SOURCE: “Marriages of State: The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra,” in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 141-60.

[In the excerpt below, Hall evaluates the racial and sexual threat to imperial culture posed by Caliban and Cleopatra in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, respectively.]

Colonialist readings of The Tempest have shown the text to be a fertile ground for exploring issues of race, cultural contest, and authority in English encounters in the “new world.”¹ They have been less attentive to roles of women in colonial structures. The threat of interracial desire, although only one element in the myriad contests over social control in the play, is key to the establishment of an ideal of patriarchal authority. Perhaps because of his indeterminacy (to which I shall return later), Caliban has been read alternatively as black African, Afro-Caribbean, and Native American; however, in all these permutations, he embodies and resists ideologies of dark and light even as he is continually read as dark other.² Ania Loomba proposes that “explicitly social-Darwinist, racist and imperialist productions indicated Caliban's political colour as clearly black” (143). The text itself locates Caliban on one side of a binarism in Prospero's final pronouncement on Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275-76), and in clearly marking him as a slave who is associated with darkness and dirt: “thou earth” (1.2.314; Vaughan and Vaughan 15).³ Caliban functions as a “thing of darkness” against which a European social order is tested and proved. Conversely, Miranda is the emblem of purity and integrity whose person is the grounds of this struggle: the contest for access to her reveals a concern over the purity of the aristocratic female body that symbolically assures the integrity of aristocratic bloodlines (“fair issue” [4.1.24]) and an orderly disposition of property (Loomba 83). In addition to the connection between Caliban and Miranda, the play features a series of attempted joinings or unions that momentarily disrupt categories of race, class, and gender. These unions generally draw attention to the increased fluidity of these categories in new world enterprise and particularly question the future of dynastic alliance and succession in an Atlantic economy.

In the first scene Prospero charges Caliban with the attempted rape of Miranda: “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” (1.2.345-48). While Caliban's response indicates that he did indeed make advances to Miranda, modern minds conditioned by American racism are compelled to disrupt Prospero's fostering of Ferdinand's “seduction” in place of Caliban's “rape,” for, as Susan Griffin reminds us, the rape threat is the prime image formed by the racist imagination:

At the heart of the racist imagination we discover a pornographic fantasy: the specter of miscegenation. The image of a dark man raping a fair woman embodies all that the racist fears. The fantasy preoccupies his mind. A rational argument exists which argues that the racist simply uses pornographic images to manipulate the mind. But these images seem to belong to the racist. They are predictable in a way that suggests a more intrinsic part in the genesis of this ideology. (298)

Although it may seem anachronistic to impose such a race/sex dialectic on an early text, and possibly offensive to seem to “explain” Caliban's behavior, it is nonetheless true that interracial sex does become an issue in the Virginia colonies not twenty years after the first performance of The Tempest. In the first Virginia law case (Re: Davis 1630) involving race, a white, Hugh Davis, was publicly whipped for fornication with a black woman (Giddings 35-36).

Completely authorized by the play, Prospero's hostility toward Caliban is linked to his obsessive attempts to control his environment and his daughter's sexuality. Caliban's response, “O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done! / Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (1.1.348-50), strikes at the heart of European fears of the putative desire of the native other for European women and thus functions to license Prospero's anxiety (Loomba 149). Caliban's threat “to people the isle” with his offspring clearly suggests that he would control the island by creating a new “mixed” race and rebuts Prospero on his own terms. Territorial claims are backed here by a need for patriarchal control over women.⁴

Miranda's response to Caliban is equally telling: the language lessons (which she implies brought about the attempted violation), rather than fostering communication, reveal an epistemic “difference” that serves only to heighten her sense of racial difference and her estrangement from Caliban:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race—
Though thou didst learn—had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with …

(1.2.352-59)

Miranda's tirade against Caliban's alien “ingratitude” does seem out of character for the dutiful daughter she is in the rest of the play.⁵ Her claim that Caliban does not “know thine own meaning” replicates the play's central ethos, which cannot accept that his “gabbling” has value: just as Prospero's power is located in his book, “true” meaning (and power) lies in European, aristocratic language. Like many colonial travelers who denigrate the language of other cultures when confronted with meanings they do not accept, Miranda reads Caliban's native tongue as a nonlanguage and refuses to accept his use of her discourse on the grounds that it is corrupted with “uncivil” meanings. Her lessons, rather than reforming and “civilizing” him, only let him express his “savage” impulses in terms she cannot help but understand. He controls the language rather than be controlled by it. Caliban's “sin,” as it were, is both linguistic and sexual; in saying, “My profit on’t / Is I know how to curse,” he subverts the language just as he is said to attempt to corrupt Miranda.

