[In the following essay, Pask analyzes a number of Prospero's actions in The Tempest that are incongruous with the values of the pastoral genre. The most prominent of these, the critic claims, are Prospero's masterminding of the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda to serve imperialist aims and the denial of Caliban's claim to the sovereignty of the island through his mother Sycorax.]

1

At the beginning of the period in which Caliban was to acquire his strongest association with revolutionary energies of every sort, William Hazlitt lodged what remains a powerful if underappreciated critique of this association. Writing in response to the report of a lecture in which Coleridge described Caliban as “an original and caricature of Jacobinism, so fully illustrated at Paris during the French Revolution,” Hazlitt responded with some heat:

Caliban is so far from being a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that he is strictly the legitimate sovereign of the isle, and Prospero and the rest are usurpers, who have ousted him from his hereditary jurisdiction by superiority of talent and knowledge. “This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,” and he complains bitterly of the artifices used by his new friends to cajole him out of it.

Rather than Coleridge's envious Jacobin, Caliban is in fact much more like “the bloated and ricketty [sic] minds and bodies of the Bourbons.”¹ Hazlitt is obviously attacking Coleridge from the left, even if his position is one hardly recognizable to more recent attempts to read The Tempest in a historical and political register. Coleridge's association of Caliban with the Jacobins was not a complimentary one, but his relatively conservative reading of Caliban turned out to be considerably more influential than others for the New Historical and Postcolonial readings of the play.

Hazlitt understands the “radical” content of the play to be aligned with Prospero rather than Caliban, and this reading reflects the influence of Milton's engagement with The Tempest. In Milton's early revision of the masque form, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle generally known as Comus, the enchanter and tempter Comus first appears to the Lady as a shepherd, but, as the representative figure of the aristocratic pastoral, his counsel to the Lady is to spend rather than to hoard her erotic energy. The Attendant Spirit (also dressed like a shepherd) later informs her brothers that Comus is of divine birth, son of Bacchus and Circe, and he also leads a “monstrous rout” who “are heard to howl / Like stabbed wolves, or tigers at their prey.”² Comus is both libertine aristocrat and leader of a plebeian mob, and the association of Comus with bestial release puts him in the lineage of Caliban.³ Still, Milton's Masque does not fail to reveal the genuine temptation Comus offers the Lady, a temptation at least partly Shakespearean in character.⁴

Milton provides us with the terms to re-inflect the critical disagreement between Hazlitt and Coleridge: Caliban as both Hazlitt's “rickety Bourbon” and Coleridge's revolutionary Jacobin. Such a reading of pastoral necessarily relies on William Empson's expansive version of pastoral as the literary mode whose characteristic “trick of mind” is to imply “a beautiful relation between rich and poor.”⁵The Tempest hardly seems to bring off this trick; rather, it is something more akin to the photographic negative of the Renaissance pastoral, even Shakespeare's own ironic playfulness with the genre. Prospero himself appears to associate Caliban with a narrower understanding of pastoral when his own wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda produces the pastoral dance of nymphs and reapers. In watching this conventionalized pastoral, however, what Prospero actually seems to see is Caliban, producing the play's most dramatically unsettling moment in Prospero's sudden dissolution of his own masque: “I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life.”⁶ I shall return to this moment in the play, but only after elaborating a double plot, Miranda's courtship and Caliban's rebellious claim to the island, that makes it so resonant in the play. “What is displayed on the tragic-comic stage is a sort of marriage of the myths of heroic and pastoral,” writes Empson with Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay in mind, “a thing felt as fundamental to both and necessary to the health of society.”⁷The Tempest, on the other hand, puts the tragicomic double plot through its usual paces, but in order to reveal the dynastic Realpolitik that produces it. The play's double plot thus insists on the divorce of the aristocratic myths of heroic and pastoral in what is effectively Prospero's counter-pastoral.⁸ His island, that is, becomes a pastoral retreat associated with the repression of pastoral in its traditional guise: otium and erotic release.⁹

2

Caliban's claim to the island—his first extended speech in the play—is not, as Hazlitt recognized, a utopian one:

This island's mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o'th'isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile—
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o'th' island.

(l.2.331-44)

“Thou most lying slave,” Prospero responds immediately, but the force of his rebuttal is directed to the latter part of Caliban's speech and the accusation of mistreatment:

                                                                                                              Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness, I have used thee—
Filth as thou art—with humane care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.

