SOURCE: Cox, John D. “Recovering Something Christian about The Tempest.” Christianity & Literature 50, no. 1 (autumn 2000): 31-51.

[In the following essay, Cox offers a Christian interpretation of The Tempest based upon moral elements in the play, while considering contrasting twentieth-century idealist and materialist readings of the drama.]

Approaches to The Tempest have changed remarkably over the last fifteen years or so, as we have witnessed a shift in favor of postmodern literary theory. At one time, what are now thought of as “idealist” or “formalist” approaches were the only way in which the play was understood. Postcolonial readings became the norm, however, with the advent of New Historicism and cultural materialism, so that one now finds virtually unanimous assent to “materialist” ways of understanding The Tempest, as well as William Shakespeare's other plays. The difference is signaled in two remarkable editions of The Tempest: Frank Kermode's Second Arden (1954) and Stephen Orgel's Oxford (1987). Among other things, the transition from idealist to materialist readings seemed to bode ill for a Christian understanding of Shakespeare's last play. Suspicion of Christian motives underlies the materialist critique, especially when Christian affirmation appears in the mouths of the powerful and the privileged, as it does in The Tempest, and especially when Christian aspects of the play are tied to Renaissance social assumptions, as they are in Kermode's edition. What I would like to suggest here is that a distinctive Christian account of the play can be offered apart from either of the dominant interpretive paradigms that developed in the second half of the twentieth century, and that that distinctiveness enables a recovery of Christian interpretation in the heyday of postmodernism.¹

Let us begin, then, with Kermode's introduction, an unusually fine and influential example of what we would now be inclined to call “idealist” criticism. Kermode introduces the play as a recapitulation of ideas from classical and Christian tradition in symbolic and imagistic form. Insofar as the play relates to history, it relates to conscious literary and aesthetic traditions that Kermode takes to be characteristic of the period in question—such traditions as the difference between white and black magic, definitions of nobility in terms of virtue, cosmological correspondences, classical (especially Roman) literature, theories of allegory, and the Renaissance genre of romance or tragicomedy.² For Kermode, The Tempest is important because it testifies to Shakespeare's brilliance in combining disparate elements into an organic imaginative unity that also includes contemporary topical references to New World exploration and fashions of courtly drama, especially the masque.³

Very few people tell such stories about The Tempest any more, at least in publications about the play. In at least two cases influential critics who used to tell such stories in print have openly reversed themselves, retracting what they once said and owning something quite different in its place.⁴ The difference is broadly describable as “materialist,” because now dominant ways of interpreting The Tempest focus on the social and economic implications of the play rather than its conscious context of ideas and imagination—its “idealist” context. Stories about the idealist context have been widely characterized as intellectually bankrupt, socially oppressive, and even morally suspect. That is because conscious traditions—the history of ideas—are now thought more often to disguise social and economic relationships than to reveal them. That disguising or “occluding” is important for materialist critics because they see social and economic relationships as the basis for power relations, and power relations in turn provide the site where structural social injustice is created and perpetuated. The real business of criticism, then, is to move beyond or behind the explicit or even symbolic ideas of a text in order to understand how its ideas are shaped by material circumstances—by social and economic relations—and thus to expose the power relations implied by writing from the past, especially when that writing is influential in its own turn in shaping culture, as is the case with Shakespeare's plays.⁵

A useful illustration of the contrast between “idealist” and “materialist” stories about The Tempest is the way each has responded to Caliban. In an idealist reading, insofar as Caliban is sexually lustful, devilish, and “savage,” he is at the opposite pole from the chaste Miranda, or from the white magician and civilized ruler, Prospero, who controls Caliban's rebellious impulses. In other words, Caliban is related allegorically to the monster called Greedy Lust in Edmund Spenser's Legend of Chastity, as well as to the wild man of European folklore, who had been adapted in innumerable ways as a literary and iconographic motif, most recently in court masques, to which The Tempest is related in both general and particular ways.⁶ In Prospero's estimation Caliban is “A devil, a born devil,” the son of a witch and the devil himself, incapable of improvement, even when exposed to the humane benefits of civilization:

… on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers.

(4.1.188-92).

In this reading Caliban symbolizes the bestial, the depraved, and the degenerate in human nature and in human society, elements that can only be controlled, because they are inherently destructive, but that can never be expected to change, at least for the better. As Robert Pierce puts it, in his sole reference to Caliban in his “idealist” essay, “the unambiguous evil of Caliban, whose outward ugliness fits his inward state,” is the only evil that the innocent Miranda can recognize (“'Very Like” 173).

The materialist story of Caliban offers another version altogether of what happens to him. It begins with the material circumstances of Caliban's existence, particularly his social status as “a savage and deformed slave,” according to the First Folio's description of Caliban in the list of characters for the play (Orgel, ed., The Tempest, 95). As a slave he is deprived of all human dignity and forced to perform menial but apparently essential tasks for the man who enslaved him and who attempts to keep him in line with repressive physical and psychological punishment. As Prospero explains to Miranda, Caliban is necessary to them as a menial servant:

But as 'tis,
We cannot miss him. He does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us.

