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Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest

Duke Pesta

Published online: 31 July 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Over the last forty years, postcolonial criticism has become a dominant

mode of critical discourse for the profession of literature and Renaissance

studies in particular, with The Tempest serving as terminus a quo for many

such discussions across historical periods and academic disciplines.1 During

this time—not counting courses in Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, or early

modern literature—The Tempest has been taught in English departments at

the undergraduate or graduate level in freshman seminars; surveys of Great

Books; capstone courses; writing and composition courses; seminars on

literary theory, Marxism, postcolonialism, and race, gender, queer theory;

early American literature and transatlantic literature courses; surveys of

American literature; and courses on Romanticism, modernism, modern drama,

Third World literatures, postmodernism, Chicano/a literatures, Afro-Caribbean

literatures, and diaspora literatures. Outside English departments, the play has

been taught in such varied disciplines as African American studies, American

studies, anthropology, comparative literature, cultural studies, education,

environmental studies, film studies, history, linguistics, modern languages,

Native American studies, oppression studies, peace studies, philosophy,

Acad. Quest. (2014) 27:273–285 DOI 10.1007/s12129-014-9433-4

1The tradition viewing The Tempest through colonialist lenses has a long history outside the West, dating to the nineteenth century. Writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Central and South America have associated the play with the gamut of evils linked to colonialism. For a sampling of this criticism, see Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “The Metamorphoses of Caliban,” Diacritics 7, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 78–83; Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982); Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Roberta Fernández, “(Re)vision of an American Journey,” in In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, ed. Roberta Fernández (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1994), 282–98; and Antonio C. Márquez, “Voices of Caliban: From Curse to Discourse,” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 13, no. 1 (1997): 158–69.

Duke Pesta is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI 54901; [email protected]. He is associate editor of Milton Quarterly.

political science, psychology, religious studies, sociology, theater, and

women’s studies.

Surely no other work of literature has been as assigned, deconstructed,

interdisciplinized, revisioned, trivialized, and ventriloquized as The Tempest.

Overwhelmingly, those who have included a reading of The Tempest in their

various courses in their various disciplines have no formal training in Shakespeare

or understanding of Renaissance poetics, and the play is seldom contextualized in

the broader Jacobean and Renaissance culture from which it emerged.2

Shakespeare’s play has become a shibboleth and his Caliban an avatar, empty

signifiers that represent the easiest, most recognizable, and least complicated

example of all that Western colonialism aspired to or indeed became. Postcolonial

assumptions about the play are so reflexive as to deracinate The Tempest, causing it

to vanish into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. Once the initial argument evolved

that The Tempest was primarily and consciously a play about colonialism, the

premise was accepted with little or no reservation. And so all this begs the question,

is The Tempest about colonialism or not?3

Tempest Agonistes

From the outset, it is clear the action takes place on an island somewhere in the

Mediterranean, the most familiar body of water in Europe and a defining boundary

for Western culture for over two thousand years by the time Shakespeare wrote The

Tempest. Although events take place entirely on the island, the wedding of Alonso’s

daughter in Carthage triggers the movement, the unjust banishment of Prospero

from Milan fuels the plot, and the narrow sea route between Milan and Carthage

delimits the scope of action. It is puzzling why so little postcolonial criticism

focuses on the colonization of Africa, though non-Western critics of the early

twentieth century suggest the link.4 Even if we assume the island is North African

rather than European, the suggestion of African colonization remains tenuous at

2Most of these courses have nothing to do with Renaissance culture or Shakespeare, and make no effort to be careful or fair in appropriating The Tempest to their particular subject matter. Typically, other academic disciplines—and literary subspecialties within English departments—cherry pick The Tempest to make tendentious points about colonialism today. 3Postcolonial interpretations of The Tempest are almost always compulsively literalist, although they do not read the play literally on its terms, allowing it to mean what it says or establish its own poetic and cultural hermeneutics. Rather, they project upon the Renaissance a series of materialist assumptions, ways of seeing the world that ultimately reveal more about the interpreters than they do The Tempest. 4For a rare exception, see Thomas Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonial Text and Pretext,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean Howard and Marion O’Conner (New York: Methuen, 1987), 99–115.

