SOURCE: “Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of the The Tempest,” in ELH, Vol. 64, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 333-57.

[In the following essay, Wilson contrasts colonial New World interpretations of The Tempest with the view that the play centers on European concerns.]

A recent pairing by the Royal Shakespeare Company of The Tempest with Edward Bond's Bingo has reminded critics of the persistence of what they long ago discounted as the “totally spurious” identification of Prospero's story with the dramatist's.¹ While this last comedy has been Americanized on campuses as a tragedy of colonialism in the New World, the professional theater continues to connect its ending to New Place and a retirement in Stratford. These popular and academic traditions seem, in fact, to straddle the play's two hemispheres, and it may be that the New Historicist success in relocating The Tempest in Virginia has transported it too far from Virgil, and the Old World of Aeneas where its action is set, between Tunis and Naples. For it is now axiomatic that, as Frank Kermode stated in the Arden edition, Shakespeare had America “in mind” when he wrote his “Virginian masque,” based Ariel's songs on Algonquian dances, and intended Caliban “to be a representative Indian, and Prospero a planter.” Yet this certainty about the American context is matched by agnosticism over the play's European pretext, which seems, Kermode presumed, to have been “a wedding in 1611 of which we know nothing.” Ever since 1809, when Malone noted analogies with the Jacobean Virginia Company pamphlets, the Americanization of The Tempest has been accompanied by obliviousness towards its festive occasion, typified by Kermode's belief that “there is no need to imagine such a wedding.” So, though Stephen Orgel's Oxford edition ventured an affinity with King James's dynastic plans, no attempt has yet been made to explain how these might relate to the Shakespearean realpolitik that necessity makes “strange bedfellows” (2.2.38), or motivate a plot which seems to carry its actors irresistibly away from the “still vex'd Bermoothes” (1.2.129), towards “quiet days, fair issue, and long life” in Warwickshire (4.1.24), through the spectacular effects of a firestorm in the Mediterranean, off the Barbary coast of Africa.²

“It will be difficult to denote with precision the role played in the age of Philip II by the ill-defined sea between Africa and Sicily, with its deep waters full of fish, its reefs of coral and sponges, and its many islands, often uninhabited because they are so small”: Braudel's words in his great history of the Mediterranean suggest a location both mysterious and concrete enough for the setting of The Tempest.³ In fact, Braudel's Mediterranean is a reminder that the topography which American critics elide was charged with cultural and economic significance for Shakespeare's audience; and that this intersection of the east-west shipping lane from the Levant to the Atlantic, with the north-south axis from Italy to Africa, defines Prospero's condition, and the “direful spectacle of the wreck” with which he engineers revenge (1.2.26), in terms for which the region was infamous: as piracy. Prospero is that “gentleman of fortune,” a king of pirates: “The only fear and terror of the cruel pirates of Argier, / That damned train, the scum of Africa.”⁴ Critics efface this elementary fact of maritime law, yet it confirms their insight that Prospero's magic occupies the metaphoric space of gunpowder, and accounts for his otherwise gratuitous plea, kneeling beside his own victims, for mercy from the London spectators: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (5.1.337-38). For when Ariel “boarded the King's ship” and “flamed … the topmast, / The yards and bowsprit” with “fire and cracks of sulphurous roaring” (1.2.196-200), the discursive context of this brigandage was not American propaganda but the death sentence decreed by James I for “carrying munition to Algiers and Tunis,” and on pirates who “commit most foul outrages, murders, spoils, and depredations within the Mediterranean, to the great offence of our friends, and extreme loss of our Merchants.” It was a context, moreover, that may explain some of the complexity of The Tempest, for as Braudel writes, the villains of these decrees, issued to protect international shipping from the Barbary corsairs, were English:

By the end of the sixteenth century the English were everywhere in the Mediterranean, in Moslem or Christian countries … They had two strings to their bow, Islam and Christendom, and fell back on a third—piracy. The English had been pirates from the very beginning and of the worst kind … Their cannons were not merely used to force a passage through the Straits … They were fired indiscriminately at anything considered worth taking—Turkish, French, or Italian, it was all the same to the English.⁵

With the hulk of the burned vessel hidden in harbor, “The mariners all under hatches stowed” (230), and the royal passengers held to ransom, the wreck on which Prospero builds his fortune corresponds closely to the marine disasters which set bells tolling in the financial markets in the period of The Tempest, when “insurance rates tell the whole story,” as Braudel comments, and in Venice soared to 20 percent in 1611 and 25 percent in 1612. Indeed, in the view of Alberto Tenenti, it was the irruption of English piracy that precipitated the decline of the Republic, which he dates from about the year 1610 and the sack of galleons like the 1500-ton Reniera e Soderina: abandoned with a cargo valued at £100,000, after its sails had been set on fire with shot, in a plan “designed to terrify, which succeeded excellently,” in the words of the maritime inquest. The commander of that pyrotechnic raid was Jack Ward, who according to John Smith, the Virginia planter, typified the war veterans for whom James I had no use, and who “turned pirates; some because they became slighted by those that had wealth; some for that they could not get their due; some that lived bravely and would not abase themselves to poverty; others for revenge.” It was Ward who reputedly introduced gunpowder to Tunis, where he had “turned Turk,” travelers reported, and built a palace, “with fifteen circumcised English renegades” for servants. Braudel estimates that over 3000 Venetian ships were captured by such buccaneers between 1592 and 1609; but the ethical confusion of their crimes, he believes, was as disturbing as the cost to insurers. For as pirate superseded privateer, “it was not only in Algiers that men hunted each other, sold or tortured their enemies, and became familiar with the miseries and horrors of the ‘concentration camp’ world: it was all over the Mediterranean.” So, though it was reckoned that some 466 English ships were seized and their crews enslaved in the Berber states between 1609 and 1616, the irony was that they fell victim to a system commanded not by barbarians, but by Christians such as Prospero.⁶

Power at its most barbaric is everywhere in Braudel's Mediterranean, and not limited, as the so-called Barbary Legend would have it, to Islam. “What kind of history have we been taught,” he asks, in the acid style of his protégé, Foucault, “that these acts, familiar to seamen of all nationalities, should seem so astonishing?”⁷ It is a question which helps situate those successive deeds of enslavement and liberation which propel the plot of The Tempest, from the moment when Sycorax employs techniques perfected in Algiers to “confine” Ariel “By help of her most potent ministers … Into a cloven pine” (274-79). For like Marlowe in The Jew of Malta and Dido Queen of Carthage, Shakespeare highlights what the New Historicists occlude, that to sail to the Ottoman Regencies of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis, was to traffic in an entire economy driven by the corso (or lottery) of the slave market, and regulated, as Stephen Clissold details in The Barbary Slaves, for the lucrative turnover of capture and ransom. Prospero's exacting negotiations to free Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, and his aristocratic hostages, belong precisely to this trade in redemption, which confounded Eurocentrism by revolving not on the enslavement of Africans, who were employed as “more potent ministers” or guards, but the bondage of Europeans, captured in raids on Naples, Provence, or even, in 1627 on Iceland. In 1631 237 peasants, including wives and children, seized from Baltimore in Ireland, were auctioned in Algiers, according to the redemptionist priest Pierre Dan, who guessed that a million Europeans had at one time tasted slavery, in a white slave population of 25,000 at Algiers and 7,000 at Tunis.⁸ This was the cycle, then, into which Shakespeare's Neapolitans traded “the King's fair daughter Claribel,” to be one of the wives of the Dey of Tunis; and out of which came Caliban, bastard of Sycorax, a “blue-ey'd” Algerine slaveowner (2.1.70; 1.2.269). So, as Prospero prepares to “manacle” the neck and feet of Ferdinand (462), the chain forms a link in that grim nexus that bound captor to captive across Braudel's Mediterranean; as when:

A Redemptionist Father returned to Leghorn from a mission to Tunis just as a shipload of captured Moslems was brought in. They were Tunisians, and amongst them the Christian ex-slaves recognized some who had been their own masters. Some of the ex-captives jeered over this sudden turn of fortune. But others were filled with fear at the sight of their old masters. They could not believe that they were free. These victims had lost their chains, but their minds still bore the brand of slavery: “Your turn today, mine, perhaps, tomorrow.”⁹

“It was mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape / The pine and let thee out”: though he threatens to “peg” Ariel in oak fetters until he “hast howled away twelve winters” (291-93), Prospero's intervention in this slave economy is evidently less that of a colonist than that of a redemptor. The complexity of this role can be glimpsed from the story of one of the most famous of hostages, Miguel de Cervantes, captured by corsairs in 1575 on a voyage, like that of Shakespeare's (presumably Spanish) courtiers, from Naples. Enslaved in Algiers for five years, Cervantes led four mass escapes before being ransomed by redemptionists, but was compromised by his sexual liaisons with a Moorish woman and his master, Hassan Pasha, a Venetian pirate. These experiences inspired both the “carefully shaded picture of relationships between Christians and infidels” in his play, Life in Algiers, and the portrait of the typical renegade in Don Quixote as “morally a good man, who treated his captives with much humanity.”¹⁰ It is not necessary to imagine, as Spanish critics do, an actual meeting between novelist and playwright, to see how this Cervantine empathy with “the drama of the thousands lost in the clash of civilizations” might influence Shakespeare's referral of the events of The Tempest back to “Algier” and the ironic banishment of Sycorax from the metropolis of bondage (261). In 1609 Cervantes would join a redemptionist Confraternity of Slaves; but in England the instant legacy of this ex-slave was a genre of pirate plays, with titles like A Christian Turn'd Turk, invoking not the barbarity of Islam, but the reversibility of slave and master. For when the Spanish writer ended his comedy with a chorus of ransomed captives praying for pardon, he broke “the conventions of a Manichean universe that would oppose good and bad,” according to his biographer, by staging his own belief in “the ambiguity of the exchanges transacted between Christendom and Islam.”¹¹ It was a relativism unprecedented in Renaissance theater, but which would later be crucial to Prospero's traffic with the Barbary slaves and slavers:

                              Two of these fellows you
Must know and own. This thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.

(5.1.275-76)

For three centuries the escape from the seraglio would form one of the salacious themes of orientalism; but in The Tempest there is no release from the underworld for Claribel. As O. Mannoni commented in his study of the psychology of colonization, Prospero and Caliban, “The colonial situation is portrayed in The Tempest even more clearly than in Robinson Crusoe,” as one of dependence by the colonizer.¹² So, if Mannoni's work is not quoted by New Historicists, that may be because it depicts slave and slave-trader as mutually incarcerating. Yet reoriented towards a Mediterranean context, the cries of Prospero's captives for “Freedom, highday!” and “release from my bands” (2.2.181; 5.1.327), seem as keyed to the medieval discourse of redemptionism, with its Catholic missions and Jewish brokers, as to the modern discourse of colonialism. The Tempest is no Fidelio; but its spectacle of sailors freed with “roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains” (233), had its analogue in the processions of ransomed hostages which danced through European cities, in France as late as 1785. And it is in this quest for escape and repatriation that Shakespeare's comedy departs most from the Virginia pamphlets, with their commitment to westward domination. Here, as even the New Historicists concede, “Prospero's Mediterranean isle steadfastly resists the colonial analogy,” since his prisoners “had been traveling east; had been trying to go home, and do go home in the end.”¹³ They do so, moreover, in exchange for the pardon of their captor, whose own freedom is thereby made conditional on their emancipation. In July 1611 James I did indeed grant English pirates pardon on condition they released their victims and returned all ships as “bravely rigged as when (they) first put out to sea” (224). That one of them, Peter Easton, chose to remain “a king himself,” and was promptly made a marquis by the Duke of Savoy, says a lot about power in Shakespeare's Mediterranean. But that Prospero does realize the fantasy of a contemporary ballad about the pardon of Jack Ward, suggests how much was at stake in London:

Strike up, ye lusty gallants, with music loud and drum,
For we have descry'd a rover upon the sea is come …
For he hath sent unto our king, the sixth of January,
Desiring that he might come in, with all his company;
“And if your king will let me come, till I my tale have told
I will bestow for ransom full thirty ton of gold.
Go tell the King of England, go tell him this from me,
If he reign king of all the land, I will reign king at sea.”(14)

“Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs” (5.1.118-19): the ironic reversal of king and pirate on which The Tempest ends can be keyed very precisely to the transformation of English policy in the period of its commission. For the specific problem of Mediterranean piracy had been staged already in London, when the young Prince Henry was saluted as Prince of Wales by the Lord Mayor in a sea pageant that climaxed, on 6 June 1610, with pyrotechnics to represent a merciless military solution. Anthony Munday's text, London's Love to Prince Henry, shipped a “worthy fleet of citizens” onto the Thames to enact a water fight in which “A Turkish Pirate, prowling on the seas to find a booty,” raked a flotilla of merchant vessels with “shot upon shot very fiercely,” until “two men of war made in to help,” and “after a long and well fought skirmish,” in which “divers men were hurled over into the Sea … proved too strong for the Pirate,” whose flagship was finally blown up with “a whole battery of rare and admirable fireworks.”¹⁵ Preceded by tableaux in which the “deformed sea-shapes” of a dolphin and whale were changed into Amphion and the nymph Corinea to bring greetings from Wales and Cornwall, this spectacle was designed to publicize the need for armed convoys to protect English shipping from the “spoil and rapine” of the Barbary corsairs; so it was the more pointed that when Shakespeare set his scene with an act of gunpowder piracy on the same high seas, it was as an overture to a drama of marine salvage. The Tempest has recently been connected with Munday's romance Primaleon, featuring escape from an Enclosed Isle;¹⁶ but Shakespeare's revision of the bellicose London's Love suggests a more immediate dialogue between the court playwright and City propagandist. And the topicality of Prospero's benign metamorphosis of naval fire-power is only amplified by new research which suggests that the very costumes worn by Richard Burbage and John Rice of the King's Men as Amphion and Corinea were recycled for Caliban and Ariel.¹⁷ Shakespeare was generating a comedy of seachanges, it appears, out of some very “fishlike” yet “marketable” material (2.2.26; 5.1.266).