(1.2.310-13).

Caliban's circumstances, moreover, resemble those of New World native peoples in several particulars. His name is an anagram of “cannibal,” suggesting the New World cannibals who are described in Michel Montaigne's essay “Of Cannibals.”⁷ At first his response to the European newcomers was hospitable and friendly: he showed them “all the qualities o'th'isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.337-38), just as many native Americans did for newcomers from the Old World. By the time the play opens, however, a powerful European has reduced the native inhabitant of the island to slavery, and the European has accomplished this by using prototechnological control of the four elements to control Caliban's physical movements and to convince him that he can also control Caliban's own god, as Caliban acknowledges fearfully in an aside:

I must obey. His art is of such power,
It would control my dam's god Setebos
And make a vassal of him.

(1.2.371-73).

Caliban is thus effectively robbed of any cosmic resources of his own, as native peoples everywhere were robbed by Europeans who came armed with the determination and technology of subjugation, and Caliban therefore falls ready prey to a second wave of exploitative European invaders who make him drunk and mock him when, in his degraded religious outlook, he tries to worship them.⁸

Most tellingly, the materialist story of Caliban offers a very different account of the pivotal event that Prospero cites as his reason for enslaving the island's only native inhabitant. Here is Prospero's description of that event, in his most angry outburst at Caliban:

I have used thee—
Filth as thou art—with humane care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till though didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.

(1.2.345-48)

Caliban has no doubt that Prospero is alluding to attempted sexual relations between Caliban and Miranda, for in his retort he regrets only that he did not succeed: “O ho, O ho! Would't had been done! / Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (1.2.348-50).

Idealist readings of this exchange use it as the basis for identifying Caliban with bestial lust, opposed symbolically to Miranda, the image of noble chastity, but materialists again tell a very different story. Nothing the similarities of Caliban's story in other respects with that of native peoples in the New World, materialist critics point to the widespread colonizers' taboo concerning sexual relations between native men and European women—a taboo that ties together the patriarchal dominance of women with the colonial dominance of native peoples. In this version of events, Prospero's description is not necessarily an objective account of attempted rape; rather, Prospero follows a racist pattern, since he was bound to reject any approach that Caliban might have made to Miranda, no matter how innocent and well meaning it might have been (Orgel, ed., The Tempest 34; Sharp 276; Taylor 143). From this perspective Prospero's rejection of Caliban is paranoid.⁹ The racism that determines Prospero's reaction to Caliban is a strategy for maintaining colonial power and social dominance that parallels Prospero's patriarchal dominance of Miranda and his class-biased selection of a European prince as the only acceptable mate for his aristocratic daughter.

In the materialist story about The Tempest, Prospero's paranoid perception of Caliban's sexual maturation is consistent with other perceptions on the part of the European invader. Prospero is the sole source of the claim that Caliban is the son of the devil and a witch (1.2.319-20; 4.1.188). But European invaders routinely dismissed native peoples as devil worshippers: what better way to justify enslavement of other people than by mythologizing them as subhuman? Caliban's mother, Sycorax, is a witch, then, only in the perception of her European rival, but behind the status Prospero ascribes to her can be glimpsed the outlines of a shaman, whose power indeed rivals Prospero's because his primitive but effective technology is itself closely identified with the spirit world. In other words, the materialist story of The Tempest emphasizes that the play is a product of its culture—with all that we recognize to be the limitations of that culture—rather than of a superlative imaginative intelligence freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.

The Tempest includes much more than Caliban, of course, but the contrast I have just outlined is accurate in the way it delineates the difference between idealist and materialist stories about The Tempest as a whole. In the case of materialism, the story is ultimately Karl Marx's: his distinction between a culture's economic and social “foundation” and its ideological “superstructure” is the informing metaphor in a narrative of capitalism's rise and inevitable decline.¹⁰ Materialist literary criticism gives first priority to economic and social relationships, because literary theorists' notion of “the material base” is derived from Marx's metaphor of the “foundation,” just as that of “occlusion” is derived from Marx's metaphor of ideological “veils” hiding the economic truth of history (Lash 51-55). The metaphoric and narrative quality of materialist analysis is difficult to recognize only if one takes Marx's analysis as scientifically positive—as a universal, verifiable hypothesis about historical economic and social relationships. But to understand Marx that way is to create an idealist paradigm out of something that claims to be historicist, thus ironically denying the fundamental nature of Marx's enterprise (Lash 61-63, 99).

Recognizing the narrative foundation of materialist criticism helps to distinguish it, at the level of basic assumption, from criticism formed by a different story—the story of God's originating creative power and God's continuing presence in human experience and in the creation, expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.¹¹ The Christian story is just as much about history as the Marxist story is, maybe more so, and neither story can make a claim to universally verifiable scientific validity without denying its own essential nature. In short, they are rival stories.

