[In the following excerpt, Hamlin explores the relationship between Shakespeare's characterization of Caliban and Renaissance voyagers' narratives that depict Native Americans as fully human yet significantly different from Europeans. Just as with the ambiguous portrait of Caliban, the critic suggests, these accounts acknowledge basic affinities with New World natives even as they insist on their otherness.]

Throughout The Tempest an air of ambiguity surrounds Caliban. His name—almost certainly an anagram of "cannibal"—appears in the First Folio's cast list among the play's human characters (as opposed to its spirits) and above those of Trinculo and Stephano, but he is described there as "a salvage and deformed slave."³³ And when Prospero first mentions him to Ariel in act 1, it is difficult to decide whether the bestial or the human plays a greater role in his constitution:

Then was this island
(Save for the son that [she] did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born), not honor'd with
A human shape.

(1.2.281-84)

Although Peter Hulme cites these lines as proof of Prospero's "grudging admittance of Caliban's humanity" and rails against those who seize upon the last six words as "'evidence' of Caliban's lack of human shape,"³⁴ I think rather that a sense of uncertainty is exquisitely balanced here, that "litter," "whelp," "hagborn" and the parenthetical exception play off against "son" and the main clause in such a way as to reveal Prospero's own deep confusion about Caliban's status. I will argue later that The Tempest moves gradually—almost inexorably—toward affirming Caliban as a man, but I believe that in the play's earlier scenes his status is deliberately mystified. However, unlike many colonialist readers, who interpret this mystification as Prospero's ruse to justify usurpation, I think its presence is due primarily to the genuine uncertainty regarding the human status of cultural aliens that emerges as a pervasive motif in the early modern period. Again and again in the travel literature, ethnographic description reveals a deep-seated ambivalence toward ethnic otherness and perceived savagery, and while this ambivalence is undoubtedly exploited at times by conquerors and colonists, its initial presence does not appear to be a necessary function of the European will to power.

Take, for example, Richard Johnson's 1609 description of the natives of Virginia near the colony at Jamestown:

[The region] is inhabited with wild and savage people that live and lie up and downe in troupes like heards of Deere in a Forrest: they have no law but nature, their appareil skinnes of beasts, but most goe naked, . . . they are generally very loving and gentle, and do entertaine and relieve our people with great kindnesse; they are easy to be brought to good, and would fayne embrace a better condition.³⁵

Here we see a people likened to "heards of Deere" and alleged to have "no law but nature," yet we also hear that they are capable of "great kindnesse" and—like Caliban when he claims that he will "be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" (5.1.295-96)—desire to "embrace a better condition." Similarly, in the writings of Captain John Smith we encounter such seemingly contradictory portrayals of the Chesapeake Algonquians as that, on the one hand, they are "sterne Barbarians," "fiends," "inconstant Salvages," and "naked Divels," and that, on the other, they "have amongst them such government, as that their Magistrates for good commanding, and their people for due subjection, and obeying, excell many places that would be counted very civili."³⁶ It is as if the authors of these passages can relinquish neither their wonder at the seemingly "natural" or "bestial" condition of American natives nor their ever-recurring recognition—or suspicion, at any rate—that these people, like Europeans, possess genuine forms of "civility." And while such a comment as Johnson's that the Virginians "would fayne embrace a better condition" may certainly be read within the frame of colonial discourse as a projection of the colonists' desire for defensible hegemony, it also may reflect a more concrete kind of observation—perhaps of the sort we see in Thomas Harriot when he tells us that despite the coastal Algonquians' clear exhibition of spiritual culture, "they were not so sure grounded, nor gave such credite to their traditions and stories, but through conversing with us they were brought into great doubts of their owne, and no small admiration of ours."³⁷

Critics who have touched, however perfunctorily, upon the presentation of Caliban as in some way indebted to New World ethnography have tended either to trace a speculative genealogy through specific travel accounts or to allude somewhat unassuredly to the sort of ambivalence reflected in the above quotations. The former inclination has been present at least since the time of Edmund Malone—who claimed in 1821 that Caliban was Shakespeare's version of a Patagonian—and perhaps reached its apogee in Leslie Fiedler's pronouncement that "Caliban seems to have been created, on his historical side, by a fusion in Shakespeare's imagination of Columbus's first New World savages with Montaigne's Brazilians, Somers's native Bermudans, and those Patagonian 'giants' encountered by Pigafetta during his trip around the world with Magellan, strange creatures whose chief god was called, like Caliban's mother's, 'Setebos'."³⁸ The latter tendency, however, while relatively common, has provoked few interesting observations beyond the rather obvious generality that Caliban's portrayal relies upon a conflation of contradictory descriptions and evaluations of cultural otherness—particularly American otherness. Geoffrey Bullough, for example, writes that "the ambiguity of travelers' opinions about the American natives affects Shakespeare's handling of Caliban," and Peter Hulme goes so far as to say that "Caliban, as a compromise formation, can exist only within discourse: he is fundamentally and essentially beyond the bounds of representation."³⁹ But few critics have, to my knowledge, explored the ambiguity or the "compromise formation" of Caliban at any length. Many seem inclined, after acknowledging ambivalence, to settle upon rather reductive conclusions; a representative example is the claim that "By every account in the play, Caliban is something less than a man. . . . He is an savage, clearly humanoid though not fully human."⁴⁰