Caliban's rejected sexual advances signal his position in the web of economics, hegemonic control, and linguistic exclusion that is common to discourses of race. In arguing that race becomes the central trope for forming differences between “cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not—also have fundamentally opposed economic interests” (5), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., also suggests that “literacy … is the emblem that links racial alienation and economic alienation” (6). Caliban's “difference” is produced out of just such a combination of linguistic exclusion and economic competition: his reply (“my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse”) articulates both economic and linguistic / racial alienation. Although writing is not directly an issue, access to a language of power is; curses (or spells), while seemingly powerful weapons for Sycorax, have no efficacy for Caliban. In this new linguistic economy, powerful curses and spells are located in Prospero's book. This triangulated linguistic community, with Prospero at the apex, serves to enforce both a racial hierarchy and patriarchal authority. Miranda, while teaching Caliban, performs the proper role of the woman within culture: she teaches a “mother language” to Caliban that is supposed to replace his original mother's tongue. However, neither Miranda's nor Caliban's relationship to language is powerful. Miranda's own mastery of language is still secondary to Prospero's: it is represented as purely oral, and she is frequently conjoined to silence in the beginning of the play. Juliet Fleming astutely notes that the vernacular and the oral are often associated with the feminine; more important, she contends that such mediated relationships to standardized languages are typical: “But while women (and foreigners) may be permitted to lend their assent to the new authoritative functions of English, they are not expected to use it authoritatively themselves; indeed the adequately ‘ruled’ English turns out to be the exclusive possession of men” (299).

So, too, the enforcing of a subject people's “assent” to a ruler's language is a key tool of colonial power. Caliban, typically, has been taught language as a tool of his own subordination; it is so tied into his labor as servant and guide that its use merely “profits” Prospero. We can see a similar ethos of language and national/ethnic competition in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland, which is concerned in many ways with the legal, cultural, and economic ramifications of the union of cultures under imperialism. One of the fears that erupts from the discussion of the dubious lineage of Spaniards (seen as a mixed-race people) is the problematic purity of the Englishmen living in Ireland.⁶ Miscegenation (which, like blackness in George Best, is dubbed an “infection” by Spenser) and assimilation show their first effect in language:

Irenius: … and first I have to find fault with the abuse of language, that is, for the speaking of Irish amongst the English, which, as it is unnatural that any people should love another's language more than their own, so is it very inconvenient and the cause of many other evils. Eudoxus: It seemeth strange to me that the English should take more delight to speak that language than their own, whereas they should (me thinks) rather take scorne to acquaint their tounges thereto, for it hath been ever the use of the conquerer to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his. So did the Romans always use, insomuch that there is almost no nation in the world but is sprinkled with their language. (67)

The discussion here shows a crucial connection between inscriptions of racial difference and colonial control. Cultural and political differences between the English, the Scottish, and the Irish are distilled to problematic linguistic differences, the overcoming and assimilation of which is the first step in an imperialist project.⁷ Irenius replies to Eudoxus's concerns that so few can be influenced linguistically by linking language acquisition to social formations, particularly to domestic practices:

I suppose that the chief cause of bringing in the Irish language, amongst them, was specially their fostering, and marrying with the Irishe, which are two most dangerous infections, for first the childe that sucketh the milke of the nurse must of necessity learn his first speech of her, the which being the first that is enured to his tongue is ever after most pleasing unto him, insomuch as though he afterwards be taught English, yet the smack of the first will always abide with him, and not only of the speech, but of the manners and conditions, … The next is the marrying with the Irish, which how dangerous a thing it is in all commonwealths, appeareth to every simplest sense, and though some great ones have used such matches with their vassals, … yet the example is so perilous as it is not to be adventured … (67, 68).

In this section of the View, fears of interracial alliance are very explicitly linked to fears of assimilation of the ruler by the ruled. This particular passage presents English fears of alternative social structures, such as Irish fosterage, and presents women as a chief danger. In some ways, fosterage is an even more powerful way of forming alliances between groups than marriage. Patricia Fumerton says of the Irish practice: “So strong was the bonding of fosterage that it cemented ties not only between the child and its foster parents but also between the foster parents and the natural parents” (46). This forming of bonds, which is not significantly different from Elizabethan practices of child exchange, is here a threat both because of the “unhealthy” mixture of Irish and English, and because of the ever-present danger of English assimilation. Women in this scenario become dangerous carriers of the infection of foreign difference, a danger so perilous that intermarriage needs to be avoided at all costs.