As rivals, however, they are also siblings, sharing much more than their orientation to history. They share a common concern for justice, for example, which lies at the heart of Marx's social and economic analysis. In fact, what makes the materialist story of Caliban useful to a Christian interpretation is not the materialist story itself but Christian commitment to a story about justice. The moral challenge to slavery, for example, is deep-rooted in the Christian story, from the first attempts among the ancient Hebrews to spell out appropriate treatment of slaves, to Paul's admonition to a slave-owner to treat his slave “not now as a seruant, but aboue a seruant, even as a brother beloued” (Philem. 16),¹² to nineteenth-century evangelicals' efforts to eradicate slavery itself as a social institution.

One difference between the Christian story and its materialist sibling is that the former includes more than justice in social and economic relationships. For one thing, the Christian story includes other virtues besides justice: faith, hope, and love, for example, which in turn inform virtues like mercy, forgiveness, and patience. The three cardinal virtues are indeed transcendent in that they derive from something other than the material base, but they are not idealist falsifications as long as those who own them work to construct economic and social relationships in light of them.

It is appropriate, then, for Christian stories about The Tempest to look for Christian virtues in action and to ask whether and how those virtues are effective in human relationships. A good place to begin that search is by recognizing the historical existence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the kind of dramatic story that Robert G. Hunter calls “comedy of forgiveness.” Having suffered injustice and attempted murder at the hands of his brother Antonio and King Alonso years before, Prospero takes advantage of an extraordinary opportunity (not planned by himself) to overwhelm and subdue those who wronged him. In the end, however, when he has them completely at his mercy, his conversation with Ariel reminds him that.

The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.

(5.1.27-30)

Prospero's forgiveness of his penitent enemies is undoubtedly an expression of the Christian story in The Tempest, and it is rendered even clearer and more striking by his forgiveness of Antonio, whom he knows to be unrepentant:

You, brother mine, that entertained ambition,
Expelled remorse and nature, whom, with Sebastian—
Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong—
Would here have killed your king, I do forgive thee,
Unnatural though thou art.

(5.1.75-79)

This moment, as much as any in Shakespeare's plays, would seem to enact a virtue that derives from the teaching of Jesus: “Ye haue heard that it hathe bene said, Thou shalt loue thy neighbour, and hate thine enemie. But I say vnto you, Loue your enemies: blesse them that curse you: do good to them that hate you, and praye for them which hurt you, and persecute you” (Matt. 5:43-44).

Prospero's forgiveness of his enemies is not only a distinctive part of the Christian story in The Tempest; it is also a point at which the Christian and materialist stories about the play diverge sharply. In Orgel's estimation, for example, to take Prospero's forgiveness of Antonio seriously is to sentimentalize the play.¹³ What is really going on, Orgel argues (or, in other words, what forgiveness and reconciliation “occlude”), is a vindictive power move on Prospero's part. The quondam duke sets up Antonio for moral failure in order to sanction the return of his dukedom:

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault—all of them—and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know
Thou must restore.

(5.1.130-34)

Moreover, Orgel argues, Prospero sets up Miranda and Ferdinand for romance in order to ensure that after his own death the dukedom will revert to Naples without reverting to Antonio (ed., The Tempest 53-55). In this reading the point of the young peoples' romance is a power move on Prospero's part, whose design is to cut Antonio out of the succession. Orgel's point is consistent with the materialist assumption that power relations are what really count in human affairs, and other considerations such as virtuous action or romantic love are mere occlusions of power.

This understanding of Prospero's forgiveness is problematic, however, even on its own terms. If vindictive punishment were Prospero's aim, then his sparing of his enemies makes little sense. Rather than spare them and forgive them, the most obvious course would be to destroy them in the tempest while still magically preserving the ship, thus providing himself not only with the means of returning to Naples but also with a half true (but irrefutable) story that his enemies were destroyed in a storm. Preserving Antonio is far messier for Prospero than destroying him outright, and if punitive vindication were his real aim, it is difficult to see why he would choose such an awkward and imperfect way of going about it. This is not the choice of a Machiavellian prince.

More importantly, to ascribe merely political motives to Prospero's forgiveness is to miss the moral significance of what he does when possessed with virtual omnipotence. That he is so possessed and that he is aware of being so possessed the play leaves no doubt: he has worked long and hard to gain control of the natural elements, to prevent weapons from being lifted against him, to create an absolutely reliable and accurate espionage system, and in general to learn how to preserve as he wishes and destroy as he wishes. He literally embodies, in fact, the fantastic vision of kingly power that was repeatedly presented as a flattering image to King James in court masques (see Orgel, Illusion and “Platonic”). That Prospero actually possesses this kind of power and still recognizes the need for self-restraint and forgiveness of his enemies is perhaps the singly most remarkable feature of The Tempest. To deny it or to explain it away is to fail to respond to what is most profoundly miraculous about the play—not magic or the wonders of the island but Prospero's growing moral insight and capacity for moral action.¹⁴

Moreover, to construe Prospero's forgiveness of his enemies as a mere political maneuver is to understate the distinction that the play makes between Alonso and Antonio. For both Prospero uses the shipwreck to create illusory circumstances that test their moral fiber: Alonso believes his only son and heir to be drowned, and Antonio believes that he and Sebastian have a chance to effect a coup d'état against Alonso with impunity. In reacting to their respective illusions, each revels his character. Alonso comes to acknowledge his vulnerability and is thus prepared to entreat Prospero's pardon for past wrongs when they first meet again (5.1.117-18). Antonio, however, in strong contrast to his brother, takes advantage of an unexpected chance to attempt another political power play. If we are looking for a political opportunist in The Tempest, we can hardly do better than Antonio.