An aristocrat “for the liberal arts / Without a parallel,” who forfeits the title of “prime duke” to his rapacious family through absorption in “secret studies”; is hurried into exile accompanied only by a young girl; plots revenge with his books and “brave utensils”; arms a roving force to raid and seize “the King's ship”; confronts his hostages in ducal robes to demand his restoration; but agrees to break his “staff” and retire to his library in return for pardon (1.2.71-77, 110, 224; 3.3.94; 5.1.54, 310): Prospero's story has been idealized as a Virgilian epic, but belongs as much, it seems, to the genre of pirate adventure. Its first recorded performance was at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and this firework display on All Saints' Day might offer some clue to its theme of persecution and pardon. In fact the occasion has been ignored in favor of a later date in 1613, when the comedy was restaged to honor the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, and the Virginia colony had survived long enough to seem a viable investment. No one has considered the implications of what may have been the original context: one of feverish diplomacy over the proposed marriage of the Prince of Wales to Caterina, daughter of Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany. Yet Prospero's plot to regain his dukedom does coincide exactly with Tuscan policy, which was to restore independence to Milan, whose usurping Duke was actually Philip II, and to blockade Naples, the other Italian city under Spanish occupation. In 1610 Henry IV of France had been about to liberate Milan by arms when he was assassinated; and it was to maintain his anti-Spanish league that his namesake now acquiesced in a Medici alliance. In August 1611 portraits were exchanged; in September the bride won freedom of worship in consideration of a dowry of 600,000 crowns; on 21 October the Medici envoy gloated how English Catholics were rejoicing that the “prince now turns to Tuscany for a bride;” and a week later The Tempest was performed.¹⁸ It cannot be chance, therefore, that the match depended at that moment on a pardon offered to an exiled duke whose story was precisely Prospero's.

“He was a person of great learning and parts,” recorded the antiquarian William Dugdale, “of stature tall and comely, strong, valiant, and famous at the art of tilting, singularly skilled in all Mathematic Learning, but chiefly in Navigation and Architecture, a rare Chemist and of great knowledge in Physic.” To Antony Wood he was “a complete gentleman, an exact seaman, a good navigator, and an excellent architect;” but Horace Walpole ironized that “considering how enterprising and dangerous a minister he might have been, and what talents were called forth by his misfortunes, it would seem to have been happy both for this duke and his country that he was unjustly deprived of the honors to which his birth gave him pretensions.”¹⁹ Don Roberto Dudleo, Duca di Northumbria, as he styled himself, was the son of Elizabeth's favorite, the Earl of Leicester, and grandson of the Northumberland who lost his head and dukedom for installing his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, as queen. Roberto's claim to this dukedom was formally accepted by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1620, as much for his “knowledge and rare ingenious inventions,” as his blood; but when he burst into Tuscany in 1607 he announced himself to the Grand Duke with the title. He was first in a position to “require” his dukedom, as Prospero does (132), in 1611, because it was he who was charged with securing papal indulgence for a Medici to marry the militant Protestant Prince. Through the influence of a “good old lord” (5), Sir Thomas Chaloner, Prince Henry's Chamberlain, who had tutored them both and was the “chief foundation of this match,” Dudley thus found his zenith dependent on “a most auspicious star,” which he could either court or let his fortunes “ever after droop” (1.2.181-84).²⁰ Editors infer some link between The Tempest and Henry, eulogized in stellar imagery by poets such as Dryaton for his naval and colonial ambitions, but it is Dudley's role in this strategy that suggests how fraught a commission this may have been. For what had made this pretend duke so indispensable was his success as the most enterprising of pirates.

“We granted you leave to travel,” King James thundered, “in hope that you might thereby prove of service to our State. We now understand that you bear yourself inordinately, attempting many things prejudicial to our Crown, which we cannot suffer to endure.” Dudley had created a sensation in 1605 by abandoning his wife and eloping to France with a teenage cousin, Elizabeth Southwell, a maid of the Queen, in fury at failure to prove his legitimacy in a melodramatic Star Chamber trial. After converting to Catholicism, the couple sailed to Pisa early in 1607 with a pair of servants, it was said, and £80 (though Dudley had transferred £40,000 to his Italian account). In Florence, however, Ferdinand had instantly made Dudley overlord of the Tuscan shipyards, on the strength of his expertise as “nephew of three Grand Admirals of England” and brother-in-law of Cavendish, the circumnavigator.²¹ The first ship built to his design, the John the Baptist, was launched in March 1608, in time to ambush the Turkish treasure fleet and “with but little help,” he bragged, “capture 9 vessels, 700 prisoners, and jewels valued at two million ducats.” At Dudley's instigation the Grand Duke then began “to entice English mariners and shipwrights into service,” Sir Henry Wotton relayed, buy “ordance from English ships and take English pirates under his protection,” until his “fleet consisted principally of English sailors.” One of these “sailors corrupted from religion and allegiance” was the corsair, Ward, whom James condemned in January 1609, as it became clear that Dudley, declared a rebel by the English envoy, planned to rig a blockade between Tunis and Leghorn, which he had fortified.²² This private war would eventually lead the renegade to secure a papal embargo on English trade, “by reason of the unjust occupation and confiscation of his Dukedom”; but its targets were obvious from 1608, when he equipped an expedition to the Caribbean, crewed by English slaves and “commanded to those parts by order of Grand Duke Ferdinand, his lord.”²³ They were his Rich and Sidney cousins, who had stolen his birthright by contesting his legitimacy, and as projectors of the Bermuda and Virginia Companies, were changing America into something “rich and strange” (402) for England.²⁴