274 Pesta

best. After all, North Africa was annexed by Rome, supplied the West with

emperors, produced no less a figure than Augustine, and was Christianized at an

early date before being colonized by Islam. The weak insinuation of African

colonization nevertheless makes more sense than to link the island to the New

World, along with the corresponding insistence that Caliban is Native American.5

Two of Shakespeare’s primary sources—Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” and

accounts of the voyage of the Sea Venture—relate events that take place in

the New World. Plausibly, this connection might insinuate a link between

The Tempest and the Americas, though it is appropriate to ask why, given the

New World material in his sources, Shakespeare so meticulously sets his play

in the Mediterranean. This is not to say New World material plays no part in

The Tempest, but merely that it is unlikely so adept a reader of source

material would construct one of his few original plots in an entirely European

context if New World colonialism was a driving issue. The second of these

sources, the famous voyage, shipwreck, and reappearance of the Sea Venture,

offers some interesting perspectives on Shakespeare’s possible intentions

when adapting the story.6

In June 1609, nine vessels under command of George Somers left England

for Virginia. The following month a storm separated the Sea Venture from the

fleet, and three days later it was wrecked on an island in the Bermudas. During their

5Postcolonial critics generally agree about the subaltern status of Caliban and his American origins. For the evolution of this thinking among Western scholars, see Leo Marx, “Shakespeare’s American Fable,” in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 34–72; Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972); Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1973); Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 11–13; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 191–205; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 89–134; Stephen Orgel, “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 40–66; and Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, intro. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–66, reprinted from Field Day Pamphlet, 14 (Lawrence Hill Derry, Northern Ireland: Field Day Theater Company, 1988). Fiedler’s Stranger in Shakespeare is among the first to suggest the imposition of Western stereotypes on

“Native Americans” like Caliban. Fiedler labels Caliban’s drunken ditty (2.2.179–82) as the “first American poem” (236). In “Modernism and Imperialism,” Jameson marshals this newly-resymbolized, postcolonial Caliban to speak on behalf of marginalized groups within the United States: “It is significant that in the United States itself, we have come to think and to speak of the emergence of an internal Third World and of the internal Third World voices, as in black women’s literature or Chicano literature for example” (49). Ronald Takaki asserts in Iron Cages: “As Englishmen made their ‘errand into the wilderness of America,’ they took lands from Red Calibans and made Black Calibans work for them,” suggesting that Caliban in reality “could be African, American Indian, or even Asian” (11, 13). 6The accounts in question include Strachey’s True Reportory (July 15, 1610), addressed by Strachey to an “excellent lady” in England.

Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest 275

nine months on the uninhabited island, the passengers experienced a number of

seemingly miraculous happenings—providential circumstances transmuted in The

Tempest—while they constructed two new pinnaces from the remains of the ship.

The miracle of their subsequent reappearance at the colony caused a sensation in

London, and various accounts of the ordeal were incorporated by Shakespeare, who

was drawn to the providential aspects of the story, grasping the dramatic potential of

a “devil’s” island turned unexpected paradise.

It is also telling that Shakespeare’s island, like its Bermudan counterpart, is

uninhabited and cannot be colonized in the sinister sense of cultural and linguistic

dominance. There are no natives of this Bermuda island, no Bermudan culture or

language for Europeans to exploit. This matters, for Caliban is not indigenous to the

island like the natives encountered by colonists in Virginia are indigenous to the

New World. Caliban’s mother is a North African from “Argier.” Accused of

witchcraft by other Africans, she conceived Caliban in Algeria with a “devil.”

Caliban has no “people” on the island, he is king of no one, and he seeks to rape

Miranda to establish progeny in the first place. There is no “Calibanic culture” here:

no history or civilization or language. In order for there to be language in any

meaningful sense, someone would have had to teach it to Caliban and be there to

speak it with him, passing it on as a cultural legacy binding him to his culture and

people. Caliban admits the absence of these things to Prospero in a central passage:

“you taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.”7

It is not Prospero’s language that Caliban acknowledges receiving, but

language itself. Before Prospero, Caliban was without language, unlike

Europeans, Algerians, or Native Americans.

In fact, the only actual “Indian” within a thousand miles of the island in The

Tempest is the dead one alluded to in Trinculo’s satiric observation about the

gawking curiosity of Europeans: “When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame

beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (2.2.31–33). But this is clearly a

lament on the inability of Europeans to live up to Christian ideals, not a colonialist

wish for more dead Indians. Coming across the huddled Caliban obscured under

his “gabardine,” Trinculo assumes it to be “an islander” struck down by a

“thunderbolt” (2.2.36–37). But once he gets a look at the deformed, fish-like

Caliban, he refers to him as “monster,” “mooncalf,” “puppy-headed monster,”

“most scurvy monster,” “a very weak monster” (2.2). Stephano and Trinculo

7The Tempest, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 7th ed. (New York: Longman, 2013), 1.2.366–67. References are to act, scene, and line. All further reference to this work will be cited parenthetically within the text.

