to punish. As mini- scripts for memorization and public speaking, then, classroom vulgaria enact in conversational language the larger political goals of aristocratic and grammar school education. They encourage students to feel assertive and to admit subordination all at once. Thus, they sound like Caliban, who knows he will be punished by Prospero’s spirits but “must curse” regardless (2.2.4).41

In light of his household’s two historical models, the aristocratic household and grammar schoolroom, Prospero has a mixed record as a master and instructor. As Miranda’s “schoolmaster,” he’s had quite a bit of success. After all, Miranda is his primary student, and he has trained her for power. He intends her to marry Ferdinand, to become queen of Milan and Naples, and to produce heirs who will permanently displace the usurper, Antonio.42 In these ways, Miranda is a key in Pros- pero’s self- serving political plans and also a major beneficiary of those plans. They will enfranchise her in some of the most powerful ways an early modern woman could be enfranchised: through dynastic in- heritance, marriage, and the production of political heirs. Accordingly, Prospero treats Miranda as an object of paternal solicitude, pride, and tutelage. He explains that he’s done everything on the island “in care” of her (1.2.16).43 He calls her his “more braver daughter” and sees her as

40 Ibid., 89. 41 See also William Horman, Vulgaria (Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson, 1975), 43; and

John Stanbridge, Vulgaria, in The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whit- tinton, ed. White. Horman’s collection contains sentences that sound like they might have come from Ariel or Miranda, who sometimes express subservience mixed with a quali- fying measure of resistance and autonomy. For instance, one such sentence reads, “I owe obedience to thee, but no bondage” (43). Many of Stanbridge’s Vulgaria statements sound more like Caliban, who is sometimes fearful and sometimes full of defiance. One reads, “It is evil with us when the master apposes us,” and another, “I may curse the time that ever I came hither” (25 and 29). I have modernized the spelling of Horman’s and Stan- bridge’s sentences.

42 Prospero never says that he thinks of Miranda’s heirs as political tools in his contest with Antonio, but he is excited at the prospect of their arrival. In scene 3.1, he looks on as Ferdinand and Miranda become engaged and says, “Fair encounter / Of two most rare af- fections! Heavens rain grace / On that which breeds between ’em” (3.1.74–76).

43 At the end of the play, Prospero hints that installing Miranda as the queen of Milan and Naples is more important to him than reclaiming Milan for himself. He says that once he is back in Milan and has seen Miranda married, “every third thought shall be [his] grave” (5.1.312). Clearly, Prospero does not plan to revel in his own restoration, except perhaps vicariously, through Miranda and her heirs.

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a teammate in his contest against Alonso and Antonio (1.2.440).44 And, most importantly, he indicates that her education has been particularly rigorous. As her “schoolmaster,” he says he has done her more good than “other princes” back on the mainland, who employ “tutors not so careful” and “have more time / For vainer hours” (1.2.172–74).

Given the solicitude and pedagogical rigor Prospero has shown Miranda, it is not surprising that she should manifest the combina- tion of submissiveness and assertiveness that early modern education sought to inculcate in students.45 She regards her father’s magic with awe and deference, and she is only curious about her personal history when Prospero prompts her to be curious (1.2.1–13 and 22–23). Yet, she also imagines imitating Prospero’s power (1.2.10–12), and when she defies him, she does so by appropriating his linguistic and intellec- tual capabilities. For instance, at the end of scene 1.2, Prospero scolds Miranda for defending Ferdinand. According to him, Ferdinand is in- ferior to other men and not worth his daughter’s care. He says,

Thou think’st there is no more such shapes as he, Having seen but him and Caliban. Foolish wench, To th’ most of men, this is a Caliban, And they to him are angels.

(1.2.479–82)

Cleverly, Miranda responds, “My affections / Are then most humble. I have no ambition / To see a goodlier man” (1.2.482–84). In her rejoin- der, Miranda co- opts the hierarchical language and ideas that Prospero employs against her and deftly turns them back on him. If, she insists, Ferdinand occupies a lowly position in the hierarchy of male worth, her “affections” for him are appropriate because they occupy a similarly lowly position in the hierarchy of human emotion—they are “humble.” In these ways, Miranda acts like a good early modern student. She de-

44 At this moment, Ferdinand is mourning Alonso, Antonio, and Antonio’s son, a char- acter who doesn’t get mentioned anywhere else in the play. He calls Antonio’s son “brave,” and in response, Prospero boasts to himself and the audience, “The Duke of Milan / And his more braver daughter could control thee / If now ’twere fit to do’t” (1.2.439–41).