Orgel acknowledges the difference between Alonso and Antonio, but among Prospero's other faults Orgel identifies the failure of Prospero's magic to resolve Antonio's moral weakness: “Nothing, the action seems to say, not all Prospero's magic, can redeem Antonio from his essential badness; but the corollary to this is that Prospero's magic has not, on the whole, been employed to bring about the reform of Antonio” (ed., The Tempest 51). A misunderstanding is involved here, for what creates moral action is not (and never can be) the circumstances per se in which one demonstrates it but the volition, decision, and action that constitute one's active response to circumstances. In Antonio's case the response is unmistakably his own, and it is unmistakably vicious, given that his circumstances are identical to Alonso's.¹⁵ Given Antonio's irreducible viciousness, Prospero would seem admirably to follow the advice that Thomas More seems to offer to himself in Utopia regarding the exercise of juridical power: “What you cannot turn to good you must make as little bad as you can” (101).

Still, Orgel is perceptive about Prospero's ambivalence in forgiving Antonio:

“You, brother mine, that entertained, ambition, / … I do forgive thee” (5.1.75-8), Prospero says, and then qualifies the pardon at once (“unnatural though thou art”), reconsiders it as more crimes are remembered, some to be held in reserve (“At this time / I will tell no tales” 128-9), all but withdraws it (“most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth” 130-1), and only then confirms it through forcing Antonio to relinquish the dukedom, an act that is presented as something he does unwillingly.

(ed., The Tempest 53)

Prospero in fact enacts charity (“I do forgive thee”) but struggles against his own inclinations in doing so, an ambivalence that would seem to be well described by Paul in Romans 7.

Whether this deficiency is a courtly dissimulation that merely occludes Prospero's lust for power, however, is not clear. Looked at in Orgel's way, it is a moral failure; looked at in another, it would seem unavoidable given Prospero's political position, Antonio's closeness to him, and Antonio's still treacherous nature—none of which Prospero chose. In the one area of their relationship where he bears responsibility, Prospero acknowledges that he bears it, informing Miranda that in Milan his lack of vigilance provoked the worst in Antonio. Antonio, however, has just proved that he is still as opportunistic as he was twelve years before, and Prospero has renounced his magic, retaining only his own prudence and wariness as means of containing Antonio's viciousness—characteristics that he admits he lacked in Milan.

All this helps to account for Prospero's ambivalence about Antonio, even as he forgives him. Virtue, as John Milton argues, only becomes itself when it is practiced in specific circumstances; otherwise it remains “fugitive and cloistered”—merely potential. That is why the understanding of material circumstances is important for the Christian story as well as for the materialist story: both affirm the uniqueness and particularity of material conditions in which human beings act. The difference is that, in trying to understand the meaning and coherence of moral actions, the Christian story acknowledges the creative and redemptive presence of God as the ultimate enabling factor of and in material circumstances. Some might argue that Prospero would embody the love of his enemies even better if he renounced power altogether, on the model of St. Francis. Such an argument assumes, however, that the exercise of power is itself evil, and whatever the merits of that assumption it does not seem to operate in The Tempest. Nothing indicates that Prospero's retaining his authority is immoral in itself, nor that he retains it by immoral means or for immoral motives; and while the play's comic reconciliation might therefore be less than perfect, as Orgel observes, it is not morally incoherent or ironically self-defeating. Prospero's (and Shakespeare's) acknowledgment of his imperfection and its specifically Christian significance seems to be the point in Prospero's epilogue:

… my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

(5.1.333-38)

The last couplet urges a specifically Christian response to Prospero based on the fourth petition of the Lord's Prayer: “Forgiue vs our dettes, as we also forgiue our detters” (Matt. 6:12).

With regard to Prospero and the Christian virtues of patience and forgiveness, then, it seems reasonable to say that Christian stories about The Tempest can be distinguished from materialist stories and even, perhaps, that the former yield a morally richer and subtler play than the latter. At the same time, however, it is important to note that that difference does not equate Christian stories about Prospero with idealist stories. Kermode, for example, takes Prospero's virtue to be linked to his social class and to his hard-won knowledge. “That gentle birth predisposed a man to virtue, even if it was not absolutely necessary to virtue, was part of the lore of courtesy,” Kermode observes (ed., The Tempest xliii-xliv), and he identifies Prospero's magic as “goetic” because it works by means of elemental spirits (rather than evil spirits) and because it enables the magician's perfection in knowledge, including moral knowledge. Magic is thus, “in a sense, the means of Grace” (ed., The Tempest xlviii), and Prospero parallels Adam in his fall and recovery: “Prospero, like Adam, fell from his kingdom by an inordinate thirst for knowledge; but learning is a great aid to virtue, the road by which we may love and imitate God, and 'repair the ruins of our first parents, and by its means he is enabled to return” (ed., The Tempest 1).