(l.2.344-48)

Caliban's original—and dynastic—claim to the island remains undisputed; he is, like Prospero himself, a usurped ruler. Regal language (“mine own king”) belongs to Caliban as much as to Prospero.¹⁰ David Norbrook has noted the use of the familiar “thou” in the first part of Caliban's speech, arguing that it “takes on the overtones of a recollected solidarity and mutuality.”¹¹ In the context of Caliban's dynastic claim to the island, it is also Caliban's aristocratic punctilio, his insistence on the equality of his status with Prospero's.

Caliban's dynastic claim comes from his mother Sycorax—a claim founded on Sycorax's magic. Prospero's new claim is based no less on magic. It is simply the case that his magic is stronger, a fact that becomes abundantly clear when Caliban invokes “all the charms of Sycorax”—nothing more than toads, beetles, and bats. All that remains of Sycorax's power is Caliban's knowledge of the island: “the fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.” This sort of knowledge is the basis of Caliban's “earthiness,” a favorite appellation of Romantic criticism of the play. Prospero, on the other hand, characteristically controls the climate and spirits of the air, including Ariel. Still, there are obvious connections between Prospero and Sycorax. Sycorax imprisoned Ariel in a tree trunk; Prospero threatens Ariel with the same punishment. A potential aristocratic alliance between the families of Sycorax and Prospero haunts the play, even if one that subordinates the maternal lineage represented by Sycorax: aerial magus, terrestrial sorceress, step-brother and step-sister (Caliban and Miranda). It seems that Prospero had previously recognized something of that relationship by taking Caliban into his dwelling. Everything about Prospero's present control of the island is designed to prohibit such a symbolic alliance, but, as Stephen Orgel notes, Sycorax remains “insistently present in [Prospero's] memory—far more present than his own wife—and she embodies to an extreme degree all the negative assumptions about women that he and Miranda have exchanged.”¹²

Prospero's rebuttal of Caliban's claim to sovereignty, as we have already seen, is largely the explosive counter-charge of Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda: its force such that Caliban's dynastic claim is almost obliterated. The charge remains, even in readings sympathetic to Caliban, powerful and resonant. The later history of English colonialism—a particularly intensified mobilization of anxieties concerning rape and miscegenation—makes Caliban's status as a proto-colonized subject of Prospero especially difficult to modify. The narrative design of The Tempest, however, suggests other possibilities, including the unsettling one that Caliban's illicit lust is much closer to the play's normative world of aristocratic alliance than the reading of Caliban as plebeian or colonized subject allows us to appreciate fully.

The “abhorrèd” Caliban is exchanged for Ferdinand—Caliban's exit staged at the same moment as Ferdinand's entrance (l. 2.373)—and a quasi-divinized language of love replaces Caliban's caricature of lust. “Most sure, the goddess” (l. 2.422) exclaims Ferdinand on first seeing Miranda. The words are doubly surprising. The allusion to The Aeneid (Aeneas's words upon seeing Venus after the Trojan shipwreck) wrenches us out of a world that seems to look forward to Atlantic exploration and incipient colonization and places us in the oldest of Old Worlds: the central epic of Mediterranean imperium. The deification of Miranda, meanwhile, hardly accords with the general treatment of love in Shakespearean comedy, where such deification usually is produced in order to be mocked and tempered (and this is especially true of plays with strong female lovers: Beatrice, Rosalind). Nothing in this play, however, ever seems to question the idealized terms of Ferdinand's love for Miranda—unless it is his increasing devotion to his future father-in-law. At the conclusion of the play, Alonso refers to her as “the goddess that hath severed us, / And brought us thus together” (5.1.187-88). If Ferdinand can now allow Miranda's mortality, it is only in comparison to Prospero's redemptive powers:

                                                                                Sir, she is mortal;
But by immortal providence, she's mine.
I chose her when I could not ask my father
For his advice—nor thought I had one. She
Is daughter to this famous Duke of Milan,
Of whom so often I have heard renown,
But never saw before; of whom I have
Received a second life; and second father
This lady makes him to me.