45 Slights offers a lengthy reading of Miranda’s character that corroborates many of the claims I will make about her here (“Rape and the Romanticization of Shakespeare’s Miranda,” 366–71). Where feminist and postcolonial readings tend to see Miranda as a mere pawn in Prospero’s political schemes, Slights’s reading of her character ultimately suggests that critics might do better to see her alongside the likes of Helena and Portia, the “Learned Heroines” that Lisa Jardine discusses in “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 1–18.

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fers to her schoolmaster, imagines taking on his power, and defies him by imitating his own facility with language and rhetoric.

In contrast, where Prospero used education to train Miranda for po- litical rule, he and Miranda educated Caliban simply to make him articu- late and well- behaved. 46 In scene 1.2, Miranda says that Caliban used to “gabble / Like a thing most brutish” and claims that she “endowed [his] purposes / With words that made them known” (1.2.357–59). Miranda claims that, despite his ability to learn, Caliban’s “vile race . . . had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with” (1.2.359–61). Likewise, Prospero says Caliban is a “born devil” on “whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188–89). In these moments, Prospero and Miranda speak as educators who tried to make their student “good,” as Miranda says, and failed because of his supposedly innate immorality. By admitting their lack of success, they invoke a humanistic ideal at the heart of English pedagogical culture. According to that ideal, good lan- guage education makes someone civil, which is to say inculcated in a

46 Before turning from Miranda to Caliban, we might also glance at the way Pros- pero treats his future son- in- law, Ferdinand, and his other servant, Ariel. Just as Pros- pero trained Miranda for royal marriage and rule, so too does he intend Ferdinand’s brief career as a log- carrier to prepare him to marry Miranda. To ensure that Ferdinand doesn’t take Miranda too lightly as a “prize,” he delays their attachment by giving Ferdi- nand menial domestic work to do (1.2.453). Prospero’s strategy is authoritarian and co- ercive but also recognizable as an act of paternalistic solicitude. It forces Ferdinand to go through an experience that both delayed and facilitated the marriages of many early modern young people: domestic service. Young people used service as a way to prepare for marriage, and many found their future spouses in the households where they worked (Ben- Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 226–35; Goody, Development of the Family, 188; and Pol- lock, “Parent- Child Relations,” 207–9). As Prospero’s servant, Ferdinand undergoes these experiences quickly and with poetic flair. While carrying logs, he literally enacts Petrar- chan metaphors that link romantic love with labor, service, and heroic effort. And in scene 3.1, he and Miranda avow their mutual devotion using these very metaphors. Thus, Ferdi- nand plays out in romantic miniature the real and prolonged period of domestic labor that enabled the marriages of early modern young people. And though forced on him, his service career gives him and Miranda an opportunity to demonstrate and solidify their affections. When it comes to Ariel, Prospero only pays lip service to the ideals of paternal- ism and edification that govern the way he treats Miranda and, to a lesser extent, Ferdi- nand. He expresses affection for Ariel and enjoins the spirit’s service through an act of extreme care: freeing him from the cloven pine (1.2.289–93). He also claims to give Ariel skill- appropriate jobs that are suited to his status as a spirit, such as treading “the ooze of / Of the salt deep” (1.2.252–53). Yet, the only work we see Ariel do on stage includes dress- ing as a nymph, stage- managing spectacles, playing music, and causing havoc among Prospero’s enemies. These might be fun tasks that draw on Ariel’s particular skills, and they are certainly opportunities for dazzling bits of theater, but they are also a far cry from the grand and high- flying work Prospero claims to give his spirit servant. Ultimately, there is no larger goal for Ariel’s service career, and no particular skills or benefits he is gleaning from his work. Instead, Ariel’s primary goal in serving Prospero is simply to get free and return to a state of independence.

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particular English and aristocratic social ethic.47 Tellingly, though, Pros- pero and Miranda’s regrets stop there. They don’t complain that Cali- ban sabotaged his own future as king of the island or ruined his chances at independence. Such would be the complaints of educators who tried to prepare their young charge for power or autonomy. However, Pros- pero and Miranda speak as though eloquence and good behavior were their sole goals for Caliban.