The connection between language and profit in Caliban's reply reverberates throughout The Tempest. The Europeans see Caliban as the conduit to the various means of new world wealth talked of in traveler's tales. Prospero makes Caliban a slave after he shows his knowledge of “every fertile inch o’ th’ island,” taking the profit of both the island and Caliban's labor and leaving him with only the dubious gain of language (“my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse”). Trinculo and Stephano immediately see the economic potential in Caliban. At first sight, Trinculo imagines putting Caliban on display: “Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man—any strange beast there makes a man” (2.2.27-30). Trinculo's enterprise again demonstrates the ambiguous allure of economic involvement. In gaining wealth from possession of the native, the European is rhetorically made one with the other, just as the hunger for novelty allows a “monster” to “make a man.” In Trinculo's formulation, he is created (made) by the native even as he makes him an object of exchange: “There would this monster make a man.” Colonialism and class interact when Trinculo (who, unlike Ferdinand, is not “the best of them that speak this speech” [1.1.430]) unwittingly creates the very entanglement that imperialism dreads: “Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (2.2.30-32).

This entanglement is itself ironically staged in the image of Trinculo and Caliban under the gabardine. Stephano associates the sight with foreign strangeness, crying, “Do you put tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind? Ha?” (2.2.56-57). Like Trinculo he instantly thinks of profit as well as of the monstrous mixture of Englishman and native: “This is some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language? I will give him some relief, if it be but for that. If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather” (2.2.63-68). Significantly, Caliban's oddity or monstrosity is due in part to his ability to speak a master language, an ability that (at least in Trinculo's formulation) rewards him: “I will give him some relief.” Trinculo sees yet another profit in Caliban, perhaps buying favor from an emperor in exchange for this new world oddity. The comic entanglement of the lower-class European and the native is reminiscent of colonial propaganda, which locates a dangerous blurring of the line between the civilized and the barbaric in the lower classes and which uses the threatening economic need of the lower classes as the impetus for colonial expansion.⁸ Indeed, this coalition threatens Prospero's imperial project as much as the plot itself threatens his life. Prospero's much-noted hasty exit would then be read as a reaction to a class threat to aristocratic power. It also gestures toward an anxiety about class mobility enabled by colonial enterprise, an issue to which I will return at the end of this [essay].

Despite such class concerns, the proper disposition of both gender and race remains the central anxiety. Ferdinand's appearance on stage immediately after Prospero's dismissal of Caliban highlights interesting parallels between the noble European and the foreign “savage.” Like Caliban, Ferdinand requires instruction from Miranda: “Vouchsafe my prayer / May know if you remain upon this island, / And that you will some good instruction give / How I may bear me here” (1.2.423-26). However, unlike Caliban, Ferdinand is “culturally sound” as well as of noble birth. His first thought upon seeing Miranda is that she “speaks his language”: “My language! Heavens! / I am the best of them that speak this speech, / Were I but where ’tis spoken” (1.2.429-31). His characterization of his status as an epistemic connection rather than one of consanguinity signals an instant bond with Miranda. Linguistic compatibility, seen in other Shakespearean couples such as Romeo and Juliet and Beatrice and Benedick as a mere sign of sexual compatibility, takes on racial overtones in that racial and cultural difference are tied to rhetorical skill. The emphasis on linguistic prowess serves in some ways to efface crucial similarities between Ferdinand and Caliban. Prospero is, with good reason, equally concerned with regulating Miranda's courtship with Ferdinand, although his reaction to that courtship is qualitatively different from his reaction to Caliban. As David Sundelson points out, Ferdinand's reassuring reply to Prospero suggests both hidden rape fantasies and the possibility of abandonment (48), revealing a basic sexuality—common to both men—that must be contained by the father. These similarities in some ways suggest that the “real” difference between Caliban and Ferdinand is racial, not moral or sexual.

The pressures of imperialism insist on the control and regulation of female sexuality, particularly when concerns over paternity are complicated by the problems of racial and cultural purity. Prospero's manipulation of Ferdinand rewards him insofar as it creates a marriage of state that forms the basis for a new empire as well as a romantic attachment. Act 2 opens with a discussion of the marriage of Claribel, daughter of the king of Naples, in which Shakespeare provides an alternative glance at the way in which the traditional political marriage is endangered by European contact with less desirable others. The king of Naples arranges a political marriage between Claribel and the king of Tunis, a move he consequently regrets, because it has indirectly separated him from a daughter and a son. Once on the island, Alonso is roundly castigated by Sebastian for abusing his authority over his “fair daughter” (2.1.70) because he chose to “lose her to an African” (2.1.123):

You were kneeled to and importuned otherwise
By all of us, and the fair soul herself
Weighed between loathness and obedience at
Which end o’ th’ beam should bow. We have lost your son,
I fear, for ever. Milan and Naples have
More widows in them of this business' making
Than we bring men to comfort them.
The fault's your own.