(5.1.188-96)

Over the course of the play, Ferdinand increasingly inserts himself into an extraordinarily idealized homosocial relationship to Prospero. The result, interestingly, is one of the most purely dynastic alliances in the Shakespeare canon, where some form of rebellion against or freedom from the wishes of the father is the norm. Miranda herself had first misrecognized Ferdinand as a “spirit” (l.2.410-12)—something, that is, controlled by her father's magic—and it appears that she was largely correct. Prospero introduces Ferdinand to his daughter and to us as a “gallant” whose grief for his apparently lost father is “beauty's canker” (l.2.414, 416). In the BBC television version of the play directed by John Gorrie, Ferdinand is quite rightly a soulful teen angel right off the covers of the old Tiger Beat magazine.

In exchanging Caliban for Ferdinand, the play exchanges a form of raw dynastic lust—and Caliban's ultimate desire, after all, is to people “This isle with Calibans” (l.2.350)—for something apparently very different, an idealized form of dynastic alliance. If Ferdinand's first words recall Aeneas, his own imperial destiny—to be the ruler of both Naples and Milan—avoids the tragic dilemma represented by Aeneas: the choice between love (Dido) and empire. The central action of the play celebrates the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda as the instrument of dynastic restitution that accords with their desires.

Still, the “specter” of Dido haunts late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century heroic narrative, and its presence is remarkably strong for such an apparently celebratory version of dynastic marriage.¹³ The period was in many respects more sympathetic to Dido than twentieth-century literary criticism has been. Montaigne, whose “Of the Caniballes” was an important source for The Tempest, writes in the essay “Of Diverting and Diversions”:

So do the plaints of fables trouble and vex our mindes: and the wailing laments of Dydo, and Ariadne passionate even those, that beleeve them not in Virgill, nor in Catullus: It is an argument of an obstinate nature, and indurate hart, not to be moved therewith.¹⁴

Claribel, sister of Ferdinand forced to wed the “King” of Tunis (and thus the indirect reason for the court party's arrival in Prospero's sphere of influence), seems to be introduced largely in order to elaborate the legend of Dido as the backdrop to the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. Gonzalo, in his gauche humanist enthusiasm, makes the connection between Claribel and Dido legible by recalling the “widow Dido” as the previous “paragon” (2.1.73-75) of Tunis (a few miles from the site of Carthage). Antonio and Sebastian miss Gonzalo's learned reference to the older Greek legend of the Dido who founded Carthage as a widow and later killed herself rather than be married to the local chieftain, Iarbas:

ANTONIO.
Widow? A pox o'that. How came that widow in? Widow Dido!
SEBASTIAN.
What if he had said “widower Aeneas” too? Good lord, how you take it!

(2.1.76-79)

If Antonio and Sebastian display their “indurate” hearts, Gonzalo's fulsome praise of Claribel inadvertently identifies the tragic context of her marrige.

Never present on the stage, Claribel haunts the play as the imperial tragedy apparently evaded by the imperial comedy of Ferdinand and Miranda. Alonso's shipwreck, Orgel reminds us, “interrupts a voyage retracing Aeneas', from Carthage to Naples.”¹⁵ The world she inhabits is thus an updated version of Virgil's Mediterranean, but also one with a strong resemblance to the notorious world in which Europeans were enslaved and ransomed along the Barbary Coast, Algiers and Tunis.¹⁶ Claribel's marriage simply instances this form of “trade” at the highest possible level. Children of nobility, of course, functioned as the aristocratic means of exchange, shoring up or creating domestic or international alliances, and King James certainly treated his own children as instruments of international diplomacy.¹⁷

In this context, it is possible that Shakespeare's use of the name Claribel recalls a “Claribell” of The Faerie Queene who plays a brief but significant role in the conclusion of Spenser's romance epic. Unlike Shakespeare's Claribel, she rebels against her father's attempt to use her as a political and economic pawn:

          Her name was Claribell, whose father hight
          The Lord of Many Ilands, farre renound
          For his great riches and his greater might.
          He through his wealth, wherein he did abound,
          This daughter thought in wedlock to haue bound
          Vnto the Prince of Picteland bordering nere,
          But she whose sides before with secret wound
          Of loue to Bellamoure empierced were,
By all means shund to match with any forrein fere.(18)

The arranged marriage Spenser's Claribell escapes reminds us of the wedding plans of Scots princes, and such a connection might have triggered Shakespeare's memory as well. Subsequently, Pastorella is revealed to be the offspring of her secret marriage with Beallamoure, a revelation that suddenly ennobles the socially hazardous bond between the shepherdess Pastorella and the courtly Calidore. Spenser's Claribell is thus closer to The Winter's Tale's Perdita than to The Tempest's Claribel, who is able to perform no such social harmonization.