Prospero might intend to leave Caliban on the island, but the nature of Caliban’s service confirms that neither he nor Miranda had anything particularly edifying in mind when they taught and employed the is- lander—that is, beyond eloquence and so- called civility. Prospero ex- plains that he and Miranda need Caliban for menial domestic tasks, but Caliban hates this kind of work (1.2.311–14). He says so when he complains about serving Prospero and identifies specific tasks that he dislikes. These tasks include fetching firewood, washing dishes, and making “dams” for fish (2.2.159 and 176–78). In contrast, there are other kinds of work that Caliban likes and is good at, such as the services he willingly provided to Prospero in the play’s backstory and excit- edly offers to Stephano in the play’s current moment. As we’ve seen, these services are neither menial nor domestic in nature but active and outdoorsy. They include touring the island, hunting animals, gather- ing food, and teaching others to do the same. Thus, the play hints that Prospero and Miranda failed as teachers and as masters. They educated Caliban, but intended their teaching only to make the islander eloquent and well- behaved; they made him a servant but gave him tasks that were neither edifying nor suited to his skills and predilections.48

CALIBAN AS FRUSTRATED STUDENT AND SERVANT

Throughout the play, Caliban speaks and acts like someone who has been frustrated and disillusioned by his career in Prospero’s household

47 Here, Grafton and Jardine’s assessment of early modern humanist education is espe- cially relevant. These authors suggest that humanist education sought to make young men docile and deferential and to bring them in line with the ideological commitments of England’s ruling elites (From Humanism to Humanities, xiv).

48 Again, in “Single Parenting, Homeschooling,” Shin’s reading of Prospero and Cali- ban’s relationship largely corroborates my own, but her focus is different. For Shin, Pros- pero’s primary errors as a teacher and master are that he beat Caliban for the wrong reasons (378–79); that he gave Caliban feminine domestic work to do, rather than “mas- culine” skill- building tasks (378–79); and that he educated Caliban in close proximity to Miranda (389).

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and who retains a lingering commitment to the way he experienced the world before that career began. First, let’s look at the moment when Caliban talks about his education. In scene 1.2 he says that Prospero and Miranda taught him “how / To name the bigger light and how the less / That burn by day and night” (1.2.342–44). The words Caliban uses to describe the sun and moon—“bigger” and “less”—are quite natural, but there are alternatives. He would have been equally intelligible had he described the sun and the moon as the yellow light and the silver or the warm light and the cool. It is important, then, that he distinguishes the two heavenly bodies in hierarchical terms. In his description, the sun is “bigger” than the moon, which is not merely smaller in size but also inferior in status and quality—it is “less.” Even when it comes to dis- cussing basic cosmology, Caliban has learned to understand and speak of his world as though it is structured according to tiered hierarchies of superiority and worth.

When he recounts his astronomy lesson, Caliban also recapitulates his own subordinate status in the educational hierarchy of Prospero’s household. The lesson evokes Genesis 2:19–20, the verses in which Adam names the beasts of God’s creation.49 In those verses, Adam is sub- ordinate to God and also occupies a position of intellectual authority. Specifically, he is an object of God’s awesome creative power and an ob- server of the things that power has wrought but also gets to name those things. Adam gets to bring creation itself into language.50 The content of Caliban’s lesson aligns Prospero with God and Caliban with Adam. Like God, Prospero directed Caliban’s attention to elements of creation. And like Adam, Caliban observed and named those elements—in this case, the sun and the moon. However, unlike God, Prospero didn’t em- power Caliban to name anything himself. Instead, he taught Caliban his own words for the sun and the moon. Unlike Adam, then, Caliban was doubly subordinate to Prospero. By adopting Prospero’s words, rather than generating his own, he deferred to his teacher both as an observer of creation and as a speaker.51

49 Genesis 2:19–20, in The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

50 George Steiner observes that there is a long history of writers and thinkers con- ceiving of “the Adamic vernacular” as perfect because it contains the primary and au- thoritative words for God’s creation. Thus, it yokes signifier and signified together seam- lessly and mimes the act of creation itself (After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation, 3rd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 60).

51 The relationship between language, education, political power, and colonization has long been central to anticolonial, postcolonial, and humanism- focused readings of The

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Paradoxically, Caliban’s speech in this moment also manifests his capacity for resistance and his lingering commitment to an apolitical worldview. The content of his astronomy lesson comes from Genesis 1:16, which reports, “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.”52 However, in describing the lesson, Caliban doesn’t quote Genesis verbatim but de- livers a tellingly imperfect paraphrase. He says “bigger” rather than “greater,” “less” rather than “lesser,” and “burn” rather than “rule.” His paraphrase captures the hierarchical worldview implicit in his lesson’s source, but the words he swaps into that paraphrase are also more ob- jectively descriptive than the terms they replace. Put another way, Cali- ban registers the hierarchical sentiment built into Genesis 1:16 and also undercuts that sentiment by opting for less hierarchical language. For instance, he speaks of the cosmos as a place where the sun and moon do not “rule” but simply “burn.” In recounting his education, then, Caliban simultaneously speaks from a position of subordination and deference, enacts resistance, and reveals an experience of the world that is by turns hierarchical and apolitical.