276 Pesta

never refer to him as anything but monster, and when revealed to the assembled

company at the play’s end, he is thought no more than “plain fish” (5.1.269).8

Not only are no indigenous people on the island, there is very little of the

colonizing spirit in those Europeans who find themselves stranded there. Not

one of them came to the island voluntarily. They did not storm it in search of

conquest, as might have Greeks, Persians, Romans, Vikings, Turks, or

Conquistadors. Every human character arrived by accident, and all are eager

to return to Italy at the earliest opportunity. When the Europeans finally depart,

they leave no colonists, settlements, or plantations behind. They appropriate no

resources and take no prisoners. They rename no lands after themselves,

plant no flags, and cede no territories to their heirs. Given the bitterly

contested geography of Europe, one might think an island discovered in

the Mediterranean after so many centuries would generate at least a

spark of territorial interest, however barren. Yet none of these evils are

manifested, though this reality is never acknowledged in postcolonial

readings of the play.

What actual tendency toward colonialism appears in the play comes not from

Prospero, nor the greedy Alonso, nor even those scheming climbers Sebastian

and Antonio, but rather from Caliban himself, in league with the halfwit jester

Trinculo and the drunken butler Stephano. Remarkably, Caliban conceives and

orchestrates the hapless conspiracy to murder Prospero, couching his vengeful

design in the desire to play kingmaker and establish Stephano as regent. From

this perspective, Caliban is not victim of colonialism, but the island’s original

and only colonist and would-be colonizer. Nor are our European buffoons

interested in the plot until Caliban titillates Stephano by describing Miranda’s

beauty—thus “native” Caliban’s ambition preys upon Stephano’s lust, making

him confederate. What a reversal of stereotypes this postcolonial reading

enables: the lusty, drunken, and slothful European corrupted by the ambitious

and power-hungry Native American, as disenfranchised, lower-class Europeans

are recruited to acts of colonization and rape by the putative representative of

native cultures everywhere.

Neither racist example of native minstrelsy nor postmodern indictment

of colonialism, the Caliban of this farcical subplot is one of the beauties

of Shakespeare’s play, a tongue-in-cheek look at various sinful

pretentions and comic relief from the serious issues of power, revenge,

8For a discussion of Caliban’s origins, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–23.

Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest 277

and forgiveness that are the dominant themes. One of the most damaging critical

misrepresentations is this willful misreading of genre. The Tempest is a

Shakespearean romance, a unique subclassification of classical and European

Romance, infused with all expectations of the genre: stylized characters,

fantastical locales, magic, miraculous happenings, strange creatures, and

love-at-first-sight encounters. In their reduction of all manner of

writing—from the mundanely prosaic to the rhapsodically poetic—to mere

“text,” postcolonial critics liberate themselves from limitations that would

restrain their wildest readings, ground them in the real context of the play, and

perhaps restore their sense of humor and wonder. For these critics, it is as if the

resolution of the comic subplot—foiling the mock-colonialist usurpation of the

island by the three stooges and leaving them chin high in a pool of horse

piss—bespeaks a cruel precursor of waterboarding rather than a benign and

uproariously appropriate “punishment” for so laughable a folly.

But The Tempest is also a Christian romance, resonant with images of perdition

and paradise, sin and redemption, grace and resurrection. Rather than ignore this

context, which is woven into the fabric of the play’s language and imagery,

postcolonial critics actively undermine the Christian ontologies of Renaissance

theology and philosophy. Denying Renaissance culture the unique expression of

its fears, dreams, and mythologies, they simultaneously reinscribe it with

postmodern, neurotic, skeptical, and politically-driven cultural attitudes and

assumptions. Many in Shakespeare’s culture believed individuals could evolve or

devolve on the Great Chain of Being, rising to the level of angels or wallowing in

the brutishness of beasts through exemplary virtue or excessive vice. The

postcolonial critic, denying ontological mobility and eschewing hierarchy

as repressive, collapses this understanding, methodically plotting along a

hermeneutical line that levels distinction. Caliban, Ariel, Setebos, and the

spirits under Prospero’s sway are entirely human and their reality is as

temporally bound as our own. Meredith Anne Skura describes the

process: “The recent criticism [of The Tempest] not only flattens the text

into the mould of colonialist discourse and eliminates what is characteristically

‘Shakespearean’ in order to foreground what is ‘colonialist,’ but is

also—paradoxically—in danger of taking the play further from the particular

historical situation of England in 1611.”9

9Meredith Anne Skura, “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 50.