Two commentators, however, have come close to focusing on the sort of ambivalence to which I want to draw attention. In stressing the distinction between the European views that, on the one hand, "Indian language was deficient or non-existent" and that, on the other, "there was no serious language barrier," Stephen Greenblatt anticipates Tzvetan Todorov's useful schematization of European perceptions of native Americans as either acknowledging difference and concluding inferiority, or acknowledging equality and concluding identity.⁴¹ Greenblatt writes, for instance, that the tensions of this dichotomy "either push the Indians toward utter difference—and thus silence—or toward utter likeness—and thus the collapse of their own, unique identity."⁴² And in a slightly different vein, Richard Marienstras has observed that Caliban possesses a "dubious ontological status"; he "can be seen as a complete and irreducible contradiction or, alternatively, as having two positive but separate natures, each stemming from a different scale of values."⁴³ What Greenblatt and Marienstras do not do, however, is point toward a middle range of perception that either acknowledges difference without immediately concluding inferiority or acknowledges equality without positing identity. Yet we see views within this range expressed implicitly, for example, by various early writers in their recognition and description of distinctly different tribes and social groups among native American peoples:

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542): The inhabitants of all this region [Malhado] go naked. The women alone have any part of their persons covered, and it is with a wool that grows on trees. The damsels dress themselves in deerskin. The people are generous to each other of what they possess. They have no chief. All that are of a lineage keep together. They speak two languages; those of one are called Capoques, those of the other, Han. They have a custom when they meet, or from time to time when they visit, of remaining half an hour before they speak, weeping; and, this over, he that is visited first rises and gives the other all he has, which is received, and after a little while he carries it away, and often goes without saying a word. They have other strange customs; but I have told the principal of them, and the most remarkable, that I may pass on and further relate what befel us.

Jean de Léry (1578): Although like other Brazilians [the Ouetaca] go entirely naked, nonetheless, contrary to the most ordinary custom of the men of that country (who, as I have already said and will later expand upon, shave the front of their head and clip their locks in the back), these wear their hair long, hanging down to the buttocks. . . . The Margaia, Cara-ia, or Tupinamba (which are the names of the three neighboring nations), or one of the other savages of that country, without trusting or approaching the Ouetaca, shows him from afar what he has—a pruning-hook, a knife, a comb, a mirror, or some other kind of wares brought over for trade—and indicates by a sign if he wants to exchange it for something else.

José de Acosta (1589): It is a popular error to treat the affairs of the Indies as if they were those of some farm or mean village and to think that, because the Indies are all called by a single name, they are therefore of one nature and kind. . . . The nations of Indians are innumerable, and each of them has its own distinct rites and customs and needs to be taught in a different way. I am not properly qualified to handle the problem, since a great many peoples are unknown to me, while even if I knew them well it would be an immense task to discuss them all one by one. I have therefore thought it proper to speak primarily of the Peruvians in this work.

William Strachey (1612): [T]hus it may appear how they are a people who have their several divisions, provinces, and princes, to live in and to command over, and do differ likewise (as amongst Christians) both in stature, language, and condition; some being great people, as the Susquehannas, some very little, as the Wicocomocos; some speaking likewise more articulate and plain, and some more inward and hollow, as is before remembered; some courteous and more civil, others cruel and bloody; Powhatan having large territories and many petty kings under him, as some have fewer.

John Smith (1624): Upon the head of the Powhatans are the Monacans, whose chiefe habitation is at Rasauweak, unto whom the Mowhemenchughes, the Massinnacacks, the Monahassanughs, the Monasickapanoughs, and other nations pay tributes. Upon the head of the river of Toppahanock is a people called Mannahoacks. To these are contributers the Tauxanias, the Shackaconias, the Ontponeas, the Tegninateos, the Whomkenteaes, the Stegarakes, the Hassinnungaes, and divers others, all confederates with the Monacans, though many different in language, and be very barbarous, living for the most part of wild beasts and fruits. Beyond the mountaines from whence is the head of the river Patawomeke, the Salvages report inhabit their most motall enemies, the Massawomekes, upon a great salt water, which by all likelihood is either some part of Canada, some great lake, or some inlet of some sea that falleth into the South sea.⁴⁴

To the extent that these descriptions register plurality and allow a varied yet specific cultural inheritance to the native groups introduced they represent anti-tabula rasa views and thus stand in opposition to such bald and overarching characterizations as Samuel Purchas's that American natives are "bad people, having little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion; more brutish then the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly then that unmanned wild countrey, which they range rather then inhabite."⁴⁵ Yet to the extent that they point explicitly to differences among these natives—and implicitly to differences between them and Europeans—they resist both the easy conclusion of inferiority and the more insidious one of identity. In short, they fall outside the polarizing rubric suggested by Greenblatt and Todorov. Rather than countering claims that native Americans are subhuman tabulas rasas by wholly assimilating them into Europeanness, these descriptions—and others like them—allow the natives their difference and in fact stress their cultural diversity. Thus they provide a more subtle contrast than that proposed by Greenblatt, a contrast more relevant, I think, to The Tempest. If we can admit that early modern ethnography allows for an ambivalence not solely between the binary opposites of subhumanity and virtual identity, but also among the range that includes subhumanity, identity, and cultural—but fully human—difference, we can sharpen our account of the way this ambivalence sheds light on the characterization of Caliban.