In his six-volume treatise published in 1646 as Arcano del Mare, pride of place goes to the maps the Duke had had engraved; and of these, the one that prompts most pride is the chart of Trinidad drawn for the 1608 expedition, by means of which, “and instructions in the author's own hand, the Captain went and returned prosperously, and although he had never been in the West Indies before, yet he achieved his voyage without loss.” Dedicated to Ferdinand II, Dudley's map provides a perfect analogue of the overdetermined text of The Tempest, with its inscription of English and Italian politics onto a New World geography and people: “who were of those Caribs who eat human flesh,” we are advised, “six of whom were presented to their Highnesses in Florence,” though but “One survived, who afterwards served for some years the Cardinal Medici, and learned to speak the Italian tongue passably well.”²⁵ Like the designs for forts Dudley smuggled him, this map illustrates those “secret studies” which drew Henry to the Duke, who “entertained no small hopes of returning to England by means of the Prince's favor,” Dudley Carleton attested, “to be employed in some special charge about the King's Navy.”²⁶ And it suggests a new source for Shakespeare's passage to America via Tunis, being based on Dudley's own expedition of 1594, when he had explored the Orinoco Delta a few weeks before Raleigh, and even named an island Dudleana. In 1600 he summarized this adventure for the Voyages of his brother-in-law, Richard Hakluyt; but the log kept for Robert Cecil by an officer, Abram Kendal, was never published, presumably because its realism would have upstaged Raleigh's self-promotion. It records, for instance, how, having claimed Trinidad for the Queen, the fleet suffered a tempest off “the Bermudes: a climate so far differing from the nature of all others, that we might think ourselves happiest when furthest from it.” One of his few biographers, James Pope Hennessy, wonders what impact Dudley's voyage had on writers, such as his cousin, the Countess of Pembroke at Wilton, where he stayed after his return.²⁷ In fact, Leicester's son would earn most fame fighting at Cadiz in his bark, the Nonpareil; but what resonates with The Tempest is his ordeal off “the still vex'd Bermoothes” (229), in a boat named after the Dudley emblem, the Ragged Staff:

For often before we have had dangerous gusts … but these were ever ordinary and their dangers still extraordinary, their dreadful flashing of lightning, the horrible claps of thunder, the monstrous raging of the swelling seas forced up into the air by the outrageous winds, all together conspiring in a moment our destruction and breathing out, as it were, in one breath the very blast of our confusion, so that, this being of all seafaring men delivered of a verity … hell is no hell in comparison (to the Bermudas) … But, at last when we expected nothing less than the splitting of sails, breaking of shrouds, spending of masts, springing of planks—in a word, the dreadful devouring of us all by some sea-swallowing whirlpool—we were most miraculously delivered … Thus as men prepared for God, always leading our lives as if we should die hourly, we passed on forward of our course towards the islands of Flowers (Azores) with a most foreseeable wind, sailing between the Bermudes and these islands with an incredible swiftness.²⁸

Editors have tracked the tornado in The Tempest to William Strachey's True Repertory of the Wrack, reporting the salvage of the 1609 Virginia convoy off Bermuda, which the dramatist is presumed to have read in manuscript; but as Kenneth Muir objects, “There is hardly a shipwreck in fiction” that does not itemize the same catalogue of wind and wreckage.²⁹ The Virginia pamphlets, which declare themselves tragi-comedy, read like a prospectus for financial disaster. By comparison, Dudley's logbook may be a corrective to Raleigh's Eldorado, but what characterizes it is its Elizabethan faith in a comic ending, imaged in the metaphor, to be deployed by Shakespeare, of the “never-surfeited sea” belching survivors (3.3.55). It was surely the contrast between the English fiasco and its Tuscan precursor which recommended Dudley, then, as a Prospero to London investors. It was he, after all, who had at first promoted the Levant trade by persuading Ferdinand to declare Leghorn a free port, “exceedingly open to all points of the compass,” in the words of the Persian traveler, Robert Shirley.³⁰ And if this Prometheus had tamed the elements, it was because, like Prospero, he had conjured his firepower “From the still-vexed Bermoothes” (1.2.229): that Isle of Devils where he had harnessed what the log calls “a substance resembling a fiery dragon, which fell into our sails and upon deck, passing from place to place, ready to set all on fire.” As he plotted his revenge by piloting a royal wedding, Dudley must indeed have seemed blessed by “this warning messenger, that vanished without any harm done unto our ships or any of our company,” which was “not so strange as true.” Strachey's report on St. Elmo's Fire for the Virginia Company, on which Ariel may draw, in fact echoes this older text, but without its belief that the fire “foretelleth some great thing to come.” Since Cecil was a key promoter of the Medici marriage, however, it seems likely Shakespeare had access to both manuscripts, and followed Dudley, now at a climacteric over his usurpers, in greeting the aerial message as propitious:³¹

                                                  At this hour
Lies at my mercy all mine enemies.
Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou
Shalt have the air at freedom.

(4.1.263-66)

Prospero's promise of liberty to Ariel has always seemed to underwrite what Stephen Greenblatt calls the “magic of art,” which “resides in the freedom of the imagination” from discourses of power. Thus, Ariel's capacity “to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curl'd clouds” (1.2.190-92), figures for Greenblatt the plenitude of the aesthetic space, which so transcends “coercion, discipline, and pardon,” that “it doesn't matter whether the story ‘really’ happened.”³² But what if, as Dudley's logbook hints, the fiery demon was once an avatar of gunpowder, and Prospero identifiable as the magus who had done most, according to the Tuscan envoy, to release English crewmen and cannon into the Mediterranean from Barbary and Bermuda?³³ The episode that follows the hurricane in the log begs just such a question about the relation of text to context, when it records how Dudley inspired his gunners during a battle in the Atlantic by staging a scene from The Spanish Tragedy on deck, and how, reciting “those verses of old Hieronymo,” he rewarded a page with a rifle, to replace one that “by charging and recharging, brake about his ears,” and a wounded sailor with “promise of an alms room in his hospital of Warwick.”³⁴ What Greenblatt calls the “unresolvable doubleness” of Prospero's isle, as site of both art and empire, was the very element, it seems, of this pretender, whose hope of pardon from King James was based partly on his friendship with Galileo, and readiness to divulge “the discoveries revealed in his telescope.”³⁵ Like Shakespeare's mage, this heir apparent could both reach for the stars, in Greenblatt's terms, and manipulate wretches who clung to “barren ground, long heath, brown furze” (1.1.66), or a hospital bed in Warwickshire. So, whether or not his voyage did inspire The Tempest, Roberto's scheme to reclaim his title does suggest how much its vision of plenitude, of “barns and garners never empty” (4.1.111), might have been prompted, as Greenblatt senses, by the “want, craving, and absence” of actual material possession.³⁶

Diplomatic correspondence from the time of The Tempest is punctuated by signals in which the disgraced duke promises London that in return for pardon he will “deliver all … calm seas, auspicious gales, / And sail so expeditious that shall catch / Your royal fleet far off” (5.1.313-16). Thus, he pledges that “Though unknown to him, he rejoices in zeal for the King's service, and wishes to be an instrument of good for his country.” Like Shakespeare's wizard, he riddles that “Though the matter, by its great importance, may seem strange and difficult,” it is vital “to the security of England. He has had long study and practice and can perform what he offers.” He makes these overtures, he swears, “out of pure loyalty, having received too many discourtesies from his friends and kindred, the greatest persons in the kingdom, to desire his return;” but will, as earnest, “gladly make of use to his country” his invention of a new type of battleship, “of such extraordinary force and swiftness that no three of the King's ships could stand against it.”³⁷ What concerns ministers, however, is Dudley's part in incidents like the one reported on 11 July 1611, when “Certain merchants of London are taken off Scilly by English pirates,” who now “have 40 ships and 2,000 men at their place of rendezvous in Barbary.”³⁸ For as their agents suspected and historians confirm, from Africa “English pirates headed for Leghorn with their plunder and sold it … Clearing-houses for such booty emerged by 1610,” and “Goods arrived there in abundance.” Thus, in October 1614, “two English pirate ships presented the Grand Duke with a gift of slaves” for safe-conduct of no less than nine galleons laden with spoils. According to Tenenti, it was this clearing-system, orchestrated by Dudley, which transformed piracy into a multinational business; so prospects would have looked alarming when on 5 October 1611 the Privy Council minuted that “The pirates refuse pardon and are gone to Florence to be commanded by Sir Robert Dudley.”³⁹ What London required most urgently from this sorcerer, evidently, was exactly the reassurance about its vanished crews and cargoes that Prospero gives Miranda:

Have comfort.
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touched
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul,
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink.