278 Pesta

In the anachronistic postcolonial readings then, Caliban can only be

viewed in the context of human history and material identity, despite a

lineage and physical reality that reveals him ontologically part human and

part something else. Little wonder critics such as Stephen Greenblatt are

perplexed and dissatisfied with the ending of The Tempest, for there is no

way outside of Christian ontology to make sense of the fairytale ending that

is Caliban’s epiphany, his decision to “be wise hereafter / And seek for

grace” (5.1.298–99).10

What information we have from the culture reinforces that Caliban was not

viewed as postcolonial critics represent him. Meredith Anne Skura explains:

Evidence for the play’s original reception is of course extraordinarily

difficult to find, but in the two nearly contemporaneous responses to

Caliban that we do know about, the evidence for a colonialist response is

at best ambiguous. In Bartholomew Fair (1614) Jonson refers scornfully

to a “servant-monster,” and the Folio identifies Caliban as a “salvage

and deformed slave” in the cast list. Both “monster” and “salvage” are

firmly rooted in the discourse of Old World wild men….In other words,

these two seventeenth-century responses tend to invoke the universal

and not the particular implications of Caliban’s condition.11

In assessing these examples as “at best ambiguous,” Skura is needlessly

generous to the postcolonial argument. Not only are Shakespeare’s references

traceable to medieval notions of the Wild Man, there is no reason whatsoever

to associate the words “monster,” “savage,” or even “slave” specifically with

the colonial aspirations of Jacobean England. To the best of our knowledge,

Shakespeare’s audience viewed Caliban as an archetype representing a host

of mythic ideas about the primordial, monstrous, and sinful, not as colonized

Native American. As Alden T. Vaughan remarks: “If Shakespeare, however

obliquely, meant Caliban to personify America’s natives, his intention

apparently miscarried almost completely.”12

10Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990). That the play ends with some manner of accord between Prospero and Caliban makes Greenblatt uneasy, though he never addresses how Prospero could do more without crossing that vexing line back into colonial control. 11Skura, “Discourse and the Individual,” 64. 12Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 138.

Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest 279

The postmodern, antimetaphysical bias that razes the levels of being available

to Renaissance culture seldom extends to Ariel, a much more logical choice to

play the superimposed role of colonized victim: his presence on the island

predates Caliban’s arrival, making him the earliest known inhabitant. Ariel is also

intelligent, loyal, innocent, and capable of the best attributes of human sympathy

and the desire for justice. It is Ariel who actually awakens mercy in Prospero

toward the sinful characters, and when Prospero’s rage against the conspirators

storms most intently, Ariel soothes it: “Your charm so strongly works ’em / That

if you now beheld them your affections / Would become tender” (5.1.16–18).

If, as so much postcolonial criticism suggests, Shakespeare intended to

romanticize a native, why is Ariel never seriously considered? Despite his

invisibility to the critics, he is all too real to the characters he alternately

goads and chastens. Ariel’s high ontological status is overt and irreducible.

He is unequivocally not human, yet working sympathetically toward the

same ends as Prospero. When Prospero questions Ariel about the admonition

that he should become tender in his affections toward his enemies, Ariel

adds, “Mine would, sir, were I human” (5.1.20). Like Caliban, Ariel is never

referred to as human, not by himself or by any character he encounters. And

unlike Caliban, Ariel clearly possessed language, culture, and associate

spirits before Prospero freed him from the torment of the tree. As a result of this

ontological inevitability, Ariel cannot be coopted, reduced, or reassigned as

colonized by any but the most vigorously anachronistic postcolonial arguments.