An interesting way of producing this account lies in situating Caliban within an ethnographic context and then contrasting him with another curiously ambiguous character from English Renaissance drama: the "wild man" Bremo in the anonymous and highly popular play Mucedorus.⁴⁶ Caliban has been connected to Bremo before, notably by Frank Kermode in his eclectic genealogy of Caliban's character; but while Kermode points to Bremo's conventionality as a wodewose or salvage man, he does not dwell on the association with Caliban.⁴⁷ Yet there is much of interest to focus on, particularly given an ethnographic contextualization.

Like the Wild Man in Book Four of The Faerie Queene, Bremo lives in a cave in the woods (7.7, 17.94), carries a club (7.5,21,29), and is lustful and cannibalistic (11.16-19, 11.21, 11.25-30, 15.59-60); but unlike Spenser's Wild Man (or, for that matter, the Salvage Man of Book Six), Bremo possesses language and demonstrates an ability to relent and to recognize changes within himself (11.38-54, 15.105). Moreover, he is represented as having the capacity to fall in love (11.37-55, 15.1-55), though exactly what this love means to him remains unclear.⁴⁸ Finally, like Caliban, he is poetic, particularly in the description of his immediate surroundings (15.23-55): he knows the forest's oaks, quail, partridges, blackbirds, larks, thrushes, nightingales, springs, violets, cowslips, marigolds, and deer, and if his catalogue strikes us as more conventional and symbolic than realistic, it nonetheless suggests a genuine love of place. Bremo seems, therefore, a rather more attractive character than the standard wodewose or homo ferus, and certainly less violent and lecherous than the type described as common in the late sixteenth century by R. H. Goldsmith.⁴⁹ Yet Bremo is duped and then brutally killed onstage by Mucedorus late in the play (17.35-67), and nothing in the response of Amadine or Mucedorus to the murder invites us to regard it as anything more consequential than the slaughter of an offending beast. Bremo is dismissed as a "tyrant" and "wicked wight" (17.68,74); that he has grown progressively more sympathetic and dies in the act of providing instruction to Mucedorus (17.51-67) is utterly forgotten. The play seems to tell us that a wild man, regradless of his apparent capacity for improvement or potential for civility, is subhuman and may be killed without remorse or consequence.

Contrast this with Caliban's portrayal in The Tempest. Like Bremo, who is called a "cruel cutthroat" and a "bloody butcher" (17.6,27), Caliban serves as the target of many dubious allegations: Prospero terms him a "demi-devil" (5.1.272) and a "poisonous slave, got by the devil himself / Upon thy wicked dam" (1.2.319-20); Miranda reviles him as an "Abhorred slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill!" (1.2.351-53). Yet much more than Mucedorus, The Tempest offers forms of resistance to these allegations, both in the speeches of Caliban and in the words and actions of other characters. For every suggestion that Caliban is not fully human, a counter-suggestion emerges that he is; Miranda's dual attitude (1.2.445-46; 3.1.50-52) becomes emblematic of this tendency. Moreover, in opposition to the view that Caliban is devoid of goodness, we have the uncontested claim of Caliban himself that his initial relationship with Prospero was thoroughly reciprocal:

When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I lov'd thee
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.
Curs'd be I that did so!

(1.2.332-39)⁵⁰

Caliban goes on to point out that he is now Prospero's subject, when earlier he was "mine own king" (1.2.342), and of course Prospero responds to this implied charge of usurpation by making the counter-accusation that Caliban attempted to rape Miranda and thus deserves his subjugation. But if, as Stephen Orgel has suggested, Caliban's unrepentant attitude toward this attempted rape may be partly explained by the fact that "free love in the New World is regularly treated [in Renaissance travel narratives] not as an instance of the lust of savages, but of their edenic innocence,"⁵¹ Prospero's allegation that Caliban is a "slave / Whom stripes may move, not kindness!" (1.2.344-45) loses much of its persuasiveness. Indeed, the problems of subordination and rebellion highlighted by the Prospero/Caliban relationship may be usefully contrasted with the relative absence of such problems in the Prospero/Ariel interdependence; Ariel's nearly perfect modelling of subservience and service ultimately rewarded may be possible precisely because Ariel, quite explicitly, is not human. Such behavior, and such social relations, are far more problematic for Caliban.