(1.2.25-32)

Editors have long concluded, as does Anne Barton, that any connection between the plot of The Tempest, with “its emphasis upon the sea, upon loss and recovery, travel, chastity, parents and children,” and the performance “at Court on Hallowmas night 1611 … is likely to remain a mystery;”⁴⁰ yet at least one member of that audience had been primed to decipher its topicality. He was the Venetian Ambassador, who reported on 19 July that with “the goods plundered from English vessels sold at Leghorn … many see the only remedy in the marriage of the Tuscan woman to the Prince of Wales.”⁴¹ Venetian dispatches in fact offer an ironic commentary on the cynicism of Shakespeare's audience, as they reveal that while the match was “generally loathed” in England, the marriage and pardon were urged as necessities by “merchants who have been plundered,” and specifically by the Levant Company.⁴² They orient the play, therefore, within a struggle that has been analyzed by Robert Brenner: between an emergent American lobby, led by Puritan adventurers such as Robert Rich and Robert Sidney, and the East Indian establishment, chaired by grandees such as Dudley's uncles, the Catholic Earls of Nottingham and Northampton.⁴³ And they confirm that it was Dudley, in concert with the latter, who prompted the marriage, “by means of letters to the Prince's Chamberlain,” expressly “to remove difficulty about the pirates, and grant them a port where they can bring goods without taxation, which would cause Leghorn to flourish.” So, if the Earl of Warwick, as he currently titled himself, was one model for Prospero, he lived up to the name, since, as Queen Anne let slip, “the quantity of gold passing” in bribes “into the hands of private individuals” in London “amounted to a million.” No wonder that Henry “lent his authority to this scheme, and wished to see the mariners of his kingdom augmented by those seeking refuge at Leghorn;” nor that his father now “condoned past crimes and turned his attention to sharing the piratical loot.” As spies counted the trees felled for Dudley's ships and pirates he converted, the only mystery in the autumn of 1611 was whether this Midas would accept a pardon or be “tempted to enter the service of the King of Spain,” since, as the Venetian envoy wrote in August:

The interested parties have begged a pardon, but as the pirates have already made great plunder, there is a doubt whether they will accept the conditions under which it has been obtained. If they do not, seeing that there are a number of very rich ships making now for London, which cannot escape the ambuscades, this market will receive a severe shock, and nor will the royal ships which they may send out be sufficient, for they cannot be in every place at once.⁴⁴

In her essay, “The pirate and the emperor: power and law on the seas,” Anne Pérotin-Dumon traces an epochal shift in cultural attitudes towards the English privateer, who begins the seventeenth century, like Ward, proclaimed in ballads as “a prince with authority to make war on the world,” but ends it despised by writers such as Defoe as a menace to the “bonds that unite civil society.”⁴⁵ It is therefore within a dying ethos that Prospero's appeal to be neither confined to an island nor “sent to Naples” to stand trial meets an expedient response (5.1.323); and all the ambiguities of the “gentleman of fortune” were present in Dudley's case, at the last hour of remission. Thus, though a royal navy squadron would not enter the Mediterranean to rescue the estimated 1500 English slaves until 1620, at the moment of The Tempest the Duke's power was so analogous to Prospero's that he could indeed offer to Prince Henry's mediator, Edward Cecil, to trade their lives. And in the wedding negotiations, where entreaties from his Catholic uncles, and even a secret letter from the Queen professing Catholicism, failed to move the Pope, the most famous English émigré, suspected of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, might yet prevail. Three weeks after Shakespeare's play was acted, at any rate, having had his crime mitigated from treason to contempt, Dudley signed a contract with Henry drafted to expedite his pardon: the sale for a song of the mansion he had forfeited when “proclaimed as a rebel,” to house the newly-weds. This deal saved the property from his grasping cousins; but in a memorandum the Duke set on record that “no motive induced him to pass so rich a castle at so low a price, except to give satisfaction for contempt … as Prince Henry was so confident the King would pardon the contempt, he sent to make a pardon ready for the King to grant it.”⁴⁶ We can guess Shakespeare had wind of this contract when he ended his play with Prospero's plea for an “indulgence” to set him free (338), for the castle in question was none other than Kenilworth: Leicester's “gorgeous palace” (4.1.152) in Warwickshire.

“Our revels now are ended” (148): if the banishment of Don Roberto did influence The Tempest, it was apt that a voyage to Trinidad via Tunis should end at Kenilworth, where young Shakespeare is supposed to have “heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back” saluting Elizabeth, and to have worn the badge of bear and staff as one of Leicester's players. But though the heir to Kenilworth rose to be Chamberlain to the Medici and devise court masques, he never justified Drayton's hopes, in a 1593 dedication, to be the patron of English drama. Nor did he ever flaunt in England the finery he designed for himself as Grand Master of his own Caesarean Order.⁴⁷ A year after The Tempest, he was still awaiting pardon when he wrote to remind the Prince how he had sold “Kenilworth for a small matter, only reserving to myself the Constableship of the Castle … so I may have some command there whenever I shall happen to be in England.” With this letter went a tome arguing that “Whoever is patron of the sea commands the land,” but before they arrived, Henry suddenly died, and with him the mercy for which the Don had bargained to break his ducal staff and abjure his rough piratic powers. Long ago he had lost Essex House and Warwick Castle to his cousins; but failure to win a papal indulgence for the “sun-rising” on which he “fastened all his hopes” cost him the last of his “cloud-capp'd towers” (152). Thus, amid “the lamentations of many gentlemen now at Florence who were the late Prince's servants,” the player-duke returned to the slave-trade “to outride sorrow;”⁴⁸ as his cousins pillaged the New World to buy the earldoms he claimed of Warwick and Leicester. Such is the narrative of empire and bondage New Historicism projects from The Tempest; but restored to Old World archives, Shakespeare's gunpowder plot also pleads for liberty and pardon. So, while Americans may be right to transpose the play to Virginia, Europeans can respond that had this Prospero retired to his “Milan” in Warwickshire, one of the many titles restored “in one voyage” (5.1.208) would have been his lost Lordship of the Manor of Stratford.