Caliban’s grievances against Prospero and Miranda derive from a similar mixture of attitudes and postures. Before recounting his as- tronomy lesson, he says, “The island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2.332–33). Here, Caliban makes a matri- lineal claim to his home that imitates Prospero and Miranda’s political relationship with one another and with Milan. Just as Miranda will de- rive her right to Milan from her parent, Prospero, so too does Caliban derive his right to the island from his parent, Sycorax. Similarly, where Prospero focuses his aspirations for political restoration on Miranda, Caliban retrospectively derives his right to the island through another woman, his mother. In these ways, Caliban’s grievances against Pros- pero and Miranda suggest the influence of their example.53 Consider

Tempest. Most of these readings corroborate my own argument that Caliban’s worldview bespeaks the influence of his educators. See especially Brown, “‘This thing of darkness,’” 64–66; and Stanivukovic, “The Tempest and the Discontents of Humanism,” 93. However, none of these accounts consider Caliban’s language in light of mundane early modern educational practice and its practical goals, nor do they observe the lingering traces of apolitical egalitarianism that Caliban’s language contains.

52 Genesis 1:16, in The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. 53 Similarly, Patricia Seed observes that Caliban’s matrilineal claim imitates the way

Prospero uses the rape attempt, and thus Miranda’s victimhood, to justify his own claim to the island. See “‘The Island’s Mine’: Caliban and Native Sovereignty,” in ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 210.

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that Caliban could have claimed the island by prior possession. Such a claim would actually have been the stronger one to make in light of real- life debates about land ownership and sovereignty in the New World. Early modern English culture didn’t generally recognize matrilineal in- heritance, but the idea that indigenous peoples owned their land was something the English took seriously enough to work around when jus- tifying their colonial ventures.54 But instead of claiming the island by prior ownership, Caliban invokes dynastic inheritance, the concept that is central to Prospero and Miranda’s political identity and plans. Like a good early modern student, Caliban imitates his teachers in an act of self- assertion.

Caliban’s opening salvo against Prospero and Miranda is an assertive and savvy claim to the island, but in the next part of his speech his griev- ances shift. He explains that Prospero and Miranda initially showed him affection, fed him, and educated him. He explains that he responded by loving them and sharing the entire island. Then he abruptly curses him- self for doing so. As he discusses these events, he emphasizes the fact that Prospero initially treated him in loco parentis and the fact of his ini- tial cannibal- like sharing. Specifically, he says, “Thou stroke’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,” and then, “I loved thee / And showed thee all the qualities o’th’isle” (1.2.333–39). Here, Caliban suggests that Prospero and Miranda betrayed him by failing to make good on their early paternalistic solicitude and by taking advan- tage of his openness. His accusations thus come from two postures that are very different from the one he adopted moments ago. Where he just spoke as a usurped political ruler, he goes on to speak as a young per- son whose caregivers have not acted appropriately and as an apolitical subject whose communal generosity has been taken advantage of.

54 Seed points out that matrilineal inheritance was possible in early modern Spain and Portugal, but not England. Instead, English folklore held that matrilineal inheritance was common amongst witches, anti- patriarchal figures who could supposedly pass power on to sons or daughters alike. Accordingly, Caliban’s matrilineal claim to the island is legiti- mate in terms of early modern Iberian cultures but both illegitimate and transgressive in terms of English law and folklore (“‘The Island’s Mine,’” 210). In contrast, she implies, a claim based on prior possession would have been much more legitimate because England incorporated questions of land ownership into their legal justifications for New World colonization. English law in the early 1600s propagated the invidious idea that native Americans did not properly own their land because they didn’t farm it or enclose it for grazing. English colonizers used this myth to preempt claims of indigenous ownership and justify themselves as they seized land in the New World for themselves (205).

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Toward the end of this speech, Caliban’s anger and indignation also evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia and loss. He says,

           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.