Many Renaissance descriptions of New World natives have been adduced as sources or models of the subhuman or near-human element of Caliban's characterization, among them Peter Martyr's depiction of "certeyne wyld men" in Española who "neuer . . . wyll by any meanes becoome tame. . . . [and] are withowte any certaine language" and Robert Fabian's portrayal of three Eskimos who "spake such speach that no man could understand them, and in their demeanour like to bruite beastes."⁵² But far fewer descriptions have been produced in support of another side of this characterization: Caliban as fully human, though radically different. Giovanni Verrazzano's observation that the native peoples of Florida "did not desire cloth of silke or of golde, much lesse of any other sort, neither cared they for things made of Steele and yron" is perhaps typical of these descriptions in that it serves as an analogue of a specific incident in The Tempest: Caliban's rejection of the "glistering apparel" so attractive to Stephano and Trinculo (4.1.222-54).⁵³ But there are other anti-tabula rasa ethnographic views available in the Renaissance, views less likely to be seen as pertinent to The Tempest because broader in scope and not as easily associated with particular passages in the play. And I refer not only to the comparatively well-known writings of Las Casas and Montaigne. Jean de Léry, for instance, emphasizes the social harmony of the Tupinamba even as he exposes the conceptual limitations attendant upon his own religious bias: "As for the civil order of our savages, it is an incredible thing—a thing that cannot be said without shame to those who have both divine and human laws—how a people guided solely by their nature, even corrupted as it is, can live and deal with each other in such peace and tranquility."⁵⁴ José de Acosta describes the Incas' indigenous form of literacy: "Unbelievable as it may seem, the Peruvians made up for their lack of letters with so much ingenuity that they were able to record stories, lives, laws, and even the passage of time and numerical calculations by means of certain signs and aids to the memory which they had devised and which they call quipos. Our people with their letters are commonly unable to match the skill of the Peruvians with these devices. I am not at all certain that our written numerals make counting or dividing more accurate than their signs do."⁵⁵ Alexander Whitaker writes that the inhabitants of Virginia are "lustie, strong, and very nimble: they are a very understanding generation, quicke of apprehension, suddaine in their dispatches, subtile in their dealings, exquisite in their inventions, and industrious in their labour. . . . there is a civili government amongst them which they strictly observe"; William Strachey characterizes the elaborate dressing and ornamentation of a Virginian queen as "ceremonies which I did little look for, carrying so much presentment of civility"; and Thomas Harriot, in a passage to which I will return, avers of the Algonquians, "Some religion they have alreadie, which although it be farre from the trueth, yet being as it is, there is hope it may be the sooner and easier reformed. They beleeve that there are many Gods."⁵⁶ It is true that Léry's and Whitaker's remarks, like those of Las Casas, emanate from a Christian essentialist perspective; this emerges explicitly in Whitaker's opinion that "One God created us, they have reasonable soules and intellectuall faculties as well as wee; we all have Adam for our common parent: yea, by nature the condition of us both is all one, the servants of sinne and slaves of the divell."⁵⁷ It is true as well that Acosta's "Unbelievable as it may seem" and Harriot's "farre from the trueth" disclose the strongly ethnocentric tendencies of these early ethnographic accounts. But some degree of subjective assimilationism is inevitable in any description of a cultural other; the above quotations—and others like them—are remarkable in the degree to which they avoid the easy conclusion of identity and insist upon a measure of difference. And if, as I believe, such views as these played a role in the evolution of Caliban's character, it is not hard to understand why Caliban seems far less "unaccommodated" than Mucedorus's Bremo. Even Bremo's portrayal reveals certain suggestions of contemporary ethnographic influence, but by and large his conventionality as a wodewose preempts the possibility of any lasting ambivalence in his character: like Doctor Chanca's New World natives, whose "bestiality is greater than that of any beast upon the face of the earth," Bremo is essentially less than fully human; like them, easy to kill without remorse.⁵⁸ But Caliban, whose depiction relies heavily on Renaissance ethnography—and particularly on the ambivalences I have stressed between the other as subhuman, identical, and human but different—is thereby rendered far less easy to dismiss. If he is a "salvage" man, his savagery is nonetheless treated by Shakespeare with more tolerance and more respect for its potential or concealed civility than is Bremo's by his anonymous creator.

A final word about Mucedorus. The play's Dramatis Personae not only lists the characters but provides instructions for the doubling (and tripling) of parts; thus, for example, Bremo is to be played by the same actor who plays Tremelio and Envy.⁵⁹ I find this intriguing for several reasons. Tremelio is a would-be assassin, a captain persuaded by the jealous Segasto to kill Mucedorus (6.62-82); in fact, precisely the opposite occurs, Mucedorus killing him in self-defense, calling him a "Vile coward" (6.81). And Envy, a figure who appears only in the induction and epilogue, is constantly reviled by his allegorical counterpart, Comedy, as, among other things, a "monster" (Ind. 16), an "ugly fiend" (Ind. 75), a "hellhound" (Epi. 24), a "Nefarious hag" (Epi. 26), and a "bloody cur, nursed up with tiger's sap" (Ind. 35). In short, the trio of Bremo, Tremelio, and Envy—all playable by the same actor—represents something like a principle of monstrosity or unnaturalness, and these characters' purpose in the play is perhaps indirectly suggested by Comedy's urgent wish that Envy "mix not death 'mongst pleasing comedies" (Ind. 50). In fact, death is present in Mucedorus, and the play becomes more a tragicomedy than a simple comedy treating "naught else but pleasure and delight" (Ind. 51). In spite of the play's happy ending, Envy insists to Comedy, "yet canst thou not conquer me" (Epi. 12) and threatens that in the future he will overthow her by the following strategem:

From my study will I hoist a wretch,
A lean and hungry neger cannibal,
Whose jaws swell to his eyes with chawing malice;
And him I'll make a poet.