Despite Kermode's attempt to co-opt Milton as a support for his account, his observation has a great deal more to do with Renaissance class prejudice than with the Christian story. Kermode is right about the commonplace equation of true nobility with virtue, but it is a commonplace with Platonic, not Christian, origins, and it is specifically opposed by Augustine's paradoxical equation of true nobility with humility, on the model of Christ, a paradox that animates medieval religious drama and, some would argue, Shakespearean drama as well (Cox, Shakespeare 22-40, 136-44). The moral discovery of one's own vulnerability involves a spiritual journey in the opposite direction from the winning of manipulative knowledge and control (Prospero's “art”), and Prospero's choice of the former therefore entails his renunciation of the latter. Far from affirming the old story (at least as old as Plato) that equates nobility and virtue, The Tempest rejects it about as decisively as any Shakespearean play does, with the possible exception of King Lear.

That rejection is evident not only in Prospero but also in Caliban, whose enslavement by Prospero has been the focus of materialist stories about The Tempest, as we have seen. I would suggest that recovering a Christian sense of Caliban's story also requires distinguishing it from materialist accounts, but in Caliban's case, as in Prospero's, a Christian reading does not have to be identified with idealist narratives like Kermode's, no matter how learned and compelling they may be in their own terms. The first storied response to Caliban as a personification like Spenser's Greedy Lust is in The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1670), a rewriting of Shakespeare's play by William Davenant and John Dryden, who much reduced Caliban's part and made him a caricature of what he is in Shakespeare's play (Vaughan and Vaughan 91-95). This caricature embodies the personified contrast between passion and reason that eighteenth-century critics made of the difference between Caliban and Prospero, and that difference is the basis of the idealist story about Caliban, as we have seen. Importantly, the Restoration caricature also embodies a royalist agenda, as Katherine Eisaman Maus has argued. A merely bestial Caliban, whose lawless impulses require the control of royal knowledge and power, is a potent image of lawless commoners, who were likely to run amok and assassinate their royal lord, as the English commons had done in 1649. The Enchanted Island presents art as dynamic control (“judgment”) of lawless imagination (“wit”) and therefore involves an essentially royalist aesthetic, with roots in Renaissance celebrations of centralized power, but that is not the aesthetic of Shakespeare's play (Cox, “Renaissance”). Shakespeare's Caliban is much more complex than the Restoration caricature that shared his name, and the history of response to Caliban therefore bears out not only materialist critics' objection that the idealist story about Caliban is reductive but also their argument that it is politically loaded.

One reason that Shakespeare's Caliban cannot be reduced to an idealist allegory of bestiality is that he is unmistakably human.¹⁶ Prospero himself says as much in his reminder to Ariel about conditions on the island before his own arrival:

Then was this island—
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born—not honoured with
A human shape.
ARIEL
Yes, Caliban, her son.

(1.2.281-84)

Both Prospero's syntax and Ariel's reply indicate that Caliban is the exception to no “human shape” being on the island before Prospero's arrival (Vaughan and Vaughan 10-11). Prospero is not consistent about Caliban's identity, of course, because Prospero is also the only authority for Caliban's father being “the devil himself” (1.2.319-20), but the two claims are presented very differently. Whereas Prospero acknowledges Caliban's humanity in a relatively dispassionate narrative of the past, his demonizing of Caliban is embedded in cursing and angry invective. Moreover, the charge of devilish parentage would appear to have no basis in fact, since Prospero lacks credible authority for knowing who Caliban's father was. Sycorax herself was dead when Prospero reached the island, and Caliban is unlikely to have divulged the kind of information about his father that Prospero alleges, even in the unlikely event that his mother divulged it to him in the first place. The only other possible source of the information is Ariel, but Sycorax is less likely to have told him than to have told Caliban; and if Ariel told Prospero about Caliban's parentage without hearing it from Sycorax, then the information is no more reliable than if it had originated with Prospero, given Ariel's refusal “To act her earthy and abhorred commands” (1.2.273) and Sycorax's subsequent punishment of him.

More importantly, Caliban's humanity is evident in what he is able to learn. From Prospero and Miranda he learned language, or, more precisely, he learned their language, since nothing says that he did not learn his mother's language before she died: he had been about twelve years old when Prospero arrived, and his mother had died at an unstated time during his childhood.¹⁷ Miranda's claim that “thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish” (1.2.354-56) could just as easily be her perception of Caliban's state as an objective description of it. Everyone perceives the sound of unknown languages as gibberish, and if Caliban learned a second language from Prospero and Miranda, he knows more than they do, at least about different languages and therefore about different cultures.

Nor can one find evidence of Caliban's subhumanity in his sullen claim that the profit of his having learned language is his knowing how to curse (1.2.362-63). On the contrary, that knowledge is just as likely a result of the way Prospero treated him after Caliban exhibited a sexual interest in Miranda. For Prospero is always far quicker to curse Caliban and far more resourceful in doing so than the other way around, a pattern that strongly suggests who the teacher is in this case and who the pupil.