(2.1.126-33)

Sebastian's criticism, like Alonso's regret (Would I had never / Married my daughter there, for coming thence / My son is lost [2.1.105-7]), directly attributes Ferdinand's loss—and the loss of the royal bloodline—to the marriage. All sorts of privation are attributed to the wedding (in contrast to the bounty promised in Miranda's wedding masque): in Sebastian's condemnation, European families are ruptured and bloodlines broken because of this marriage. Prospero prospers not only because of his successful manipulation of the Ferdinand-Miranda alliance but also because of Alonso's disastrous decision to open up the sex/gender system to an African king. In refusing to open the sex/gender system to non-European outsiders, Prospero demonstrates his ability to preserve the integrity of the “fair” aristocratic body and, consequently, the state. Not only does he regain his kingdom, he becomes the father to a new dynasty.

The attention to paternal authority only throws into relief the very visible absence of mothers in the play. Typically, Prospero gives the maternal history of both Miranda and Caliban. Miranda's mother is mentioned in order to confirm the purity and insularity of Prospero's own bloodline:

Prospero:
Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,
Thy father was the Duke of Milan, and
A prince of power—
Miranda:
Sir, are you not my father?
Prospero:
Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father
Was Duke of Milan, and his only heir
And princess no worse issued.

(1.2.53-59)

Ironically, her presence is evoked by Miranda's unwitting, yet witty, denial of her father's royal power. Prospero's reply (“She said thou wast my daughter”) reveals an anxiety over inheritance and the woman's role in reproduction, a factor that had a particularly strong resonance for James, whose own claim to England's throne was particularly vexed because, as Stephen Orgel notes, “His legitimacy, in both senses [as designated ruler and son], thus derived from two mothers, the chaste Elizabeth and the sensual Mary” (“Prospero's Wife” 59). Caliban counters Prospero's attacks with an equally strong claim to an “empire” through his African mother's bloodline:

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.

(1.2.331-44)

It is in response to Caliban's claim of property rights that Prospero charges Caliban with rape, a rhetorical move that reinforces Valerie Smith's point that “instances of interracial rape constitute sites of struggle between black and white men that allow privileged white men to exercise their property rights over the bodies of white women” (158). Although Smith is referring here specifically to the view of white women as property, historically claims of rape have worked to mystify property interests.

Caliban poses the ultimate threat to such a quest for social and political integrity. Not only is he made into a sexual threat against an aristocratic body, his own unfixed and ambiguous origins make him an embodiment of the miscegenative threat. Caliban himself is that site of anxiety provoked by the expansion of England. Peter Hulme persuasively suggests that the play is situated within a fundamental dualism, represented both geographically in the island and physically in Caliban:

The island is the meeting place of the play's topographical dualism, Mediterranean and Atlantic, ground of the mutually incompatible reference systems whose co-presence serves to frustrate any attempt to locate the island on a map. Caliban is similarly the ground of these two discourses. As “wild man” or “wodehouse”, with an African mother whose pedigree leads back to the Odyssey, he is distinctly Mediterranean. And yet, at the same time, he is, as his name suggests, a “cannibal” as that figure had taken shape on colonial discourse: ugly, devilish, ignorant, gullible and treacherous—according to the Europeans' descriptions of him. (108)

As I argue [elsewhere], Africa is a foundational presence in new world discourses. Hulme's formulation provides a necessary corrective to many colonialist readings that look only to new world materials as influential on the play. Alden and Virginia Vaughan note the surprisingly infrequent attempts to link The Tempest to discourses of Africa (51). Although it is not my intent here to embark on that project, thinking along Hulme's lines opens up the possibility for Caliban to occupy multiple sites of difference and might counter some of the unease that critics have felt with the imprecision with which one can identify the play as “colonialist.” Meredith Skura, for example, bases a large part of her critique of what she calls “revisionist” readings of the play on a survey of new world materials and a conclusion that there was no stable colonialist discourse that Shakespeare could be said to draw on.⁹ As a useful counter to Skura's argument, it would be helpful to combine Hulme's insight with Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the “contact zone,” which is a colonial space “in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable contact” (6). The island is a space of competing and conflicting discourses that are about the contact itself. There are any number of these “contact zones” in Renaissance travel literature, and it might be fruitful to think of those in relation to the play. For example, one might think about the infamous example of Sir Francis Drake, whose crew, on his third circum-navigation, impregnated a black woman named Maria and abandoned her on an island along with two black men.