However easy it might be to refute the argument that Ariel is a victim of colonial cruelty, such a reading is infinitely more plausible than one that seeks to establish Caliban as anticolonialist hero. In postcolonial readings, Prospero is undisputedly the primary villain of the play, and yet very little is made of the relationship between Prospero and Ariel along colonial lines. It is true that once Prospero liberated Ariel from the tree, he required Ariel’s services for a determined length of time as consequence of that liberation. But then he freed Ariel to the winds ahead of schedule, without subsequent entanglements. And yes, Ariel grumbled initially about the length of his service, but quickly recanted when reminded of the torment endured at the hands of Sycorax. Further, Ariel seems genuinely attached to Prospero, shares his vision of justice, and in expectation of freedom is correspondent to command while doing his spriting gently. Take the play’s ontological parameters seriously, and the premise that Ariel is native islander holds no validity: he is clearly a spirit, a creature of wind not bound by body or location, and has no material interest in the island.

280 Pesta

To entertain a postcolonial reading that replaces Caliban with Ariel,

affording him privileged subaltern status, poses another conundrum of which

postcolonial critics want no part. If Ariel is human native and not ethereal

spirit, then it is not Prospero but the Algerian Sycorax and her African

confederates—by default Setebos and the other malevolent spirits must be

human, too—who colonize, torture, and enslave Ariel:

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate

To act her earthy and abhorred commands,

Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,

By help of her more potent ministers

And in her most unmitigable rage,

Into a cloven pine, within which rift

Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain

A dozen years… (1.2.274–81)

This is as concise and graphic a description of colonization as appears in

Renaissance drama, replete with cultural arrogance, extortion, torture, and

unjust imprisonment. From this perspective, the colonization is a work of

North African infamy, requiring perhaps a supplemental poetics of

Occidentalism, not Orientalism. And it is the European Prospero who

redresses colonial evil, freeing Ariel, abandoning the island, and

unconditionally renouncing all claims over its inhabitants. Of course, such an

extended reading strategy is unappealing to our postcolonial critics, whose

ideological imperatives inhibit them from exploring colonialism outside

Western culture.

Prospero and Posterity

This brings us to Prospero, for his unjust demotion must follow the

unwarranted elevation of Caliban as night follows day. Far from abetting

colonialism, Prospero—himself a victim of usurpation, dispossession, and

banishment, cast upon the island as a refugee—frees Ariel from colonialist

torment inflicted by Sycorax, then thwarts the mock-colonialist conspiracy of

Caliban. In many respects, Prospero is the ultimate colonialist stereotype: the

wizened, gray-bearded autocrat—domineering, crafty, prudish and priggish, more

taciturn and British than genial and Italian—a cross between Colonel Mustard

and Gandalf in short pants and pith helmet examining the troops before the battle

Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest 281

of Plassey. For all the wishful thinking invested in the romantic reimagining of

Caliban, recasting Prospero as villain is as important for postcolonial approaches

to The Tempest, since Prospero fits the negative stereotypes of colonizer more

easily than Caliban can be reclaimed as sympathetic native.

However, although brusque, Prospero is benevolent, his considerable

power cloaked in mercy and restraint. Caliban does not deny the humane care

he first received from Prospero and Miranda, and concedes his attempted

rape brought about the change in relations. We must remember that Prospero

restricts the freedoms of Caliban only after he seeks to ravish Miranda:

Thou most lying slave,

Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee,

Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee

In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate

The honor of my child. (1.2.347–51)

Harsh words, but hardly surprising, given Caliban’s unrepentance. Quick to

concoct elaborate backstory and ahistorical justifications indemnifying

Caliban from the assault, postcolonial critics are remarkably unimaginative

when it comes to the unmentioned specifics of the attempted rape. Assuming

Prospero foiled the attack, is it not worthwhile to pause and imagine the

scene? A father comes upon his daughter under assault, the perpetrator that

strange, demi-human creature he brought to live in the cell alongside her.

This is the recompense for the care lavished on the brute?

Given Prospero’s powers, manifested through the host of potent spirit

ministers, the question is not Prospero’s intemperate language, but rather why

he did not at once dispatch the creature. To Miranda’s remark that Caliban is

“a villain…I do not love to look on,” Prospero responds,

But, as ’tis,

We cannot miss him. He does make our fire,

Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices

That profit us. (1.2.313–16)

Considering the tasks undertaken for Prospero by spirits—not least of which

are to “flame amazement” and tote a wooden banquet table across the

island—it strains credulity to think Caliban’s meager skills as fire-starter and

menial woodman require keeping such a dangerous entity so close. As

Caliban concedes, Prospero has mastered the island’s secrets, and his alliance

282 Pesta

with Ariel ensures his comfort and protection. So why keep Caliban alive?