The shadow story of Claribel seems to establish Miranda's alliance as a positive one, but the larger specter of Dido restlessly complicates Prospero's contradictory promotion of his daughter's marriage. Since Ferdinand's first words on seeing Miranda are also a Virgilian allusion, we are reminded of the imperial quality of Miranda's own marriage and its almost desperate centrality to Prospero's plans and his control of the island. “Miranda's virginity,” Peter Hulme writes, “is an important political card for Prospero, in some ways his only one.”¹⁹ We are never allowed to witness the relationship of Miranda and Ferdinand without Prospero's paternal monitoring of their interactions, and Orgel notes the Virgilian undercurrent in this anxiety: “[I]n so far as the play's Virgilian overtones encourage us to see Ferdinand as another Aeneas, Prospero's anxiety will strike us as justified.”²⁰ Nevertheless, her choice is first his choice, and he introduces Ferdinand to Miranda in highly theatrical terms: “The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, / And say what thou seest yond” (1.2.409). Prospero forces Ferdinand to do Caliban's work, gathering logs, which forces the compliant Miranda into her first act of disobedience. Ferdinand's “enslavement” adds a jarring note to the effort to distinguish the alliance of Ferdinand and Miranda from Caliban's desires, but it also seems to be important in Prospero's staging of the relationship: partly to protect her virginity, which she, as a “natural” woman, might be inclined to give up too easily, but also in order to advance the intensity of their relationship by obligingly playing the role of blocking father.

3

Prospero's plans have nothing to do with future sovereignty over the island, and it is partly for this reason that he neglects to dispute Caliban's claim to the island. No attempt at social harmonization marks his control of the island, indicating something of the great distance between the play and Shakespeare's own earlier comedies (and reprised in The Winter's Tale). The force of comic harmonization is almost entirely directed toward that continuation of the Virgilian voyage: Carthage (Tunis) to Naples. The Mediterranean, Virgilian world of the play is one in which commerce is translated into a marriage market, much as it was previously in Antonio's bankrolling of Bassanio in order to win Portia in The Merchant of Venice. The first words of the court party on the island reinforce their connection with the commercial world:

                                                                                Our hint of woe
Is common: every day some sailor's wife,
The masters of some merchant, and the merchant
Have just our theme of woe; but for the miracle—
I mean our preservation—few in millions
Can speak like us.

(2.1.3-8)

Shakespeare, moreover, grafts the activities of the expansion of English commerce in the Mediterranean onto dynastic alliance for a potential critique of dynastic and commercial operations much more pointed than those to be found in Merchant. As Richard Wilson has persuasively argued, “to sail in 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.” The Tempest, likewise, amplifies Portia's marriage lottery to the extent that the marriage market looks remarkably similar to a slave market. In this system, Caliban and the Italian court party become indistinguishable. “This was the cycle,” remarks Wilson, “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 slaveholder.²¹ In this cycle, the juxtaposition of Claribel's forced marriage to both Miranda's idealized dynastic alliance and Caliban's attempted rape—and his apparently continuing desire to rape Miranda—reveals Caliban in the colors of the degenerate aristocrat as much as African slave. He shares as much with Cymberline's Cloten as with any of Shakespeare's low-born characters. Claribel's forced marriage can thus appear as an officially sanctioned version of what Caliban wants to do.

Warding off such continuities, Prospero strenuously separates himself and his island from the Mediterranean system that surrounds it: (colonial) counter-pastoral.²² As a site of reforming opposition to the European dynastic states, Prospero's island has more in common with English activity in the Atlantic than with its simultaneously growing presence in the Mediterranean. The play's minimal explicit references to the Atlantic world are associated with the magical control of the island: Ariel's memory of fetching dew from the “still-vexed Bermudas” (l.2.229) and Setebos, Sycorax's god and the name of a Patagonian deity in the accounts of Magellan's travels. While the Mediterranean world around it allows Sycorax initially to claim the island and Claribel to be packed off to Tunis, Prospero's control of the island establishes the political economy instantly recognizable to us if still novel in Shakespeare's time: the enslavement of the African Caliban and the servitude of the “native” Ariel. Prospero's magic appears to make it possible for a colony from the Atlantic world to stray into the Mediterranean.²³