Caliban embodies the contradiction and contest characteristic of border spaces, and in that position he contests Prospero's imperial visions. Just as Caliban verbally refuses Prospero's attempts to construct a seamless colonial narrative and critical attempts to construct a unified play of forgiveness and restoration, his “difference” itself is unsettled; it defies categories and is therefore, for the Europeans and contemporary critics, “unsettling.” Even the seeming resolution seems to open up the issues of Caliban's birthright and inheritance once more:

This misshapen knave,
His mother was a witch, and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power.
These three have robbed me, and this demi-devil—
For he’s a bastard one—had plotted with them
To take my life. Two of these fellows you
Must know and own; this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.

(5.1.268-76)

The terms originally used to control and disinherit Caliban (“misshapen knave,” “bastard,” “demi-devil”) are here reproduced along with a discourse of theft and illegitimacy, which are used to license Prospero's moves to create a political dynasty. Both moves publicly establish Prospero's ownership in a proprietorial sense, suggesting that any “acknowledgment” or bond with a dark other can be safely made only within a context of ownership and control.

The play opens up another perspective on interracial union through the perplexing “widow Dido” jesting that precedes the breast-beating over Claribel's marriage. It is now a commonplace that the Aeneid is a crucial subtext for issues of dynastic politics and royal authority in The Tempest (Orgel, Tempest 39). The story of Aeneas, the founder of imperial Rome, and Dido, the African queen, provides yet another cautionary tale of the threat of female sexuality to colonial expansion when Dido's passion is read as diverting Aeneas from the task of empire. The bantering over Dido's status as widow represents conflicting Renaissance readings of the Dido story (Orgel, Tempest 42), which speak to the issue of proper marriage. Gonzalo's insistence on Dido as widow authorizes her union as a marriage (since one must be a wife to be a widow) and thereby legitimizes the foreign female's part in the creation of empire. In contrast, Antonio's jesting reduces Dido's importance: she becomes a mere dalliance on Aeneas's part and no significant threat to Aeneas's imperial project.

Gonzalo, in changing the subject from the king's doomed children, turns to an imaginative politics that paradoxically creates a “new” commonwealth with existing political structures. The proximity of the description of his “socialist” state to the issues of dynastic succession suggestively links changes in the European social order to the threat of miscegenation. Issues of racial difference are consequently collapsed into problems of economics, politics, class, and gender. Like Shakespeare's Cleopatra, Gonzalo's Dido competes for title of widow and a legitimate place in the imperial text and provokes the possibility of alternative dynastic structures that are not purely European.

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is the play that perhaps is most closely concerned with the ways an African queen threatens empire. Cleopatra's darkness makes her the embodiment of an absolute correspondence between fears of racial and gender difference and the threat they pose to imperialism. As Ania Loomba states, “Dominant notions about female identity, gender relations and imperial power are unsettled through the disorderly non-European woman” (125). In his tirade on Antony's “dotage” in the opening scene, Philo comments on both Cleopatra's sexuality and her darkness, claiming that Antony's eyes “now bend, now turn / The office and devotion of their view / Upon a tawny front” (1.1.4-6) and calling him “the fan / To cool a gipsy's lust” (1.1.9-10).¹⁰ His language, typical of orientalist discourse, makes it clear that Shakespeare is at pains to have us see a black Cleopatra. For Shakespeare, as Leonard Tennenhouse notes, “Cleopatra is Egypt. As such, however, she embodies everything that is not English according to the nationalism which developed under Elizabeth as well as to the British nationalism later fostered by James” (144).

Although there seems to be no male tradition in England of a swarthy Cleopatra, Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra (1594) may provide some clues to the darkness of Shakespeare's. While Cleopatra is never described as physically dark in The Tragedie of Cleopatra, her deeds are “black”; in many ways, she is an outsider even within her own country. The chorus's lament suggests that her unruly behavior is a danger to her own community and estranges her from the rest of Egypt:

And likewise [she] makes us pay
For her disordered lust,
Th’ int’rest of our blood:
Or live a servile pray,
Under a hand unjust,
.....This have her riot wonne,
And thus shee hath her state, her selfe and us undunne.

(16v)

In Daniel's version, Cleopatra is very much the unruly female whose sexuality destroys not only Antony but Egypt as well. Although it is apparent in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra that Cleopatra has lost Egypt to the Romans, there is no Egyptian censure for this, whereas in Daniel's Cleopatra her servants, rather than Antony's, turn traitor and repent. One reason for Cleopatra's lack of darkness may be that The Tragedie of Cleopatra begins after Antony's suicide, which tends to minimize the ominous specter of mixed-race children, a vision that would have been incompatible with the maternal role Daniel envisions for her.