(Epi. 34-37)

This implies that if an outcast or "native monster" (Epi. 20) of the sort Envy describes had the linguistic command of a poet, he would represent a true threat to Comedy's complacence; he would have the power of subversion. And while Comedy dismisses this threat as nonsense and easily manages to subdue Envy by the epilogue's end, the description of a poetic "neger cannibal" nonetheless has a strangely prophetic ring for readers familiar with The Tempest. In spite of Caliban's alleged aphasia at the initial contact with Prospero, he learns language—learns it astonishingly well—and this acquisition, perhaps more than any other trait, marks his humanity and signals his potential dangerousness to the intruding Europeans. Envy's threat, with its suggestion that characters like Bremo and the "neger cannibal" are necessary to the workings of comedy even as they endanger its survival and structural integrity, prefigures in a peculiar way Prospero's elusive remark about Caliban: "this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275-76). Comedy cannot thrive without the dangerous potency of Envy: Mucedorus needs Bremo and Tremelio just as The Tempest needs Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian—and just as Prospero needs Caliban.

One of The Tempest's most explicit mystifications of Caliban's status lies in Stephano's reference to him as "My man-monster" (3.2.12). Clearly, such a phrase would be less appropriate with respect either to Bremo, notwithstanding his command of language, or to The Faerie Queene's Salvage Man, in spite of his aphasia; but for Caliban—especially at this point in the play—it seems a perfect designation, emblematic of the pervasive ambivalence regarding his condition which the play has created. Stephano utters it early in the second of four scenes in which he and Trinculo appear with Caliban. In the first of these scenes, Trinculo makes the thoroughly ambiguous remark—after coming upon Caliban wrapped in a gaberdine—that in England "would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man" (2.2.30-31); Stephano seconds this ambiguity by alluding to "salvages and men of Inde" (2.2.58) and marvelling that the composite Caliban/Trinculo is "some monster of the isle with four legs, . . . Where the devil should he learn our language?" (2.2.65-67). Interestingly, however, this uncertainty regarding Caliban is mirrored by Caliban's own uncertainty regarding the Neapolitans—especially Stephano. And it is in this pair of corresponding and reinforcing ambivalences that we begin to see" perhaps the greatest value of locating The Tempest within an ethnographic context.

Prompted by his drinking of Stephano's sack—itself an action resonant with contemporary New World associations—Caliban exclaims to himself, "These be fine things, and if they be not sprites. / That's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor. / I will kneel to him" (2.2.116-18). This is followed by such exclamations as "Hast thou not dropp'd from heaven? . . . I do adore thee. . . . I prithee, be my god. . . . Thou wondrous man" (2.2.137-64). Like The Faerie Queene's Artegall when he meets Britomart—or the satyrs in their encounter with Una—Caliban "makes religion" of his wonder.⁶⁰ It is true that he swears allegiance to Stephano, and true also that this willing subordination is often interpreted as proof of his natural slavishness ;⁶¹ but Shakespeare makes it clear that Caliban takes Stephano for a "brave god" (2.2.117) before he promises to be his "true subject" (2.2.125). Thus, notwithstanding the comic mode of the scene or its status as subplot in the play's larger design, Caliban does not necessarily reveal an abject propensity to be a slave. Stephen Greenblatt has written, in a discussion of the Diario, that Columbus occasionally demonstrates a recognition of "reverse wonderment" among the native Americans he encounters in the Caribbean⁶²; I would argue that Caliban's behavior here suggests a literary transformation of that wonderment. His subservience, initially, is not that of man-monster to man, but of man-monster to man-god; and while it is in some respects comic, it merits far more than ridicule.⁶³ We must not forget, for example, that Caliban possesses a concept of divinity of godhead: his references to his "dam's" god, Setebos, make this clear (1.2.373, 5.1.261). And since it is virtually beyond dispute that Shakespeare takes "Setebos" from Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage, it bears noting that in an adjacent passage Pigafetta describes the reaction of a Patagonian native confronted by Europeans: "When he sawe the capitayne with certeyne of his coompany abowte hym, he was greatly amased and made signes holdynge vppe his hande to heauen, signifyinge therby that owre men came from thense."⁶⁴ Indeed, the motif of native Americans regarding Europeans as gods appears frequently in the voyagers' accounts.⁶⁵ And while this representation, due to its utter one-sidedness, is clearly unreliable as a descriptive characterization, its implicit reliance upon the idea that idolatry can evolve into "true" religion suggests that at its core lies the accurate perception, among European observers, that the native inhabitants of America practiced forms of devotion that could only be categorized as "religious." Thomas Harriot, in a passage quoted earlier, expresses this best:

Some religion they have alreadie, which although it be farre from the trueth, yet being as it is, there is hope it may be the easier and sooner reformed.⁶⁶

The Europeans' very theory of evangelization—or, at any rate, their most successful theory—relied in part upon the premise that what they deemed idolatry was in fact a conclusive indication of humanity and a positive step toward Christian conversion. The ability to confuse men for gods, as Caliban does, is thus a confirmation of the views expressed in the anti-tabula rasa descriptions quoted above. When American natives are represented as overestimating the status of Europeans, they are simultaneously—if indirectly—represented as fully human in status and as possessing cultural forms of their own. They are not blank pages, not unaccommodated.