It is, however, Prospero's almost exclusive interest in metropolitan politics that provides his strongest link to the colonizing aristocrats of Shakespeare's London. At the time of The Tempest, colonization claimed the attention of a conservative but increasingly oppositional “country” interest developing among the aristocracy, including Shakespeare's one-time patron, the earl of Southampton. If New Historical critics of the play have been sensitive to the play's colonialist aspect, they also have too easily assimilated it to the power of the Stuart state. Norbrook, on the other hand, has persuasively established this oppositional subtext in the play's use of Italian dynastic politics, including an illuminating statement in the 1614 Parliament that the Virginia colony would become a bridle for the Neapolitan courser if the youth of England were able to sit him.²⁴ John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Double Marriage (1621) celebrates an exiled duke's assassination of the tyrannical king of Naples, but Shakespeare's Prospero represents no such explicitly radical program. His use of his island is not designed to topple Naples and Milan but to reform them through political marriage. Prospero is an inherently unstable combination of Puritan reformer and absolutist ruler of the island.²⁵ As counter-pastoral, meanwhile, the island everywhere shows signs of negotium—the enforced labors of Caliban, Ariel, and Ferdinand, as well as what appears from his exhaustion at the end of the play to be Prospero's own investment of significant energies on the management side—where we might expect otium.

4

The contradictions of Prospero's counter-pastoral converge on the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. Miranda's virginal purity distinguishes the island from the Mediterranean cycle surrounding it even while it serves as Prospero's most important “political card” in returning to the negotium of dynastic alliance. Prospero's mode of reform remains typically aristocratic: a masque-like education of the court party leading to marriage.²⁶ The two modes of reform are most expansively conflated in the wedding masque of Ferdinand and Miranda, and it is there that we behold Prospero's own celebration of his success in isolating a purified and virginal political marriage. Prospero introduces the masque by twice insisting on Miranda's status as his “gift” to Ferdinand (4.1.8, 13), along with a fulsome warning about the dire effects of breaking her “virgin-knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies” (4.1.15-16). This almost parodic “traffic in women” reveals an anxious reassertion of patriarchal authority, perhaps in response to the extraordinary moment in the previous scene between Miranda and Ferdinand in which her innocence allows her to seize control of the courtship:

                                                                                                                        But this is trifling,
And all the more it seeks to hide itself,
The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning,
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!
I am your wife if you will marry me;
If not, I'll die your maid.

(3.1.79-84)

Analogizing any attempt to hide her desire to the vain attempt to hide a pregnant belly, Miranda aligns herself with disingenuous sexuality. Prospero's masque, on the other hand, excludes Venus and Cupid from its celebration of the match. John Pitcher argues that it is in fact designed to “recode” Dido's tragedy as a properly constituted and lawful marriage.²⁷ This reformation of the story of Dido and Aeneas in terms of a perfectly chaste marriage resonates with Prospero's larger political project of a kind of counter-absolutism, counterpoised to the passion of Dido and Aeneas on the one hand and the political marriage of Claribel and the Dey of Tunis on the other: empire, but a now reformed empire.

The wedding masque, however, also appears to be the weak link in Prospero's plans. His recollection of Caliban's conspiracy prompts his sudden dissolution of the masque, an elegiac farewell to theater, and a transformed sense of himself as old and weak: “Sir, I am vexed. / Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled” (4.1.158-59). Ernest R. Gilman has suggested that Caliban's conspiracy plays the role of the antimasque to Prospero's wedding masque. Arriving at the end of the masque, Caliban and his fellows effectively invert the form of the Jonsonian masque and with it Prospero's ability to control the terms of the marriage.²⁸ Caliban seems to represent the return of the libidinous sexuality that Prospero sees himself as controlling through the wedding masque. Caliban's threat, however, is not simply a threat from below: the return of the repressed as both sexual and political uprising.²⁹ He is, as we have already seen, aristocratic libertine as well as plebeian rapist.