(1.2.340–43)

Here, we might expect Caliban to reassert his political claim to the island by saying he used to be “king” of that place, but he does not. Instead, he says only that he used to be king of himself—he was his “own king.” This distinction is subtle, but it reveals how much Caliban’s worldview has changed since Prospero and Miranda came to the island and why. When Caliban describes the present moment, he uses the language of political ownership and subjugation in a clear, literal way. He says, “The island’s mine,” and “I am all the subjects you have.” In contrast, when he describes the past, he uses the same language metaphorically. He says, “[I] was mine own king.” Caliban understands that there can be no king without subjects; he uses this concept to imply that Prospero is a lame ruler when he says, “I am all the subjects you have.” Accordingly, when Caliban says he used to be his “own king,” he is not saying he used to be “king” of the island. Instead, he is using the language of monarchy to mourn the autonomous and independent way he lived before the ad- vent of Prospero and Miranda. His politicizing education, then, has not fully erased his apolitical experience of the world, but it has structured the way he remembers and describes that experience.

Caliban talks in a similarly multifaceted way moments later when he returns to the subject of his education. He says to Prospero and Miranda, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (1.2.364–65). For anticolonial and postcolonial critics, this moment ex- emplifies Caliban’s status as a disempowered colonial subject.55 Simul- taneously, it also suggests the experience of a frustrated early modern student.56 Caliban says his education taught him to be verbally asser-

55 Brown, “‘This thing of darkness,’” 64–66; Stanivukovic, “The Tempest and the Dis- contents of Humanism,” 93.

56 Postcolonial and humanist critics generally have the most to say to one another when dealing with Caliban’s language and education. However, in Shakespeare and the Invention of English, Rhodes cautions against taking Caliban too literally as a colonized subject, even when assessing his relationship with language and education. Rhodes notes that John Brinsley’s A Consolation for our Grammar Schools (1622) advocated the teach- ing of English in colonial territories as a means of spreading imperial power. However,

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tive, and he resists that education by using the verbal skills it gave him, specifically cursing. At the same time, though, he also implies that he used to be invested in rather than resistant toward his education. Earlier in this scene Prospero uses the word “profit” to describe the benefits of Miranda’s princely training. Caliban uses this same word ironically, as a way to say that his own learning was practically useless, but the fact that he can do so suggests that he understands exactly the sort of profit his education should have yielded: independence and power. And his frustrated derision suggests that he is disappointed he did not receive such profit. Thus, Caliban complains like someone who learned how to curse but failed to achieve the more substantive forms of power that early modern education promised its students.

The apolitical and political postures that track through Caliban’s ar- gument with Prospero and Miranda in scene 1.2 also circulate through his interactions with Stephano and Trinculo. Just before he encounters the two men, Caliban wishes harm down on Prospero and acknowl- edges his master’s surveillance and punitive authority. He says,

All infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me, And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin- shows, pitch me i’th’ mire, Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark, Out of my way unless he bid ’em.

(2.2.1–7)

Caliban knows that Prospero’s spirits are monitoring him and that they’ll attack him on command. Regardless, he cannot resist the im- pulse to curse, and as he curses, the violence he imagines enacting against Prospero mirrors the violence Prospero enacts against him. Both involve the natural elements of the island: “bogs,” “fens,” “flats,” “urchin- shows,” the “mire,” “a firebrand,” and “the dark” (2.2.2–6). Like a grammar school student, Caliban resists his instructor’s power by imitating that power. And like the imaginary student speakers in the Tudor vulgaria collections, he articulates resistance and subordination

he also argues that “The Tempest itself occupies an earlier stage in the imperial story” than Brinsley’s Consolation does (147). He goes on to say, “Post- colonialist writers take for granted that Shakespeare represents a culturally dominant (and imperially dominating) language, but in his formative years,” when English was still considered by many to be barbarous in comparison to Latin, “the reverse was true” (147).

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simultaneously. His verbal rebellion compels him to acknowledge the authority of the man he rebels against.

Caliban’s compulsion to resist and fear Prospero at the same time is so strong that it determines the way he reacts to Stephano and Trin- culo when they arrive on stage moments later. When he sees Trinculo coming, Caliban hides under a gabardine and exclaims, “Here comes a spirit of [Prospero’s], and to torment me / For bringing wood in slowly” (2.1.15–16). Caliban assumes that Stephano and Trinculo are Prospero’s spirits come to punish him, and as the two men talk about him and force him to drink wine, he continues to react to them as such. In respond- ing to Stephano and Trinculo, then, Caliban plays out the inevitability of Prospero’s surveillance and punitive violence, the two things he an- ticipated while cursing Prospero a few moments earlier. In his fear and anxiety, Caliban momentarily makes real for himself a kind of scenario that could have come directly from the early modern grammar school- room. As he curses Prospero, he also feels compelled to fear his instruc- tor’s watchfulness and power. Then, when he encounters newcomers, he assumes they are instruments of that watchfulness and power.