“In this worthy enterprise of bringing two hemispheres into one world,” trumpeted the publisher of the Arcano del Mare, “if one man is more eminent than others, it is this Duke of Northumberland, who, to make himself master of marine science, tore himself away from the great House where he had princely birth, and sacrificed full forty years in unveiling the mighty secrets of the sea.”⁴⁹ “No source has been discovered for the plot of The Tempest,” Muir regrets;⁵⁰ but it seems improbable that Shakespeare was unaware of this global impresario, whose tale must have taken the ears of Stratford “strangely” (313). For like Prospero, Roberto had grown a stranger to his estate by “being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76-77), such as the planning of the 1597 Islands Voyage, which sailed with “A Commendation by Her Majesty to the Great Emperor of China,” Hakluyt stated, “principally at the charge of the honourable Sir Robert Dudley.” And like Shakespeare's dethroned magician, the discoverer of Dudleana had found his dukedom “in a poor isle” (5.1.212), after being thrust from his palace by a treacherous conspiracy: “through forcible entry,” the Sheriff of Warwickshire deposed, “by servants of the Countess of Leicester on the castle of Kenilworth, then in the sole and quiet possession of Mr. Robert Dudley.” “Hurried aboard” the Nonpareil in “dead of darkness” (1.2.130, 144), with his young companion disguised as a page, Roberto had indeed been supplied by his old tutor with volumes he prized “above his dukedom” (168), and that today grace the Florentine Natural History Museum, beside his astrolabe and apparatus “to find the ebb and flow of tides.” So, whether or not Prospero's magic does refer to those black arts with which the Warwickshire seadog “set roaring war” in the Mediterranean sky, it seems unlikely that the circle which he draws to compass “the ebbing Neptune” (5.1.35-44) was imagined in ignorance of the work for which Dudley was hailed as “the world's wonder” in his own time: the study of “scientific or spiral navigation by Great Circles” he wrote at Kenilworth in 1599.⁵¹

“By far the greatest English chart-maker,” Dudley had completed four volumes of his magnum opus in English by 1611, yet critics of The Tempest have forgotten this magus who spanned its worlds;⁵² “probably suggested” the unpopular marriage it legitimated to engineer his own revenge;⁵³ set slaves logging to build the fleet that terrorized the seas where it takes place; and may even have cued its subplot of Trinculo and Stephano through his exploitation of the twin redemptionist orders: the Trinitarians and Knights of San Stephano.⁵⁴ Yet it is his claim to the escheated Stratford, one of “diverse fair lordships” he looked to inherit from his uncle Ambrose, which raises the most intriguing implications for The Tempest.⁵⁵ For had Henry carried his Italian bride to Kenilworth, the manor's usurping Lord, the Puritan Edward Greville, would have been displaced by this convenor of the “knot of bastard Catholics” who had made Florence a hotbed of conversion. Such were the hopes conveyed to Rome by a mysterious “English visitor,” who affirmed to the papal inquiry on the marriage that, while “English Catholicism is almost extinct … the English will follow the Crown into Jewry, if need be.”⁵⁶ Whether or not this emissary was Dudley, the quip illuminates the religious subtext of Shakespeare's comedy, which, as Orgel perceives, has more to do with James's ecumenical plans for his children than the actual Protestant wedding The Tempest was performed to celebrate in 1613. Editors such as Kermode who assume that Prospero's masque is redundant in “the version played in 1611, when no marriages or betrothals were celebrated,” have allowed their New World to eclipse the Old; but it cannot be coincidence that the nuptials Shakespeare's exorcism did precede on All Saints' Day were to be contingent on the homecoming of a persecuted Catholic Lord to Stratford. Nor that, through all his years of exile, Dudley's staunchest allies were two other cousins, William and Philip Herbert: that “most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren,” the dedicatees of the First Folio, where the first text printed was The Tempest.⁵⁷

“Amongst the famous rank of our sea-searching men,” boasted Drayton in 1622, Warwickshire could claim “Sir Robert Dudley, by sea that sought to rise,” and “Hoist sails with happy winds to th'Isles of Trinidado.”⁵⁸ As Hugh Trevor-Roper exclaims, it seems extraordinary that this transatlantic voyager, who was “the most important Englishman in Italy,” should be “so forgotten, in Tuscany as in England.” And it seems equally surprising that this “Italianized duke” from Stratford, who stood at the center of the world of “shipwrights, cartographers and pilots,” is never associated with The Tempest, even though the expedition to which it may allude foundered on a shore where, a dozen years before, Dudley had “landed / To be the lord on't” (5.1.161).⁵⁹ The reason was implicit, however, when Drayton insinuated that the winds which swept a Midlander to Trinidad would never waft him safely home. James I sealed the papers on which Dudley had staked his legitimacy to appease his cousins, who by 1612 were in hock to the Duke of Savoy, a rival for the Stuart match.⁶⁰ And after Prince Henry's death, his bid to ingratiate himself with yet another treatise, exhorting the King to “bridle the impertinency of parliaments” by martial law and gunboats, consigned him to oblivion as a despotic Machiavel.⁶¹ Though he survived to see Charles I approve his title, by the time he died in 1649, he was remembered chiefly as patentee of the Earl of Warwick's Powder: a panacea prescribed by Shakespeare's son-in-law, John Hall. Yet this anti-Duke, whose crimes chained Kenilworth to Barbary and Bermuda, may explain some paradoxes of Prospero, such as a fixation on marriage and silence about his own wife: with the deserted Duchess Dudley, a friend of the Lucys, residing at Stoneleigh Abbey, a mere “ten leagues” from Stratford, Shakespeare could glance only obliquely at the fate of “Widow Dido” (2.1.80, 245). Above all, this pirate's plea for pardon reprieves The Tempest, however conditionally, from the tragedy of colonialism, prompting us to share with our “good hands” (5.1.329) a fortune in ransom and redemption.

“Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet him … on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things”: Conrad's characterization of the missionary Kurtz alerts us to the probability that even at the outset of the imperial enterprise the creator of Prospero would have seen in it the avidity for “lying fame, sham distinction, all the appearances of success and power,” which propelled the ships and men as they sailed from London: “adventurers and settlers; king's ships and ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade, and commissioned ‘generals’ of East India fleets. Hunters of gold and pursuers of fame.”⁶² But in a recent essay entitled “All Saints' Night” the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy asks us also to honor the ghost of “a colonial humanism that might be thought of as stupid, absurd, or reprehensible, and has been condemned by history, but which cannot be described as infamous.” In particular, it is the European involvement in North Africa, Lévy argues, which proves empire “an event the nature of which muddies our terms of reference,” as “any distinction which appears clear-cut in the light of historical judgment, or behavior I would be embarrassed to countenance today, was infinitely more blurred at the time,” when someone could be implicated in colonialism “without being a monster.”⁶³ Such is the ambivalence restored by returning The Tempest to its Mediterranean context, where for three centuries, historians remind us, it was the problem of white slavery which necessitated a European presence in Africa, and where “the massive campaigns to raise funds for ransoms, the widely circulated accounts of the redemptionist fathers, the processions held when ransomed captives returned, the visibility of former captives begging alms, the chains and shackles hanging in churches,” all confirmed the complexity of the relationships between races and religions, slaves and slavers.⁶⁴ And no one personified that complexity more than Duke Roberto Dudley: pirate, redemptor, and renegade Lord of Shakespeare's Stratford.