This overdetermined sexuality is at least partially cued by the masque itself, despite the fact that its narrative celebrates the absence of Venus and Cupid. After the spectacular special effects of the masque's opening introduction of Juno, it proceeds towards an increasingly pastoral vision. Iris calls forth nymphs and then, to dance with them, georgic reapers (as is appropriate to the general character of Prospero's counter-pastoral): “sun-burned sickle-men, of August weary” (4.1.134). Iris invites these laborers to “holiday” release:

Come hither from the furrow and be merry;
Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing.

(4.1.135-38)

Richard Wheeler has elaborated the sexual undercurrent of the lines. The “encounter” on “country footing” evokes the French foutre (“to copulate with”) as well as the very English “cunt” (as in Hamlet's “country matters”).³⁰ Chaste marriage turns into its opposite through the apparently innocent means of pastoral. Sexuality here also hints at death: the sickles of the reapers. Prospero's first words after his dissolution of the masque indicate the presence of death in his thinking:

I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life.

(4.1.139-41)

Prospero had to some extent controlled time (the Latin tempus) through his control of nature (the tempest itself, the winterless year of the wedding masque). This control suddenly reveals itself to be merely theatrical effects, “this insubstantial pageant” (4.1.155). The suffusion of death through the final scenes of the play seems to be directly related to his recognition of the inevitable failure to administer his daughter's sexuality in perpetuity. This, he anticipates in Lear-like fashion, will coincide with the moment of his redundancy in the dynastic system:

                                                                                                                        … and so to Naples,
Where I have hope to see the nuptial
Of these our dear-belov'd solemnized,
And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave.

(5.1.307-11)

Caliban is for Prospero the embodiment of this combination of sexuality and death. Caliban, as I have argued, is the photographic negative of the pastoral, his sexuality both aristocratic and plebeian. It is appropriate that Prospero seems to be reminded of Caliban at the moment of viewing the nymphs and reapers in pastoral holiday. Pastoral was the genre of erotic exploration in the Renaissance. More broadly, C. L. Barber famously associated the seasonal cycle of festivity with a pattern of “release” and “clarification” in Shakespearean comedy, one as important for aristocrats as for plebeians.³¹ This is the pleasurable space in Shakespearean theater in which a figure such as Oberon can engage, however temporarily, the sexuality of the comically monstrous Bottom or in which the aristocratic Rosalind seems to require the presence of the bawdy Touchstone to experience fully the possibilities of Arden.³² Aristocratic marriage remains the order of the day, but not without a significant alteration of feeling produced by the pastoral engagements of aristocrats and clowns.

Caliban's form of release, on the other hand, represents both an abject version of Prospero's own dynastic impulse and insurrection from well beneath Prospero: “Freedom, high-day [holiday]! High-day, freedom! Freedom, highday, freedom!” (2.2.181-82). Meredith Skura convincingly locates Prospero in a line of Shakespearean rulers who lash out at figures who embody qualities they have rejected in themselves: Antonio to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Duke Senior to Jacques in As You Like It; Duke Vincentio to Lucio in Measure for Measure, Henry V to Falstaff in 2 Henry IV.³³ Prospero's most rhetorically inflated denunciation of Caliban occurs shortly after his dramatic recollection of the conspiracy and dissolution of the masque:

A devil, a born devil, 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)

“The charge,” remarks Orgel in his note on the passage, “may be less straightforward than it appears: Prospero has just become conscious of his own advancing age, and has expressed fears for his own mind.” Caliban then enters, significantly accompanied by the fool Trinculo, himself little more than a seedy reminder of Shakespeare's great fools and forms of festivity. The return of Caliban is the return of repressed sexuality to the wedding masque, but in generic terms it is also the return of a repressed form of pastoral to Prospero's island. The demonized Caliban (“a devil, a born devil”) is the uncanny reminder of pastoral forms that Prospero's Puritanical control of the island has repressed.

Tremendously shaken by his sudden recollection of Caliban, Prospero nevertheless proceeds to complete the insertion of Miranda into the dynastic system of alliance, his overriding political and personal goal all along. This event, to which we shall now turn, allows us to take the full measure of Prospero's counter-pastoral. Prospero has effectively reshuffled the key ingredients of Shakespearean comedy, the symbolic union of high and low and the relative freedom of daughters and lovers, such that both now appear particularly jaundiced. Rather than a “romance,” we perhaps have here a particularly aggravated version of one of Shakespeare's “problem comedies.”