The emphasis which Shakespeare gives to the ambivalences I have discussed both highlights the play's debt to voyagers' accounts and propels it toward its romantic conclusion. Stephano cannot decide whether Caliban is monster or man; Caliban, equally, cannot decide whether Stephano is man or god. And, as if in sympathy with these uncertainties, Miranda wonders whether Ferdinand is human or divine (1.2.410-20), and neither Ferdinand nor Alonso can initially decide whether Miranda is a maid or a goddess (1.2.422-29, 5.1.185-88).⁶⁷ Gradually, however, the uncertainties are resolved, the multiple possibilities collapsed. Prospero assures Miranda that Ferdinand "eats, and sleeps, and hath such senses / As we have" (1.2.413-14); Miranda describes herself to Ferdinand as "No wonder, sir, / But certainly a maid" (1.2.427-28); Ferdinand tells his father that Miranda "is mortal" (5.1.188); and Caliban curses himself for his error: "What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool!" (5.1.296-98). And while no explicit recognition surfaces in Stephano or Trinculo that Caliban is human, there remains the far more significant remark by Prospero that "this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275-76). As Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, Prospero "may intend these words only as a declaration of ownership, but it is difficult not to hear in them some deeper recognition of affinity, some half-conscious acknowledgment of guilt."⁶⁸ Affinity and guilt indeed; many years ago, assuming the persona of Caliban and addressing a composite Prospero/Shakespeare, W. H. Auden characterized this recognition as follows:

Striding up to Him in fury, you glare into His unblinking eyes and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always expected to see, a conquerer smiling at a conquerer, both promising mountains and marvels, but a gibbering fist-clenched creature with which you are all too unfamiliar, for this is the first time indeed that you have met the only subject that you have, who is not a dream amenable to magic but the all too solid flesh you must acknowledge as your own; at last you have come face to face with me, and are appalled to learn how far I am from being, in any sense, your dish; how completely lacking in that poise and calm and all-forgiving because all-understanding good nature which to the critical eye is so wonderfully and domestically present on every page of your published inventions.⁶⁹

Prospero's acknowledgment may imply that Caliban is what he—Prospero—can become, or what he has in futurum videre within himself, or what his nurture may, in the end, amount to; in any of these cases, his remark hints at the same interpenetration of the conventionally savage and the civil suggested by the portrayal of The Faerie Queene's Salvage Man. Perhaps Prospero is also implicitly admitting that Caliban possesses a perceptive subjectivity and thus stands in a dialogic relationship with him. At all events, this acknowledgment—coming as it does from the character who, more than anyone else, has been responsible for the mystification of Caliban's status—goes far toward finally drawing Caliban within the bounds of humanity.

Throughout The Tempest we look at Caliban much in the way that Renaissance explorers must have looked at New World natives. In some ways he seems bestial; but in others—among them his intimate knowledge of the isle, his initial nurturing of Prospero and Miranda, his later resentment of Prospero's rule, his capacity for forming warm attachments, his vulnerability, and his dreamy, reflective poetry—he seems entirely human. Above all, there is his decision, late in the play, to "be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" (5.1.295-96).⁷⁰ Perhaps this means that he will seek Christian prevenient grace—the divine favor of God—or perhaps the pardon or indulgence of Prospero.⁷¹ But in this particular instance, the word "grace" need not necessarily refer either to divine dispensation or human forgiveness; it could be being used in the alternative sense of "virtue," as it is twice elsewhere in the play (3.1.45, 5.1.70) and in such other instances as Donne's famous lines about "man, this world's vice-emperor, in whom / All faculties, all graces are at home" or the moment in Macbeth when Malcolm speaks of "The King-becoming graces" and mentions, among other traits, "justice," "temp'rance," "lowliness," "Devotion," and "patience" (4.3.91-94).⁷² Caliban, in vowing to "seek for grace," may very well be vowing not submission (and thus containment by the dominant culture) but rather an independent project of self-betterment; the virtue he may be seeking is that of proper judgement, so that in the future he will not again make his past mistake of confusing humans and gods. In any case, though Shakespeare never explicitly resolves the matter of Caliban's status, he suggests—to the extent that he gradually allows the play's other uncertainties about character identity to dissolve into thin air—that Caliban, like Ferdinand, Miranda, and Stephano, is a fully human being. And this suggestion is reinforced by The Tempest's thorough contradiction of Prospero's allegation that Caliban is ineducable, "a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick" (4.1.188-89); the same could be said, after all, of Antonio and Sebastian, neither of whom—unlike Caliban—show any sign of repentance for their conspiracy, though both have had the advantage of more refined and extended nurture. One might even argue that Caliban, in his initial and fully reciprocal relationship with Prospero, exhibits a nurture that, far from failing to "stick" to his nature, lies at is very essence.

Placing The Tempest within an ethnographic context goes far toward explaining why Caliban cannot be discarded in the way that Bremo is, for example, in Mucedorus. Caliban is not merely a "wild man," a sinister, shadowy figure derived from European folklore and medieval tradition; he remains far more complex and distinct, and though his portrayal certainly reveals bestial elements, it is also vivified by an acknowledgment of the existence of culturally alien humans across the ocean. Like the ambivalences of New World ethnography, the ambivalences of The Tempest gradually move toward human inclusiveness. And this levelling tendency, which shows the failings of aristocrats as well as the virtues of an alleged "demidevil," bears a resemblance both to movements in other late plays of Shakespeare and to the ideals of what might be referred to as "Montaignesque pastoral"—a more radical pastoral than that typical of Spenser, more informed by the speculative and critical spirit that characterizes the Essais. As the whore-son and the Bedlam beggar must be acknowledged in King Lear (1.1.24, 3.4.28-180) and the strange Tupinamba in Montaigne's "Des Cannibales," so, too, must Caliban.

Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to Joanne Altieri, David Bevington, and Charles Frey for reading and carefully responding to earlier drafts of this essay. I have learned much from their acuity and generosity. . . .

³³ As Meredith Anne Skura points out, these words appear in the Folio's "Names of the Actors"; Shakespeare may or may not have written them ("Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest," Shakespeare Quarterly 40.1 (Spring 1989): 48).

³⁴ Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (London: Methuen, 1986), 114.

³⁵Nova Brittania (London: 1609), in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, ed. Peter Force, 4 vols. (New York: Peter Smith, 1947), 1 (6): 11.

³⁶The Generali Historie of Virginia (London, 1624), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 2: 152, 183, 189, 198, 125-26.

³⁷A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (London, 1588), in Virginia Voyages from Hakluyt, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 70.

³⁸ Edmund Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 21 vols. (London, 1821) 15: 11-14; Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein Day, 1972), 233. Sidney Lee also points to the varied ethnographic roots of Caliban, including the Guianans described by Ralegh, but he curbs his enthusiasm enough to recollect—unlike Fiedler—that there were no "native Bermudans" ("The American Indian in Elizabethan England," in Elizabethan and Other Essays, ed. F. S. Boas [London: Oxford University Press, 1929], 263-301).

³⁹ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) 8: 257; Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 108. See also Robert Ralston Cawley, who argues that Caliban is not a mélange of types but a representation of the changing attitudes toward native Americans held by the colonists ("Shakespere's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest," PMLA 41 [1926]: 719n); Sister Corona Sharp, who writes that Caliban's character "took shape under the influence of conflicting opinions held on the American Indians during Shakespeare's lifetime" ("Caliban: The Primitive Man's Evolution," Shakespeare Studies 14 [1981]: 267); and Karen Flagstad, who adds that "the savage Caliban conflates contradictory stereotypes" ("'Making this Place Paradise': Prospero and the Problem of Caliban in The Tempest," Shakespeare Studies 18 [1986]: 221).

⁴⁰ Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 85, 87.

⁴¹ Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century," in First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 2: 574; Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 42-43.

⁴² Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse," 575.

⁴³New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169-70. I disagree with Marienstras, however, when he asserts that Caliban's uncertain status "gives the reader a feeling of instability that remains with him through to the end of the play" (170).

⁴⁴ Cabeza de Vaca, Relation of Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, trans. Buckingham Smith (New York, 1871; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 82; Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29; Acosta, How to procure the salvation of the Indians, excerpted in John Howland Rowe, "Ethnography and Ethnology in the Sixteenth Century," Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 30 (1964): 16; Strachey, Historie of Travell into Virginia Britannia, excerpted in The Elizabethans' America: A Collection of Early Reports by Englishmen on the New World, ed. Louis B. Wright [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965], 215; Smith, Generali Historic in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 2: 119.

⁴⁵ "Virginias Verger," in Hakluytus Posthumous, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (London: 1625), 20 vols (Glasgow: J. MacLehose & Sons, 1905-7) 19: 231.

⁴⁶ All quotations from Mucedorus (London, 1598) are drawn from Drama of the English Renaissance, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 1: 463-80. Mucedorus was published in seventeen separate editions between 1598 and 1658. It was performed by the King's Men in 1610 "before the King's majesty at Whitehall on Shrove-Sunday night" (Fraser and Rabkin, 463); thus Shakespeare probably knew the play, and may have acted in it.

⁴⁷ Introduction to the Arden Tempest (London: Methuen, 1954), xxxviii-ix. Norman Rabkin writes that "Bremo the wild man is something of a forerunner of Caliban, suggesting the interest of an age of exploration in the phenomenon of natural man while ensuring that the play remains fairy tale" (Introduction to Mucedorus, 463).

⁴⁸ Bremo's encounter with Amadine in scene 11 reveals obvious similarities to the conventional motif of the wild man's transformation to civility in the presence of a beautiful and virtuous woman. But this particular encounter is presented, I think, as a more sentimental and less thoroughly transforming experience.

⁴⁹ Goldsmith, "The Wild Man on the English Stage," Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 481-91.

⁵⁰ This speech, with its indication of Caliban's intelligence and appreciation of Prospero's gifts, echoes numerous accounts of New World natives, among them James Rosier's 1605 description of Indians along the New England coast: "They seemed all very civil and merry, showing tokens of much thankfulness for those things we gave them. We found them then (as after) a people of exceeding good invention, quick understanding, and ready capacity" (A True Relation of the Most Properous Voyage Made This Present Year 1605 by Captain George Weymouth, excerpted in The Elizabethans' America, 149). On Weymouth's voyage, see Sidney Lee, "The American Indian in Elizabethan England," 282.

⁵¹ Orgel, introduction to the Oxford Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 34. Sister Corona Sharp takes this view even further in calling the attempted rape "Caliban's failure in European sexual ethics" ("Caliban: The Primitive Man's Evolution," 273). And Paul Brown asserts that Caliban's "inability to discern a concept of private, bounded property concerning his own dominions is reinterpreted as a desire to violate the chaste virgin, who epitomizes courtly property" ("'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism," Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 62). See also Orgel's "Shakespeare and the Cannibals," in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 55.