Notes

1. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Routledge, 1986), 115.

2. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954), xxiii and xxxiii-iv; and The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 31; Edmund Malone, An Account of The Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakespeare's Tempest were derived (London, 1809). All quotations of Shakespeare are from the Arden editions and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, tr. Sîan Reynolds, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1972), 1:116.

4. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, ed. James W. Harper (London: Black, 1971), 3.3.55-56.

5. Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 1:146 and 574, documents 67 and 242, 13 June 1606 and 6 April 1623; see also the proclamations against pirates of 30 September 1603; 12 November 1604; and 8 January 1609, 1:53-56; 98-99; and 203-6. Braudel, 629 and 35.

6. Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:880-87; Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580-1615 (London: Routledge, 1967), chap. 4, esp. 77 and 86; John Smith, True Travels and Adventures of Captain John Smith (London: 1630), quoted in Christopher Lloyd, English Corsairs on the Barbary Coast (London: Collins, 1981), 72; William Lithgow, The Total Discourse of the Rare Adventures of William Lithgow (London: 1632), quoted in Lloyd, 53.

7. Braudel, 867.

8. Braudel, 869; Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1992), esp. 52-55 and 102-30. The most important account of the Mediterranean slave economies remains Godfrey Fisher, Barbary Legend: War, Trade and Piracy in North Africa, 1415-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

9. Clissold, 52.

10. Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, tr. J. R. Jones (New York: Norton, 1990), 273; Ellen G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 73.

11. Canavaggio, 91, 123, 222 and 273. Robert Osborne's 1612 play, A Christian Turn'd Turk, was based on the adventures of Jack Ward in Tunis.

12. Dominique O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, Pamela Powesland (New York: Praeger, 1956), 105.

13. Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 221.

14. “The Famous Sea Fight between Captain Ward and the Rainbow,” anon.; quoted in C. Firth, Naval Songs and Ballads (London: Navy Records Society, 1908), 30. The offer of a pardon was repeated frequently during the months preceding and following the first performance of The Tempest: see Calendar of State Papers Domestic, James I, (London: Longman, 1858), vol 9, 17 July 1611; 7 February 1612; and 26 November 1612. Hereafter abbreviated CSPD. For Peter Easton, see Lloyd, 66.

15. Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday, ed. David M. Bergeron (New York: Garland, 1985), 43-44.

16. See Gary Schmidgall, “The Tempest and Primaleon: A New Source,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1986); 423-39.

17. Michael Baird Saenger, “The Costumes of Caliban and Ariel Qua Sea-Nymph,” Notes and Queries 42 (1995), 334-36. I am grateful to Dr. Gabriel Egan of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, for drawing my attention to this article.

18. For a detailed account of this sequence of events, see Roy Strong, “England and Italy: The Marriage of Henry Prince of Wales,” in For Veronica Wedgwood: Studies in Seventeenth Century History, ed. Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (London: Collins, 1986), 59-88. The relationship of The Tempest to the Hallowmas themes of persecution and pardon is discussed in R. Chris Hassel, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), 167-70.

19. William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (London: John Osborn, 1730), 252; Antony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses 2nd ed. (1721; London: 1813), 3:260. Dudley's life was not in the first edition (1691); Horace Walpole, Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (London: 1806), 5:339.

20. The patent of the Emperor Ferdinand II recognising Dudley as legitimate heir of his grandfather is reproduced in John Temple Leader, Life of Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland (Florence: Barbera, 1895), 197-201. For Dudley's letter of introduction to Grand Duke Ferdinand, dating from early in 1606, where he claimed “la Duchee de Northumberland, la Comtee de Warwick et celle de Leicester,” see Leader, 182. For Dudley's role in the Medici marriage negotiations and his friendship with Sir Thomas Chaloner, see Leader, 65; R. Strong, 71; and Henry Prince of Wales and England's Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 80-81. For Chaloner as the “chief foundation” of the Medici marriage, “to whom promises have not been wanting if he should dispose the Prince to the match,” see Thomas Birch, The Life of Henry Prince of Wales (London: 1760), 218, and 16 April 1612 in Calendar of State Papers Venetian, ed. Horatio Brown (London: Longman, 1905), 12:329. Herafter abbreviated CSPV.

21. See Arthur Gould Lee, The Son of Leicester: The Story of Sir Robert Dudley, Titular Earl of Warwick, Earl of Leicester, and Duke of Northumberland (London: Gollancz, 1964), 123-25, 129. For the Howard navy connection, see Robert Dudley, Direttorio Marittimo, unpub. ms., quoted in The Voyage of Robert Dudley to the West Indies, 1594-1595, ed. George F. Warner (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899) 2nd series, no. 3, xii. The first of Dudley's three wives was Margaret Cavendish, a sister of the circumnavigator, Thomas. When the latter died at sea in 1592, his ships, the Leicester and Roebuck, were inherited by Dudley for his Trinidad expedition. Dudley's connection with the American colonists was further cemented by the marriage of Margaret's sister, Douglas, to Richard Hakluyt: (Voyage of Dudley, x-xi).

22. Launched in March 1608, the San Giovanni Battista had been the “ship made at Leghorn by the Earl of Warwick,” to be “more perfect than any,” whose design had been sent in 1607 to Sir Thomas Chaloner in London: (Voyage of Dudley, 55). Wotton quoted in Lee, 136; Lloyd, 48-53 and 85; Tenenti, 85; Larkin and Hughes, 203-6. Tuscan attacks on English shipping date from Dudley's arrival in 1607. On 29 January 1609 Venetian despatches reported “great resentment” in London against the Grand Duke, a proposal to prohibit Florentine imports in retaliation for the blockade, and a threat to expel the Tuscan Ambassador (CSPV, 11:224).

23. Roberto Dudley, Arcano del Mare (Florence: Francesco Onofri, 1646-7), 3:47-48, reproduced in Warner, 93-97. For Dudley's promotion of the Florentine expedition, see English and American Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550-1646, ed. Joyce Lorimer (London: Hakluyt Society, 1986), 2nd series, no. 171, 29-34. And for his private trade war, see Lee, 192-94. The “letters of marque” issued by the Curia Apostolica authorising him to recover eight million ducats compensation for loss of his dukedom by impounding all English vessels “wherever they may be found,” are reproduced in Leader, 203-4.

24. For the American investments of Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle, afterwards Earl of Leicester, see “The Names of the Adventurers for Virginia” (1620), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992), 2:278. For the American interests of the Rich clan, especially Sir Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, see The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615-1646, ed. Vernon A. Ives (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984).