… [There] seems to be an emerging female tradition of a dark Cleopatra. One most obvious reason for this phenomenon is that female writers in various ways identify with the Roman Octavia, an identification that makes Cleopatra a different threat than is found in the male tradition. In her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer makes Cleopatra black, but only in relation to the fair Octavia:

Yea though thou wert as rich, as wise, as rare,
As any Pen could write, or Wit devise;
Yet with this Lady canst thou not compare,
Whose inward virtues all thy worth denies:
Yet thou a blacke Egyptian do'st appeare;
Thou false, shee true; and to her Love more deere.

(1427-32)

In describing Cleopatra, “as rich, as wise, as rare, / As any Pen could write,” Lanyer zeroes in on the crucial matter of Cleopatra as text. Her literary appropriation is much like colonial appropriation in that she is the rich matter to be tamed and controlled for imperial growth. However, as Shakespeare's Octavius discovers, Cleopatra is a highly resistant text in her insistance on fashioning her own role in the empire. This resistance is perhaps due to her absolute identification with Egypt. Although her blackness and difference appear in proportion to her Dido-like threat to empire, the strong correlation between Cleopatra's sexual difference and her cultural difference makes it difficult to manipulate one against the other.

Egypt itself is a very malleable sign. Indeed, as with contemporary Eurocentric geography, many writers of the Renaissance did not locate Egypt on the African continent. Often in geographical and political discourses, Egypt is spoken of as though it is a separate continent, unconnected with Africa. Here Egypt is a focal point of East-West confrontation, claimed as African or “Asiatic” simultaneously, existing as a constantly claimed but ultimately unfixed signifier. Throughout Leo Africanus's Geographical Historie, for example, Egypt is alternately both an early cradle of Christianity and a bastion of “Mahommetism.” With its mixture of religions and races, Egypt is itself like the threatening “infinite variety” attributed to Cleopatra. This absolute identification of Cleopatra with Egypt is most apparent in the association with the Nile. Her speech to Charmian is a case in point:

“Where's my serpent of old Nile?”
(For so he calls me). Now I feed myself
With most delicious poison. Think on me,
That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black,
And wrinkled deep in time?

(1.5.25-29)

Here, we see three of the elements associated with the Nile: serpents, poison/pollution, and blackness. It has been suggested by many editors of the play that this link with the Nile is meant to suggest Cleopatra's fecundity and fertility; travel writings, however, offer a different, more negative understanding of the significance of the Nile. As I noted [elsewhere], travelers' tales of Africa's rivers, which regularly overflow their boundaries, had become a source of fascination for the English, and the geographical fact of inundation is regularly conflated with the sense of darker-skinned Africans as people who resist boundaries and rule. In his description of the Nile, Leo Africanus demonstrates how depictions of the Nile become inextricably connected with assessments of Egypt's political order: “Creatures therein contained are exceeding strange, as namely sea-horses, sea-oxen, crocodiles, and other such monstrous and cruel beasts, (as we will afterward declare) which were not so hurtfull either in the ancient times of the Egyptians or of the Romaines, as they are at this present: but they became more dangerous ever since the Mahumetans were lords of Egypt” (335). The Nile and its inhabitants become more dangerous as they move farther from the “civilized” world. Depictions of the Nile invariably involve unspoken comparisons with English rivers, and the inundations conjure up the specter of Western impotence and stagnation in the face of Egypt's “fat prosperity” (Daniel, L3v).¹¹

Similarly, the Nile runs throughout Antony and Cleopatra as a sign of overwhelming sexuality and social disorder and associates Cleopatra with the kind of overflow and excess characteristic of the female grotesque. Antony, like the Renaissance traveler, regales the drunken triumvirate with tales of Egypt and the “flow o’ th’ Nile” (2.7.17), while Enobarbus tells the attendants tales of Cleopatra's “infinite variety.” The play opens with an evocation of the flooding of the Nile as Philo proclaims, “This dotage of our general's / O’erflows the measure” (1.1.1-2). Antony's and Cleopatra's assertions “Melt Egypt in Nile. … Let Rome in Tiber melt” (1.1.33) also link this powerful image of inundation with the struggles of empire. The dark/light binarism, here acted out as a division of Egypt and Rome, is continually on the verge of dissolution. More than a wishing-away of worldly cares or a sign of Egyptian dispersal of symbols of order and measurement, the metaphors of excess bespeak an anxiety striking directly at the heart of Europe's primal fear: loss of identity in measureless expansion. Antony's absorption with Cleopatra is only the romantically reversed reading of Rome's political absorption. Although it is true that “the luxury and feasting of the Egyptian court image a natural plenty which is curbed by no Roman temperance,” this natural plenitude, so seductive to a modern audience, is precisely what would have been threatening to a Europe struggling to control its own countrymen loosed into a foreign world of plenty (Kermode 1345).