The strongest point against an idealist allegorizing of Caliban is his moral character—his ability to grow in goodness.¹⁸ He seems to have learned European ideas of just ownership, for example, given his remark to Prospero that “This island's mine by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me” (1.2.330-31) and his later claim that.

I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o'th'island.

(1.2.341-44)

These are not laughable claims. They convey a serious sense of immediate grievance, even without recognizing their possible topical application.¹⁹ Importantly, Caliban's claims to be suffering unjustly are trivialized in the Restoration version of The Tempest, thus effectively removing a credible claim to justice on the part of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy and simultaneously relegating them to subhuman status.

Justice, however, is not all that Caliban learns. Having been duped by Stephano and Trinculo, he recognizes his error when they are easily diverted from the plot he had proposed: “The dropsy drown this fool! What do you mean / To dote thus on such luggage? Let's alone, / And do the murder first” (4.1.230-32). Perseverance, courage, recognition of misplaced trust, the ability to weigh comparative goods and to choose the better are all moral qualities that Caliban displays in this situation, even if the cause in which he displays them is morally dubious—and its unqualified dubiousness is by no means clear, given the justice of Caliban's claims against Prospero. After his recognition of his own and his companions' error, Caliban accepts Prospero's offer of pardon with alacrity in a willing spirit of obedience and co-operation:

Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!

(5.1.294-97)

“Grace” is a word with many shades of meaning for Shakespeare, but not least among them is the theological sense of unmerited favor—the grace of God (Tiffany). Caliban's final resolution is the strongest evidence of his humanity: his awareness of his need for forgiveness and “grace” is what he shares most importantly with others in the play who are capable of the same kind of moral growth. Not surprisingly, Davenant and Dryden removed Caliban's determination to seek for grace from their version of The Tempest.

At the same time, Caliban's spiritual enlightenment is the point on which Christian accounts of Caliban are likely to diverge most sharply from materialist stories about him. If the result of colonialist exploitation was simply to make native peoples more compliant to the will of subjugators, then the result was not justice but false consciousness, especially if religion was the means of inducing compliance, as seems to be the case with Caliban. Looked at this way, Caliban's determination to obey Prospero happily and seek for grace is the sorriest development in the play.

But it is not the play's final development, and the materialist story about Caliban's moral growth is not the last word about The Tempest. After Caliban determines to seek for grace, Prospero declares his intention to leave the island and return to Italy. In other words, he reverses the colonial pattern, not simply emancipating his slave but leaving the land to the one who was “king” of it when the Europeans first arrived. In effect, The Tempest therefore recounts a twelve-year interlude in the life of the island, and if one asks whether Caliban is better off for that interlude, the answer would seem to be that he is. His suffering as a slave cannot be made right, but his encounter with Europeans has been, as it were, a moral and intellectual vaccination, given what he has learned—at least one European language, European ideas of justice, a dignified spiritual life involving self-recognition and grace, both elements of the Christian story, and the ability to discern bad masters from good, an ability he lacked before the arrival of Prospero, Stephano, and Trinculo. Thus forewarned, he would appear to be better forearmed against a future wave of European invaders than he was before the first lot came. One might add that he is also better armed against vice, having learned to examine his conscience.

In addition to leaving Caliban alone in the end, Prospero defies the colonialist analogy in other ways as well. One of the qualities that makes Prospero a better master than anyone else in the play is his ability to improve in goodness, a grace-bestowed human characteristic that he shares with Caliban; and one of the most important moral insights Prospero acquires is his recognition that he has had a share in what Caliban has become: “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275-76). This acknowledgment justifies a great deal of speculation about the relationship between Prospero and Caliban—speculation, for example, that Caliban uses language to curse because that is principally what he hears from Prospero. Though Prospero complains at one point that Caliban has a nature on whom nurture can never stick, Prospero's acknowledgment of his partial responsibility for Caliban's condition reverses and cancels his earlier assessment. To paraphrase Orlando in As You Like It, Prospero recognizes that he has kept Caliban rustically at home—or, to speak more properly, stayed him at home unkept (cf. “here you sty me”), for you cannot call that “keeping” for one of Caliban's birth (“Which first was mine own king”) that differs not from the stalling of an ox.

What I am suggesting is that recovering a Christian dimension to the story of Caliban and Prospero not only distinguishes what happens to them from idealist and materialist accounts but also may act as a corrective to both. In contrast to the idealist story, a Christian account of the play can accommodate the materialist insight, for example, that Prospero may have overreacted to Caliban's sexual interest in Miranda and, if so, that Prospero bears some responsibility for Caliban's reductive sexual outlook. On the other hand, to be fair and accurate, if Caliban was indeed twelve when the three-year-old Miranda reached the island, then he matured sexually long before she did, and it is at least possible that Prospero reacted to what he perceived to be a young man's attempted sexual abuse of a child and that that is why Prospero sees Caliban as a monster and a devil (Taylor 141-42). The point is not certain, of course. The play allows for either view as a real possibility, and that is enough to qualify both the materialist assumption that what happened was simply the result of a cultural imperialism and the psychological assumption that Prospero is fighting his own incestuous desires in reacting harshly to Caliban—though those also remain possibilities that cannot be definitively discounted. About some points the best response is simply to note the possibilities and suspend judgment, neither condemning Caliban as a personification of lust nor Prospero as a racist colonizer.²⁰

In contrast to the materialist story, on the other hand, an understanding of The Tempest with the Christian story in mind would recognize the play's careful differentiation among those who exploit Caliban. Though we see Prospero abuse him more than anyone else, Caliban himself acknowledges that Prospero's first instinct was not cruel but kind:

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.