As with all the sinful characters, Prospero keeps them close with the

Christian objective of improving them through restraint, abnegation, and

redemptive suffering—a motive he is not at liberty to divulge even to

Miranda, who, although virtuous, must also undergo moral refinement.

What does Caliban suffer that comes close to torture or genuine slavery?

When Prospero first summons Caliban, he grumbles, curses, and delays. For

a slave, he is poorly trained, not at all cowed before his master. The

exasperated Prospero can only spur Caliban with threats:

For this, be sure, thou shalt have cramps,

Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins

Shall forth at vast of night that they may work

All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched

As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging

Than bees that made ’em. (1.2.328–33)

In addition to such threats there are others delineated by Caliban: cramps and

aches, spirits disguised as apes and hedgehogs that “mow and chatter,” then

“bite” and “lie tumbling in [his] barefoot way” (2.2.10–12). Sometimes

Caliban is “wound with adders, who with cloven tongues / Do hiss [him] into

madness” (2.2.9–14). And yet, these spirits at other times serenade Caliban

with “Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.138),

followed with voices,

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

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. (3.2.141–45)

The spirits that tweak and chasten him are those that elevate his senses and

“wind him about” with music and poetry in an effort to develop his more

human attributes, the better part of his legacy from his maternal line (3.2.136–44).

As a result of Prospero’s ongoing compassion and tutelage, Caliban learns

more than mere cursing: he speaks some of the play’s most poignant

poetry.

Prospero does not treat Caliban with the viciousness expected of a brutal

colonizer, nor does he react to the attempted rape with anything like the

Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest 283

violence one would anticipate, given his portrayal in postcolonial criticism.

Caliban is kept close not because as slave labor he is invaluable to some

never-mentioned colonialist project, but because Prospero recognizes a

Christian obligation to the creature, that thing of darkness he acknowledges

his. This is most obvious at the play’s end, when Caliban the would-be rapist

adds attempted murder to his rap sheet. When brought before the company

and exposed as unequivocally guilty of attempting two heinous capital

crimes, Prospero’s rough justice extends no further than ordering Caliban to

clean his room. This is the stuff of vexed yet tender-hearted fathers—not

remorseless colonizers.

Postcolonial critics are also uninterested in Prospero’s treatment of

Ferdinand, the foil to Caliban’s grumbling excesses. Ferdinand has no

acquaintance with hard labor, nor as prince does he know subservience,

hunger, or privation. Eager to have Ferdinand as son-in-law, Prospero

nevertheless exposes him to the same drudgery that signifies Caliban’s

“slavery”: bringing in wood. Caliban’s first contentious words in the

play—“There’s wood enough within” (1.2.318)—foreshadow Ferdinand’s

humble acceptance of his ordeal as “patient log-man” (3.1.67). Along the

way, Ferdinand—who never sought to rape or murder anyone—is like

Caliban led astray by spirits, controlled, berated harshly, accused of treason,

manacled, and overpowered by Prospero. This parallel treatment serves to

expose differences not among nations and cultures, but in individual hearts

and human natures.

The Tempest and Intercultural Exchange

Despite The Tempest’s fairytale ending, Shakespeare understands that such

utopian visions cannot be for sinful creatures of flesh and blood living in a

fallen world. This is why the play takes place on a mythical island in the

Mediterranean, and not in the Bermudas. Shakespeare is not writing about

New World wonders, marvelous possessions, or greener Edenic pastures

overseas, however much postcolonial critics force such readings. Rather, the

miraculous reconciliation the play provides can exist only on an enchanted

island: one that will vanish like an insubstantial pageant when the company

returns to human civilization.

Shakespeare seems immune to idealistic utopian daydreaming that fueled

destructive colonial excursions, voyages seeking desired for but never

284 Pesta

discovered cities of gold and fountains of youth in the pristine New World.

Shakespeare’s pragmatic rejection of utopianism can be viewed in the

mockery of Gonzalo’s self-contradicting commune, in the antiromantic

characterization of Caliban, and in Prospero’s cynical response to Miranda’s

exclamation at seeing a mass of humanity assembled for the first time at the

play’s end: “Oh, brave new world / That has such people in’t!” (5.1.185–86).

Prospero’s jarring reply—“’Tis new to thee” (5.1.187)—undercuts the idea

that humanity can remain in a state of grace, and reminds us that any

colonizing vision that seeks heaven on earth is ultimately doomed to

disillusion.

Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Postcolonial Criticism of The Tempest 285

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