This combination of unlicensed sensuality and economic exchange is perhaps best symbolized by Antony's gift of an “orient pearl” (1.5.41):

“Say the firm Roman to great Egypt sends
This treasure of an oyster; at whose foot,
To mend the petty present, I will piece
Her opulent throne with kingdoms. All the East,
Say thou, shall call her mistress.”

(1.5.43-49)

Like Emilia's admonition of husbands that “pour our treasures into foreign laps” (Othello 4.3.88), Alexas's message from Antony evokes both male submission and sensuality: Antony pictures himself placing kingdoms at the foot of Egypt's throne (rather than Rome's) and delivering the treasures of the Orient to Cleopatra. The image of his message is suggestive of the imperial image of Elizabeth in the Ditchley portrait, in which she literally has kingdoms at her foot.¹² Unlike Elizabeth's virgin pearl, however, this “treasure of an oyster” continues the conflation of sexual and material exchange: oysters were long thought to be an aphrodisiac.¹³ Similarly, Cleopatra's wealth and the sexual threat represented by her children underlie her contest with Octavius when she counters his perhaps false offer of protection for her children with an inaccurate accounting of her “money, plate, and jewels” (5.2.138). The fertility associated with Cleopatra is a threat to the Roman world; in this scene her illegitimate children become the battleground on which she struggles to maintain her stake in the empire.

Antony's affair with Cleopatra is perhaps not as damaging as his “going native” and falling into the plenitude and excess of Egypt. Cleopatra's court is a place of sexual misrule, and in Rome Antony is continually censured for sexual freedom, which is taken for granted in Egypt. In Octavius's eyes, Antony is humbled and effeminized; he uses an image of cross-dressing to denigrate the relationship further: he “is not more manlike / Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolomy / More womanly than he” (1.4.5-7). The descriptions of the court feature all sorts of transgressive behavior, which includes neglecting class as well as racial and sexual boundaries:

                                                                                                                                                                                                        Let’s grant it is not
Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolomy,
To give a kingdom for mirth, to sit
And keep the turn of tippling with a slave,
To reel the streets at noon, and stand the buffet
With knaves that smells of sweat.

(1.4.16-21)

In descriptions of Antony's “dereliction of duty” (some of which sound not very much different from Harrington's scenes of license in James's court), we see that the Romans blame Antony not so much for the affair as for the behavior it provokes: “Mark Antony / In Egypt sits at dinner, and will make / No wars without-doors” (2.1.11-13).

The closing scenes of Antony and Cleopatra turn upon the manipulation of Cleopatra as an imperial text. Like “widow Dido” of The Tempest, she is subject to variant readings. Octavius wants finally to tame and display the previously unruly matter of Cleopatra:

Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion’d at your master's court,
Nor once be chastis’d with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up,
And show me to the shouting varlotry
Of censuring Rome?

(5.2.52-57)

As her speech shows, Cleopatra proves well aware of Roman efforts to fix her position in the imperial picture. Octavius attempts to read her as the dangerous female subject, the strumpet who brought down Rome by causing Antony's downfall:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad's out a’ tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.

(5.2.214-21)

Cleopatra poses an alternative reading of her part in the imperial text. Refusing to be seen as a fatal dalliance, subject to conflicting interpretations, she inscribes herself as a wife. As in The Tempest, the issue of lawful marriage with the other is crucial. In chastizing Cleopatra, Antony bemoans the time diverted from creating legitimate children:

Have I left my pillow unpress’d in Rome,
Forborne the getting of a lawful race,
And by a gem of women, to be abus’d
By one that looks on feeders?

(3.13.106-10)

Shakespeare here has Antony erroneously evoke the idea of a “lost” pure bloodline. Antony did produce children with Octavia, a fact obscured in Shakespeare's text, which is a crucial indication of character in North's translation of Plutarch and, later, for Dryden's in All for Love.