25. Quoted in Warner, 95.

26. Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603-1624, ed. Maurice Lee (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1972), 135-36.

27. “The Voyage of Sir Robert Dudley to the isle of Trinidad,” in Principal Navigations, ed. Richard Hakluyt (London: 1600; repr. 1903-5), 10:203-12; “Robert Dudley's Voyage to the West Indies, Narrated by Abram Kendal, Master,” in Warner, 52-53; James Pope-Hennessy, West Indian Summer (London: Batsford, 1943), 32.

28. Extracted from Warner, 53-57.

29. Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 278.

30. Quoted in Lloyd, 77. For the importance of Leghorn in the development of piracy, see also Braudel, 878-79.

31. Warner, 56. For Cecil as the “Right Honourable” to whom the log of Dudley's voyage is apparently addressed, see Warner, 54; as chief promoter of the Medici match, Strong, 71; and as “General Cecil, the person entrusted with the negotiations,” see CSPV, 12:329, 6 April 1612. For the evil reputation of Bermuda, see especially Jean Kennedy, Isle of Devils: Bermuda under the Somers Island Company, 1609-1685 (London: Collins, 1971).

32. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 158-63, esp. 159 and 163.

33. Lee, 131.

34. Warner, 61-62.

35. Greenblatt, 158; for Dudley's friendship with Galileo, which dates from 1609, see Lee, 163.

36. Greenblatt, 160.

37. CSPD: James I, 9:222, 233 and 245: 31 January, 11 May and 15 July 1614.

38. CSPD: James I, 9:55.

39. CSPD: James I, 9:79; Tenenti, 85.

40. The Tempest, ed. Anne Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 23-24.

41. CSPV, 12:396, 19 July 1612.

42. CSPV, 12:42 and 283, 16 September 1610 and 4 February 1612.

43. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Trade, 1550-1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). In 1609 the Venetian Ambassador recorded that “the King wishes to extirpate” the pirates and “said he would never pardon them,” but “the avarice” of the Earl of Northampton, who “earnestly requests permission to reprieve them,” and “the interests of some great minister [Cecil] place obstacles in his way” (CSPV, 11:311-12 and 394, 6 August and 8 December).

44. CSPV, 11:301, 309, 311-12, 430 and 435, 18 July, 1 and 6 August 1609; 25 and 27 February 1610; 12:42, 44, 67, 170, 192, 274, 283, 300, 327-9 and 388-89, 16 and 18 September, 8 November 1610; 25 June, 9 July, 11 August 1611; 4 February, 2 March, 6 April, 5 and 7 July 1612. For Dudley's activities at Leghorn, and the hostile reactions in London, see also 11:224, and 12:53, 101, 121, 138, 140, 178, 289 and 393

45. Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “The pirate and the emperor: power and law on the seas,” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 196-227, esp. 214-17.

46. Sir Edward was the nephew of Robert Cecil; for his role as intermediary, see Strong, 46-47 and 80-81. For the letter from England's Catholic peers, see Strong, 81, and for Queen Anne's letter to Pope Paul V, signed “humilissima et diligentissima figliuola et serva,” in the Archivio de Stato, Florence (Miscellanea Medicea 293, inserto 29, no. 2), Strong, 70. For Dudley's memorandum on the sale of Kenilworth in exchange for a royal pardon, see Lee, 149; and for the suspicions of his sympathy with the Gunpowder Plotters, see CSPD, 8:317, 21 May 1606.

47. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.1.150. For Dudley's, later Leicester's Men, and the “princely pleasures” at Kenilworth in 1575, see Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 89; Michael Drayton, The Shepherd's Garland (London: Thomas Woodcock, 1593); “To the Noble and Valourous Gentleman, Master Robert Dudley: Enriched with all Virtues of the Mind and Worthy of all Honourable Desert,” in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 1:46. See also Lee, 55. Dudley's manuscript Habiti delli Duchi et Principi dell'ordine Cesaro armati secondo l'inventione del Signor Duca di Nortumbria is reproduced and illustrated in Leader, 102-5.

48. Lee, 156-57; Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 14 December 1612, in Carleton, 135. Within weeks of The Tempest being acted it was already being said that “the pardon offered the pirates comes too late” to stop them “going over to Florence” (CSPD, 9: 60, 109 and 115, 17 July 1611, 4 and 29 January 1612).

49. Arcano del Mare, ed. Jacopo Lucini (2d. ed., Venice, 1661); quoted in Lee, 228.

50. Muir, 278.

51. Lee, 50-51, 90-91; Leader, 39-40.

52. Edward Lynham, British Maps and Map Makers (London: Nelson, 1904), quoted in Lee, 229.

53. Leader, 65.

54. For the rival Redemptionist orders of San Stephano and the Holy Trinity, see Clissold, 12-14, 108-10, 117-18 and 122-25.

55. Lee, 192; Edmund K. Chambers, Sources for a Biography of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 10.

56. Sir Henry Wotton to Cecil, quoted in Lee, 128; James D. Mackie, Negotiations Between King James VI and I and Ferdinand I, Grand Duke of Tuscany (St. Andrews: Humphrey Milford, 1927), 93 and 98. On the basis of talks with the “English visitor,” the memorandum concludes that “the Pope may sanction the match,” because “The coming of the princess will ease the sufferings of English Catholics,” and her “followers will begin to convert England” (75, 85 and 89). In a long list of reasons, the marriage is recommended as likely to “issue happily,” just as a Bourbon-Valois match led to the St. Bartholemew's Day massacre (78). This was precisely the fear expressed in London, where it was “openly said that if a Tuscan woman comes here she will cause the same damage that a Tuscan woman has caused to France” (CSPV, 12:396, 19 July 1612).

57. The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 31; F. Kermode, xxiii; Schoenbaum, 258. For Dudley's reliance on the Herbert brothers, see Lee, 92, 168, 176 and 199. Philip's son, Lord Charles Herbert, died on a visit to Dudley in Florence in 1635 (Lee, 208-9).

58. Michael Drayton, The Second Part of Poly-Olbion (London: Augustine Mathews, 1622), 14:372-73, in Hebel, 406.

59. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Anti-Dukes of Northumberland,” Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 2 (1992): 50-70, esp. 61, 64 and 68.

60. In 1612-13 Robert Rich organised expeditions to both East and West Indies under commission of the Duke of Savoy; see Ives, 391.

61. Robert Dudley, A Proposition for His Majesty's Service to Bridle the Impertinences of Parliaments, quoted in Lee, 169-72. Possession of copies of the Proposition severely compromised Sir Robert Cotton in 1630 and the Earl of Strafford in 1642 (197-98).

62. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 137 and 237-38.

63. Bernard-Henri Lévy, “All Saints' Night: The French Algerian Cause,” in Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century, tr. Richard Veasey (London: Harvill Press, 1995), 288.

64. Friedman, 166.

A version of this essay was first given as a lecture to the 35th Congress of the Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur at the Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, in May 1995.