Importantly, Caliban soon goes from thinking Stephano and Trinculo are spirits to thinking they are gods “dropped from heaven” (2.2.115 and 134). This moment resonates with European colonialist narratives that erroneously described indigenous peoples responding to explorers as gods.57 As models for Caliban’s behavior, though, such narratives obscure the extent to which Prospero and Miranda primed Caliban to act as he does. The idea that deities live in the sky circulates pervasively in classical mythology and Christian theology. Caliban could easily have gleaned that idea from an education that included biblical astron- omy lessons and the story of the man in the moon, which he says he heard from Miranda (2.2.137). Indeed, when Caliban wonders aloud if the newcomers come from heaven, Stephano confirms his assumption by identifying himself as the man in the moon. Thus, Caliban’s educa- tion has prepared him to interpret never- before- seen humans as deities. Moreover, his shifting reaction to Stephano and Trinculo also bespeaks the insidious influence of Prospero’s punitive authority. That authority has given Caliban only two options for responding to new people. Either they are instruments of Prospero’s godlike power to be feared, or they are alternatives to Prospero’s godlike power to be revered.

57 On this particular colonialist narrative, see Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Span- ish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 212–13.

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Caliban, however, manifests more than just fear and reverence when he first meets Stephano and Trinculo. He becomes empowered and egalitarian at the same time that he also becomes particularly servile. At first he begs to be Stephano’s servant, and he does so in the most obsequious way possible. He calls the butler “wondrous” and offers to “lick” his “foot” (2.2.161 and 146). Soon thereafter he excitedly details the things he wants to do for his new master. He says, “I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries; / I’ll fish for thee, and get the wood enough” (2.2.157–58), and then he adds,

I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow, And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts, Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee To clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock.

(2.2.164–69)

And later, after Stephano has accepted his service, Caliban sings of his newfound “Freedom” (2.2.181). Over the course of this interaction, Cali- ban goes from being an abject foot- licker, to an active hunter- gatherer, to a teacher who is going to “instruct” Stephano in catching marmosets, to a man celebrating independence. The first of these postures demon- strates utter submissiveness. In contrast, the latter three demonstrate mastery and pedagogical authority over the island, a desire to share the island, and a desire to engage in physical outdoor activities. At the same time that he reveals a capacity for total obsequiousness, then, Caliban also manifests a degree of power and a desire to return to his old way of life on the island.

In his excitement to be roaming the island, Caliban reveals a relation- ship with that place and with language that lies completely outside his experiences in Prospero’s household. As he names the island’s plants and animals, his speech recalls and contrasts his biblical astronomy lesson. During that lesson, Caliban was subordinate to his instructor just as Adam was subordinate to God, but he took on none of Adam’s intellectual authority and power—his ability to name God’s creation. In this later scene, however, Caliban does demonstrate authority, and he does get to name. In listing the island’s flora and fauna, he dem- onstrates an expert knowledge of the island that no other character in the play possesses. Moreover, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed, he even uses a word—“scamels”—that exists nowhere else in English. For Greenblatt, this word proves that Caliban’s worldview is coherent in its

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own right and not just the product of his relationship with Prospero.58 I think we can take Greenblatt’s argument even further. It is true that the word “scamels” could not have come from Prospero and Miranda. But in using it, Caliban doesn’t just speak independently of his educa- tion; more importantly, he speaks like Adam. He names elements of his island world using language unmediated by someone else’s culture— language that is original to his personal and apolitical experience of the island.

As an object of memory and desire, the island ultimately becomes a fulcrum around which Caliban’s various traits swirl. The next time we see him, for instance, the island excites both his violent political schemes and his capacity for imitating other peoples’ forms of au- thority. In scene 3.3, he reiterates his plan for Stephano to murder Pros- pero, rule the island, and take Miranda as a consort.59 Caliban’s primary goal is to usurp Prospero’s control over the island, and he uses his mas- ter’s own political strategies to pursue that goal. By offering Miranda as a temptation for Stephano, he again follows the example that Prospero sets when he uses Miranda in his own political schemes. Caliban even redeploys Prospero’s word—“nonpareil”—when describing Miranda’s beauty (3.2.100). Elsewhere in this scene, he threatens to withhold the island’s “quick freshes” so Trinculo will have to drink “brine” (3.2.64– 65). Despite Caliban’s expert knowledge of the island, even this politi- cal maneuver bespeaks Prospero’s influence. We’ve seen that Caliban did not use the island politically when Prospero and Miranda first came, but Prospero certainly does when he threatens to make Ferdi- nand drink “brine” in the second scene of the play (1.2.463–64).