Miranda herself is significantly altered at the end of the play, having effectively lost her symbolic insularity—her distinction from the Italian metropole. In the final act, Prospero can “discover” Miranda and Ferdinand in masque-like fashion to the astonished members of the court party. They are playing chess, the game of aristocratic power:

MIRANDA.
Sweet lord, you play me false.
FERDINAND.
                                                                                No, my dearest love
I would not for the world.
MIRANDA.
Yes, for a score of kingdoms you would wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.

(5.1.172-75)

Chess is here linked to Ferdinand and Miranda's knowingness—at least Miranda's, who can now seem considerably worldlier than Ferdinand. The alliance in which the happy lovers are engaged is simply diplomacy: war by other means. At a more intimate level, chess represents the strategic struggle for Miranda's virginity as the everyday “battle of the sexes”—and in a form no longer associated with the youthful freedom of Shakespeare's earlier heroines.³⁴ Miranda's affectionate cynicism is an extraordinary change from her previous erotic frankness. It produces what is, despite its apparent attractiveness, perhaps the most dispiriting moment in the entire play, as Miranda projects her own name, “wonder,” onto the assembled nobility:

                                                                                                              O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

(5.1.181-84)

“'Tis new to thee,” Prospero responds, ironically marking her accession to “old world” protocols. Miranda appears to have thoroughly absorbed the nature of Prospero's political project and her role in it.

The moment is of course an ambivalent one for Prospero. The maintenance of Miranda's purity was the symbolic key to his difference from the Mediterranean dynasties, and it is this symbolic difference that is lost at the moment of his triumph. It requires the ever incautious and idealizing Gonzalo to drive home the point:

Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue
Should become kings of Naples? O rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars! In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost. …

(5.1.205-11)

In case the audience might have forgotten the relatively spare mention of Claribel earlier in the play, Gonzalo here equates her marriage with the union of Ferdinand and Miranda. If Miranda, unlike Claribel, gives her enthusiastic assent to the marriage, the form of her assent changes as she moves closer to the court party: innocent sexual desire to the gamesmanship of erotic courtliness. If Miranda has escaped the immediate clutches of Caliban, she has entered Claribel's world with enthusiasm.

Notes

1. The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (London and New York: Penguin, 1992), 536-37.

2. John Milton (The Oxford Authors), ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), lines 533-34.

3. David Norbrook, on the other hand, interprets Milton's masque as a revision of The Tempest that identifies and highlights the play's utopian aspect: “The libertarian impulse in the play is doubtless why it appealed so strongly to Milton, who rewrote it in Comus, transferring Caliban's less attractive qualities to the aristocratic Comus, giving a more rigorous utopian discourse to the lady, and assigning the agency of the resolution not to the aristocrats but to the Ariel-figure and a nature goddess” (“‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King’: Language and Utopia in The Tempest,” in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], 21-54, citation 21).

4. See John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 68-93; Mary Loeffelholz, “Two Masques of Ceres and Proserpine: Comus and The Tempest,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 25-42; Christopher Kendrick, “Milton and Sexuality: A Symptomatic Reading of Comus,” in Re-membering Milton, 43-73.

5. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935, reprinted New York: New Directions, 1974), 11.

6. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), act 4, scene 1, lines 139-41. Further references to the play are from this edition and are included in the text.

7. Empson, 30-31.

8. Raymond Williams uses the term “counter-personal” to describe the realist impulse behind George Crabbe's The Village (1783). See The Country and the City (St. Albans, England: Paladin, 1975), 23. I had forgotten Williams's use of the term when I first applied it to The Tempest, but it seems to me that my forgetful use of the term usefully complicates Williams's own tendency to portray Renaissance pastoral as an “enamelled” world in which “living tensions are excised” (29).

9. Most readings of pastoral in The Tempest have seen Prospero's appropriation of its myths as relatively unproblematic. See Thomas McFarland, Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 146-75; David Young, The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972, 146-91.

10. See David Scott Kastan on this exchange, Shakespeare after Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 186. Kastan's reading of the play, like my own, insists on the centrality of European dynastic politics.

11. Norbrook, 42.

12. Stephen Orgel, “Introduction,” The Tempest, 19-20. Orgel's list of the parallels between Sycorax and Prospero is instructive: “She, too, was a victim of banishment, and the island provided a new life for her, as it did literally for her son, with whom she was pregnant when she arrived. Like Prospero, she made Ariel her servant, and controlled the natural spirits of the island” (19).