⁵² Martyr, The Decades of the new worlde or west India (London: 1555; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Microfilms, 1966), decade 3, bk. 8, p. 134; Fabian, in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: 1598-1600; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 7: 155. The three Eskimos Fabian describes were brought by Sebastian Cabot to England from the North American Arctic in 1502 and presented to Henry VII. See Sidney Lee, "The American Indian in Elizabethan England," 270.

⁵³ "The relation of John de Verrazzano a Florentine, of the land by him discovered in the name of his Majestie. Written in Diepe the eight of July 1524," in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations 8: 433.

⁵⁴ Léry, History of a Voyage, 158.

⁵⁵ Acosta, How to procure the salvation of the Indians, 17.

⁵⁶ Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London: 1613; New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1936), 26-27; Strachey, Historie of Travel into Virginia Britannia (London: 1612), excerpted in The Elizabethans' America (New York: Harper, 1959), 212; Harriot, A briefe and true report (London: 1588), in Virginia Voyages, 68.

⁵⁷ Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, 24.

⁵⁸ Diego Alvarez Chanca, a Spanish surgeon, accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the West Indies (1493-96) and wrote about the natives in his "Letter addressed to the Chapter of Seville" (Four Voyages to the New World: Letters and Selected Documents, trans, and ed. R. H. Major [Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978], 66).

⁵⁹ Alan C. Dessen discusses this role-doubling as "a means to call attention to structural or thematic analogies" in "Conceptual Casting in the Age of Shakespeare: Evidence from Mucedorus," Shakespeare Quarterly 43 no. l(Spring 1992): 67-70.

⁶⁰The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 4.6.22 and 1.6.7-19.

⁶¹ Richard Marienstras, for example, writes that Caliban "rushes into servitude even when striving for freedom" (New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 175).

⁶² Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 77.

⁶³ For a fascinating and sustained example of native Americans confronting Europeans whom they cannot, at first, satisfactorily categorize, see Diego Durá n, The Aztecs: The Indies of New Spain (New York: Orion, 1964), esp. chap. 69-74. Durá n claims, for instance, that Moteczoma and his ministers plotted various strategies of resistance to Cortés and the other conquistadors even while alluding to them as immortal beings: "T do not know' [said Moteczoma] 'what measures to take to prevent these gods from reaching the city or seeing my face. Perhaps the best solution will be the following: let there be gathered enchanters, sorcerers, sleep-makers and those who know how to command snakes, scorpions and spiders, and let them be sent to enchant the Spaniards. Let them be put to sleep, let them be shown visions, let the little beasts bite them so that they die.' . . .' 'O powerful lord' [responded Tlillancalqui] 'your decision seems good to me, but if they are gods who will be able to harm them? However, nothing will be lost in the attempt'" (276).

⁶⁴ Martyr, Decades, 219.

⁶⁵ Drake's men found that the Miwok natives of California "supposed us to be gods, and would not be perswaded to the contrary" (Richard Hakluyt, "The famous voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South sea," Principal Navigations 11: 119). And Thomas Harriot writes of the Indians near the Roanoke Colony, "some people could not tel whether to thinke us gods or men" (A briefe and true report of the new found-land of Virginia [London: 1588], in Virginia Voyages from Hakluyt, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn [London: Oxford University Press, 1973], 73). See also Robert Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (Boston: MLA, 1938), 385-88. In one of the classic English fictions dealing with the encounter of European and native American, Daniel Defoe exploits this motif in portraying the relationship between Crusoe and the "savage" Friday: "I believe, if I would have let him, he would have worshipped me and my gun" (The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965], 214).

⁶⁶ Harriot, A brief e and true report, 68.

⁶⁷ On connections between Miranda and the American native Pocahontas, see Morton Luce's Arden edition of The Tempest (London: 1902) 169-70; Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources 8: 241; and Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, 240-41.

⁶⁸ Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 157: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), See also Skura, "Discourse," 66; Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, 239; and Lynda E. Boose, "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," PMLA 97.3 (1982): 341. When Ferdinand speaks to Prospero of "our worser genius" as a force that can potentially "melt . . . honor into lust" (4.1.27-28), he perhaps anticipates Prospero's "thing of darkness" speech inasmuch as he suggests that a principle of wildness or savagery lies within all humans.

⁶⁹ "The Sea and the Mirror," in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), 387-88.

⁷⁰ In claiming that he will "be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" (5.1.295-96), Caliban is almost certainly not speaking ironically; the tone of self-annoyance in which he castigates himself for taking the drunkard Stephano for a god and worshipping the "dull fool" Trinculo (5.1.297-98) seems strongly to preclude this.

⁷¹ On prevenient grace, see article 10 of the Church of England's thirty-nine articles (1571): "The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will" (from Thomas Rogers, The Faith, Doctrine, and Religion, Professed and Protected in the Realm of England . . . Expressed in 39 Articles [Cambridge, 1607; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968], 103). If Caliban is capable of seeking prevenient grace, the presumption is strong that he is fully human.

⁷² Donne, "An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary" (11. 161-62) in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 274. See also As You Like It, 3.2.11 and 3.2.17, and Hamlet, 4.7.21. The OED defines this meaning of "grace" as "In persons: Virtue; an individual virtue; sense of duty or propriety" (2.13b).