(1.2.332-36)

Prospero's recollection is the same: “I have used thee … with humane care, and lodged thee / In mine own cell” (1.2.345-47). Given Prospero's acknowledgment of his own part in “this thing of darkness,” the play creates the distinct possibility of a tragic misunderstanding at some point in the last twelve years. Such misunderstandings occur not only between cultures but also between generations (fathers and adolescent sons, for example), but in any case this is a misunderstanding that Prospero would seem to recognize when he acknowledges responsibility for what Caliban has become and when he decides to leave the island.

Prospero's erring, self-knowing, repentant, and generally complex humanity is highlighted by the behavior of others who exploit Caliban deliberately: they neither begin by treating him kindly nor end by recognizing what they have done. Stephano and Trinculo have explicit economic designs on Caliban from the moment they meet him, imagining how profitable he could be for them in Europe (2.2.26-32, 66-68) and plying him with sack in order to ensure his cooperation with their designs. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme simply ignore Stephano's and Trinculo's exploitation (one might even say that they “occlude” it), and Paul Brown mentions it only to explain it away with a point about the class exploitation of masterless men: Stephano and Trinculo would not mistreat Caliban, Brown suggests, if they were not “the already excremental products of civility” themselves (64-65). Both arguments limit the moral field to justice by suggesting that all actions are to be discerned only in terms of disproportionate power, thus heaping blame on the powerful (i.e., Prospero) while absolving the powerless of responsibility for their actions, even when they abuse others who are less powerful than themselves. The moral inadequacy of this argument is evident if it is extended to the exploitation and destruction of real native peoples by real disenfranchised (i.e., lower-class) Europeans, who are thereby excused for whatever they did because they were exploited themselves.

Again, The Tempest is more complex. The exploitative instincts of Stephano and Trinculo at the bottom of the social scale are matched by Sebastian and Antonio at the top of it. “Will money buy 'em?” Sebastian asks Antonio, when they first see the three lower-class rebels. “Very like,” Antonio responds, “One of them / Is a plain fish, and no doubt marketable” (5.1.264-65). Kermode asserts that “Antonio is silent” in the closing scene and that his impenitence is therefore inferrable but uncertain (ed., The Tempest lxii). But Antonio is not silent, and his last line betrays the same instinct to exploit Caliban that Stephano and Trinculo had expressed at first. One need not infer Antonio's impenitence from his silence: it speaks eloquently in his continuing lust to dominate and exploit. The fact that Prospero lacks this instinct—that he enslaves Caliban only because of what he perceives to be Caliban's mistreatment of Miranda—is one of the principal differences between the two dukes on one hand and between one of the dukes and the masterless men on the other. These differences make moral sense, but they cannot be neatly tied into deterministic class theories.

Recovering the sense of an archaic text requires more than suspicion; if the culture that produced the text was religious, as Shakespeare's was, then the quest to reconstruct historical meaning requires imagination, if not faith. Though suspicion and faith would seem to be irreconcilable, they in fact have much to offer each other, as Merold Westphal argues, and the claims of each need to be taken seriously in the process of sorting out the messy human record.²¹ The materialist story of The Tempest has offered persuasive insights about structural social injustice, and those insights are important to a Christian story of the play, because social justice is a serious concern of the Christian story itself. The ultimate concern of the Christian story, however, is not with cultures, social groups and classes, or political systems but with the individuals who comprise them. The moral dignity of Caliban is therefore no less important than the moral dignity of Prospero, and both depend on grace, not on social class, no matter how insistent the demands of a stratified English society may have been in the early seventeenth century. A Christian moral understanding is certainly what Prospero asks for, when he begs our indulgence as we hope to be pardoned ourselves. And it is what Caliban asks for too, in expressions of his humanity that resist demonizing and allegorizing. Caliban's determination to be wise hereafter and seek for grace would in fact seem to be the ultimate expression of anyone's humanity in The Tempest.

Notes

1. I do not mean to suggest that Christian interpretations of the play have not been offered recently; in fact, I have learned from them. See, for example, Beauregard, Esolen, Feuer, and Tiffany. The present essay argues for the possibility of a distinctively Christian reading in the context of theoretical and practical criticism over the last fifty years. In attempting to find a way between idealist and materialist interpretations, it has affinities with Lupton's recent essay in Shakespeare Quarterly. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Lupton suggests that, in the process of salvaging Caliban's indigenous claims, neohistoricist critics have “necessarily occluded, reduced, or secularized” the “religious foundations of the play” (20).