Caliban’s complexity also informs his famous ode to the island, his “Be not afeard” speech. As the three conspirators argue and plot, Ariel enters, invisible, and plays music. This music troubles Stephano and Trinculo, but Caliban comforts them. And as he reassures them, he speaks some of the only poetry in the play that rivals or perhaps even surpasses Prospero’s own. “Be not afeard,” he says,

       The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep,

58 Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse,” 43. 59 We never actually hear Caliban suggest this plan for the first time. That moment

occurs offstage.

420 Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds, methought, would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.

(3.2.135–43)

This virtuosic, island- focused reverie exemplifies the traits I’ve been tracking in Caliban throughout the play. In the most practical sense, it serves a deeply violent and political purpose. It assuages Stephano’s and Trinculo’s anxieties so they can move forward with the plan to murder Prospero. Accordingly, Caliban’s poetry is part and parcel with the more overt scheming he does earlier in this scene when he encour- ages Stephano to attempt murder. It is also a poignant example of the same persuasive skills that he tries to use outside Prospero’s cell when he tells Stephano and Trinculo to ignore the “luggage” Prospero and Ariel planted there to distract them (4.1.232).

Caliban needs this speech to further his political rebellion against Prospero, but it also expresses a fantasy of extreme political passivity. Here, I follow Paul Brown.60 In dreaming, Brown argues, Caliban seeks to escape Prospero by imagining the island as a pastoral utopia devoid of political struggle. This utopia resembles Ferdinand and Miranda’s betrothal masque, a spectacular form that Prospero uses to realize, aes- theticize, and obfuscate his own power. Accordingly, Brown observes, Caliban’s poetic reverie reveals a kind of double subordination. In one way, it manifests a desire for powerlessness. Rather than dream- ing about rebellion, Brown notes, Caliban longs for the supine vulnera- bility of sleep and the dream- induced opiate of idyllic fantasy. In an- other way, it suggests that Caliban has internalized the mechanisms of his oppressor’s authority. Unwittingly, Brown suggests, Caliban tries to evade Prospero by embracing one of the forms his power takes. To add force to Brown’s reading, the “Sounds,” “sweet airs,” “twangling instrument,” and “voices” that put Caliban to sleep might come from Ariel, who just traversed the stage while invisible, playing “airs” that unsettled Stephano and Trinculo. If Caliban desires a form of escapism induced by Prospero’s spirits, then his posture in this speech is not just passive but also pathetic. Such desire, Brown might say, would indicate that Caliban has been trained to desire the very things that oppress him.

Of course, Caliban’s dream may represent a desire for passivity and escape, but the place to which Caliban imagines escaping is not a ge-

60 Brown, “‘This thing of darkness,’” 63.

Tom Lindsay 421

neric pastoral utopia, as Brown suggests. Rather, it is a specific time and place in Caliban’s memory; it is the island before Prospero and Miranda arrived. Then and there, Caliban’s home was an idyllic space of free- dom, natural abundance, and communal sharing. It was also devoid of hierarchy and politics. Caliban’s dream- island possesses all of these qualities. In dreaming, he lies there alone, passive, and without fear as the natural world—“clouds”—generously shares its “riches” with him. If, as Brown has it, this dream reveals Caliban’s desire to evade or ignore his political struggle with Prospero, it also shows how much he wants to return to the island as it was when politics did not exist there at all. Thus, at the same time that Caliban’s ode to the island advances his political plans and conveys an escapist desire for powerlessness, it also testifies to his nostalgia. It showcases how his idyllic, cannibal- like relationship with the island has been irrevocably complicated by his time in Prospero’s household. 61

C ONCLUSION

The uncomfortable conclusion of this analysis is that we must consider Caliban’s experiences as a student and servant when accounting for his attempt to rape Miranda. The rape attempt is a central event in the is- lander’s backstory and a crux in the play, but critics often read it in terms that suit their own arguments or methodological predilections. Frequently, this maneuver means ignoring Caliban’s blatant, political motivation for attempting rape—he wanted to “people” the island with “Calibans” (1.2.351–52).62 In other instances, it also means ignoring the reality of the attempt or downplaying its importance. For instance, crit- ics interested in the way Prospero’s power works, especially postcolo- nial critics, tend to see the rape attempt itself as a non- issue. That it happened, or whether it happened at all, are matters of secondary im-