13. See John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

14. Montaigne's Essays, John Florio's Translation, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (London: Nonesuch, 1931), vol. 2, 230; cited by Gail Kern Paster, “Montaigne, Dido and The Tempest: ‘How Came that Widow In?’” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 91-94, citation 93-94. Orgel is, on the other hand, uncharacteristically harsh on the Virgilian Dido: “[T]here are many sympathetic readings of the Virgilian episode in the period, but there was not getting around the fact that Virgil's Dido ends as a fallen woman, conscious of her sin, betrayed and abandoned” (42).

15. Orgel, 40.

16. See Richard Wilson, “Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of The Tempest,” ELH 64 (1997): 333-57, esp. 335-36.

17. Wilson intriguingly argues that Claribel's match would have possessed topical significance for an English audience watching The Tempest while simultaneously following the negotiations for the marriage between the Medici heiress and the Prince of Wales. The match, however, was “generally loathed” in England, and some (Wilson shows that the Venetian ambassador was one) might have suspected the extent to which the proposed match was in effect an attempt to gain commercial concessions and to regain plunder from Robert Dudley's (the natural son of the Earl of Leicester) commercial operations in Leghorn (346-47). This would have implicated Stuart politics in what in the play is clearly a corrupt system.

18. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, VI.xii.4. D. C. Kay, “A Spenserian Source for Shakespeare's Claribel?” Notes and Queries 229:2 (1984): 217.

19. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 126.

20. Orgel, 42.

21. Wilson, 336.

22. See Leo Marx, “Shakespeare's American Fable” (1960, reprinted in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1964], 34-72).

23. Scholarship of the past few years has returned to an interest in the Mediterranean context of the play, challenging the previous assimilation of the play to colonialist discourse. I have already indicated my own use of Wilson and Kastan. See also Barbara Fuchs, “Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 45-62; Jerry Brotton, “‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest,” in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 23-42. Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters, however, remains the best reading of the relationship between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in The Tempest, arguing that the play is a palimpsest in which an Atlantic text not yet fully legible on its own terms reinscribes the original Mediterranean text (108-09).

24. Norbrook, 34-35, 50-51 (fn. 40). For the importance of this political formation on Shakespeare's immediate followers, see Philip J. Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Robert Brenner's Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), argues that the colonizing aristocrats of Shakespeare's time were eventually displaced by interloping “new-merchants,” but Brenner also notes intriguing counterexamples, including the Earl of Warwick's use of the “still vexed Bermudas” as a base for parliamentary opposition from 1628 onwards (149).

25. The “Puritan” Prospero is not a staple of recent criticism, but it was once generally assumed to be crucial to his identification with British imperialism. See, for example, G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays (London: Methuen, 1948), 255.

26. Recent scholarship has revised earlier assumptions that identified the politics of the masque solely with the interests of the monarch. See the essays in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

27. John Pitcher, “A Theatre for the Future: The Aeneid and The Tempest,” Essays in Criticism 34 (1984): 193-215, esp. 204-05.

28. Ernest R. Gilman, “‘All Eyes’: Prospero's Inverted Masque,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 214-30.

29. Richard P. Wheeler has associated Caliban at this moment with the return of the repressed (“Fantasy and History in The Tempest,” [1995, reprinted in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick M. Murphy (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 293-324, citation 316]). Wheeler's reading is more fully psychoanalytic than my own, and he argues that Caliban represents Prospero's own repressed desire for Miranda.

30. Wheeler, 315-16; David Sundelson, “So Rare a Wonder'd Father: Prospero's Tempest,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 33-53, esp. 49.

31. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959, reprinted Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

32. Douglas Bruster intriguingly connects Caliban with Will Kemp, clown of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (“Local Tempest: Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 [1995]: 33-53).

33. Meredith Skura, “Discourse and the Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 42-69, esp. 60-65. Harry Berger, Jr. similarly reads Prospero's “pastoral kingdom” as requiring a scapegoat—Caliban—in order to sustain its magical sense of its own power and virtue (“Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies 5 [1969]: 253-83, citation 261).

34. See the discussion of Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, “Ferdinand and Miranda at Chess,” Shakespeare Survey 35 (1982): 113-19. Shakespeare's interest in the symbolic conflation of love and war is, they point out, a consistent one (115).