2. Kermode, ed., The Tempest xxiv-lxxxviii Kermode candidly acknowledges his dependence on other critics in the same vein, and his notes are a rich mine of sources for idealist critical interpretations of The Tempest.

3. Kermode, ed., The Tempest xxv-xxiv (on the New World) and lxxi-lxxvi (on the masque), drawing on such studies as Nicoll and Welsford.

4. Orgel, “New Uses,” and Orgel, ed., The Tempest 13n2. Quotations of The Tempest in this essay are from Orgel's edition, with act, scene, and line numbers indicated in the text. The most thoughtful examination of one scholar's transition from idealist to materialist understanding of The Tempest is in Pierce, “Understanding.” See also Pierce, “'Very Like.”

5. I take the term “occlude” in this context from Barker and Hulme. In general, however, my summary of the materialist story is not taken from any particular source but more or less accurately represents points in many materialist stories about The Tempest, including Brown, Cartelli, Cheyfitz, Erlich, Greenblatt, Hawkes, Hulme, and Lamming.

6. On Caliban and various monsters in The Faerie Queene, see Kermode, ed., The Tempest, xliii; on the wild man, xxxix and lxii-lxiii, with pertinent bibliographical references in each case. More recently, see Pinciss. For a New Historicist view of monsters in The Tempest, see Burnett.

7. According to Vaughan and Vaughan, the anagrammatic character of Caliban's name was first attributed in print to Richard Farmer by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens in their 1778 edition of The Tempest (30). It is repeated by virtually every subsequent editor of the play. Shakespeare's debt to Montaigne was first noted by Edward Capell in 1780 (Vaughan and Vaughan 47). John Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay (published in 1603) is reprinted as Appendix D in Orgel, ed., The Tempest 227-38.

8. This critique of what Prospero does to Caliban's religious life is not mentioned in any of the materialist criticism of The Tempest that I have read. It nonetheless illustrates what can be gained from a materialist account in the process of constructing a religiously informed critique.

9. On this point materialist critics and psychoanalytic critics agree, though they disagree on much else. For a perceptive analysis of the differences between them (written from the point of view of a psychoanalytic critic), see Skura. Whereas the materialists see Prospero's paranoia as racist and colonialist (Barker and Hulme 202, for example), Skura sees it as primarily sexual—an upwelling of repressed incestuous desire (60-61).

10. For Marx's use of the “foundation” metaphor, see his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 29:262-63). My understanding of this point has been greatly assisted by Lash 112-24.

11. While the narrative quality of Christian affirmation would seem to be self-evident from the Bible, it has recently received a good deal of thoughtful attention from theologians. For a useful summary, see Wright 83-92. My thinking has also been influenced by O'Donovan's argument that the shape of Christian ethics is the shape of the Resurrection story.

12. Quoted from The Geneva Bible. Most of Shakespeare's biblical allusions are from this source.

13. More precisely, Orgel rejects what he sees as the sentimentality of taking seriously the reconciliation and restoration at the end of the play. In this judgment he is reacting to a critique of his early article about The Tempest (“New Uses”) by Berger, who refers to Orgel's article as “the best defense of this sentimental reading known to me” (254). Berger's perceptive questions about the play have been influential in subsequent deconstructive readings, including postcolonial readings.

14. For a persuasive analysis of Prospero's forgiveness as specifically attributable to grace (i.e., not the expected result of lifelong character formation, much less of political calculation), see de Grazia.

15. For a better explanation of the difference between Antonio and Alonso, see Hunter 239-41.

16. Lupton offers a thoughtful analysis of Caliban's complex identity as a “creature,” but it is not clear that in her analysis he is as fully human as the Europeans who invade his island. I would argue that The Tempest bestows fuller human status on Caliban than phrases like a “chaotic exception … within the cosmos of Adam” or a “creature … deprived of the imago dei” seem to allow (Lupton 3, 21).

17. Caliban's age was first calculated by Luce based on 1.2.53 and 269-84 (xxxiv). For discussion see Taylor 140-41 and Orgel, ed., The Tempest 28nl and 1.2.279n.

18. The extent to which perception governs responses to The Tempest is evident in the Vaughans' description of Caliban. Despite their incisive discussion of his essential humanity, they uncritically repeat reductive idealist truisms—that he “lacks moral perception,” “has no moral awareness,” and “is enslaved by his own desires” (17). They also twice describe him as “crawling” from his cave (16), when the Folio stage direction reads simply, “Enter Caliban” (1.2.320).

19. Orgel details how “Caliban's accusations against Prospero of usurpation and enslavement reveal an unexpected solidity” in the immediate political context (ed., The Tempest 36-38).

20. Cf. McDonald: “On the very issues that have most deeply concerned materialist critics and their American cousins—power, social and political hierarchy, the theatre as a political instrument, freedom of action, education, and race—The Tempest is at its most elusive and complicated” (27).

21. For a reading of The Tempest that takes seriously the claims of faith as well Renaissance suspicion (in the form of Montaigne), see Kirsch.

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