61 Stanivokovic reads Caliban’s “Be not afeared” speech as his most articulate claim to the island (“The Tempest and the Discontents of Humanism,” 126). In this way, Stanivuko- vic makes a mistake similar to the one Orgel does when he claims that Caliban looks noth- ing like the cannibals of Montaigne’s essay (“Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” 54). Both critics read Caliban’s character in the moment of the play back through his history rather than considering the possibility that he has changed as a result of his experiences with Prospero and Miranda. Thus, Stanivukovic mistakes Caliban’s poignant, apolitical vision of the island for a political claim to that place.

62 For instance, Kevin Pask sees the rape attempt as indicative of Caliban’s ribald and lustful nature, which in turn installs him in the play’s allegorical register and enables him to foil and threaten Prospero’s masque (“Caliban’s Masque,” 749).

422 Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education

portance to the way Prospero uses it to justify Caliban’s enslavement.63 But we cannot ignore or downplay Caliban’s violent political agency when examining the workings of Prospero’s power. The two are inextri- cable. As Prospero’s student and servant, Caliban learned the concepts he needed to understand himself as the usurped inheritor of the island; he learned how to see Miranda as a politically advantageous tool; and, unlike Miranda, he wasn’t given any sanctioned means toward autonomy or power. In these ways, Caliban’s political rapine came di- rectly out of the learning and the frustration he experienced as Pros- pero’s charge.64

Importantly, Prospero and Miranda don’t see the rape attempt in the way Caliban does. They don’t acknowledge his overtly political mo- tives. They don’t acknowledge the possibility that his service and edu- cation politicized him. And they certainly don’t acknowledge his claim to the island. Instead, as we’ve already seen, they explain the rape at- tempt by claiming that Caliban is simply resistant to the ethical benefits of education and paternalistic care. This claim is not disingenuous, and along with the trauma of sexual violence it drives the very profound and very justified sense of anger and betrayal that Miranda expresses in her “Abhorred slave” speech.65 However, as genuine as it is, Pros- pero and Miranda’s interpretation of Caliban’s rapine is also tellingly narrow. It takes a complex political situation and turns it into a simple, seemingly apolitical narrative of humanist disappointment. In this nar- rative, Caliban attempted rape—and thus failed as a student and ser- vant—because of his own nature, not because of the experiences he had in Prospero’s household. In its simplicity, then, Prospero and Miranda’s view of the rape points up the source of the political frustration that motivated the attempt in the first place. It suggests that, in the eyes of

63 For instance, see Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,’” 61–63; and Barker and Hulme, “‘Nymphs and reapers,’” 203.

64 Other critics have suggested a causal connection between Caliban’s education and his rape attempt but have not fully explored the nature of that connection. Greenblatt sug- gests that language education links Prospero and Caliban in a moral sense. In his read- ing, Prospero acknowledges Caliban as his “thing of darkness” (5.1.275–76) at the end of the play because he has an inchoate sense of responsibility for Caliban’s moral failings (“Learning to Curse,” 36). Similarly, Orgel speculates that Caliban’s education may have contained two pieces of content that enabled his rape attempt: the idea that sex is repro- ductive and classical narratives of politically expedient rapine such as Virgil’s account of the rape of the Sabine women (“Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” 54).

65 Postcolonial critics often argue that Prospero and Miranda are disingenuous in the way they construe Caliban’s sexual advances. For instance, see Barker and Hulme, “‘Nymphs and reapers,’” 203.

Tom Lindsay 423

his instructors and masters, Caliban was only ever supposed to be a well- behaved student and servant.

Ultimately, the conflict between the islanders dramatizes the paradox at the heart of early modern education and service. For his part, Cali- ban behaves like someone whose youthful training should have turned deference and submission into a channel toward independence and ad- vancement. When such things weren’t forthcoming, he sought them in a direct and violent way, through political rape. For their part, Pros- pero and Miranda behave like people who only sought to make their charge docile and eloquent. When that charge meets political frustra- tion with assertiveness, they ignore the fact that their training enabled him to feel and to enact both. In these ways, The Tempest is about what happens when education and service fail to balance their two primary goals. It is about what happens when young people eschew appropriate modes of personal and political ambition. And it is about what happens when teachers and masters fail to inculcate docility and deference while also creating paths toward autonomy and power, as Prospero did for Miranda but not for Caliban.

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