Although, as Stanley Cavell notes, Antony deliberately distances himself from any possibility of marriage to Cleopatra (22-24), he dies thinking of himself as a bridegroom: “My queen and Eros / Have by their brave instruction got upon me / A nobleness in record; but I will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t / As to a lover's bed” (4.14.97-101). Cleopatra, in turn, stages her death as an imperial marriage: “Husband, I come! / Now to that name my courage prove my title! … Peace, peace! / Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (5.2.287-307). Her insistence on being seen as a legitimate wife threatens the closure of the imperial text. Reading these “other” mistresses as wives forces the acceptance of their mixed offspring and directly negates the Roman emphasis on noble deeds and pure bloodlines.

Egypt and Caliban's island are both liminal spaces in which the separations of dark and light, self and other, are momentarily broken down, and the anxieties over that collapse are displayed and explored. Both Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest grapple with difficulties of maintaining cultural integrity and endogamous unions within imperial/colonial economies of desire. In doing so, the texts offer early hints at what will later become entrenched racial stereotypes. Rome is England's imagined forefather in empire, and Antony and Cleopatra provides an object lesson in imperial history; Antony becomes a warning against the dangers of overinvolvement with the reputed sexual excess of black women. The Tempest, looking forward to future colonization, offers the greater threat of the black man as rapist. Both images work less to control actual black sexuality than to shape an image of a white, male ruling class as rational, restrained, and powerful in the face of dangerous excess and unregulated sexuality. However, just as in the travel narrative, such warnings against the other have embedded in them a fascination with the other. Difference always escapes the desire for control. The model imperial powers, Octavius and Prospero, both fail in their attempts to control and order foreign others for their own use. Octavius is ultimately not able to restrain and display Cleopatra, and Prospero is forced to acknowledge his connection to a “thing of darkness.”

Notes

1. For examples of what “new historicism” and cultural materialism have made of the colonial themes in this play, see Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism”; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. For discussions of postcolonial issues see especially Thomas Cartelli, “Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as Colonial Text and Pre-Text”; Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, 142-58; and Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest.”

2. Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan's Shakespeare's Caliban offers a wide-ranging reception history of the play.

3. A. and V. Vaughan also explore the intriguing possibility that the name Caliban derives from the Romany word Cauliban, which meant “‘black’ or things associated with blackness” (33-34). Line references to The Tempest are to the Oxford edition, ed. Stephen Orgel.

4. Stephen Orgel argues that the competing claims of Caliban and Prospero for the island represent the available ways of understanding royal authority under James I's reign (“Prospero's Wife” 58).

5. For a discussion of the critical commentary on these lines and the theater's attempts to resolve them, see Stephen Orgel's introduction to the Oxford edition of The Tempest. I will add that violent rejections of the other's sexual advances only serve, rather than disrupt, the interests of patriarchy. Although this may be a case of the “radically discontinuous” speech attributed to women (Belsey, Subject of Tragedy 160), it also true that women bear the responsibility of policing the borders of the state and rejecting differences that threaten patriarchal structures and are licensed to speak out in that capacity.

6. Spenser outlines one of the sources of this sense of Spain's mixed heritage when he suggests that Spain's current riches are the inheritance of a long history of invasion, particularly by Africans: “For the Spaniard that now is, is come from as rude and savage nations as they, there being as it may be gathered by course of ages and view of their own history (though they therein labour, much to ennoble themselves) scarce any drop of the old Spanish blood left in them: … And yet after all those the Moors and barbarians breaking over out of Africa, did finally possess all Spain, or the most part thereof, and tread down under their foul heathenish feet, whatever little they found there yet standing; the which though afterwards they were beaten out by Ferdinand of Aragon and Elizabeth his wife, yet they were not so cleansed, but that through the marriages which they had made, and mixture with the people of the land during their long continuance there, they had left no pure drop of Spanish blood; no, nor of Roman nor Scythian; so that of all nations under heaven I suppose the Spaniard is the most mingled, most uncertain and most bastardly” (43-44).

7. José Piedra analyzes the first grammar of a modern European language, Antonio de Nebrija's Gramática de la lengua castellana, as an arm of imperial rule: “Europe, Africa, and America became the grounds on which Spain planned to practice enslavement justified as a rhetorical brokerage of universal knowledge” (282). He further claims, “Nebrija provided the New World with the justification for a cohesive Hispanic Text; he unified ‘otherness’ under the grammatical self-righteousness of the colonial letter” (284).

8. See Chapter 1, pp. 53-54.

9. Skura's essay is itself quite fascinating in that it critiques attempts at historical specificity while at the same time insisting on ahistorical psychoanalytic paradigms (such as “man's timeless tendency to demonize ‘strangers’” [45]) that re-inscribe the universality of Shakespeare. Ironically, the very materials she uses would seem to question the “timeless tendency to demonize strangers”: although all colonial narratives are in some sense motivated fictions, the recurring trope of the friendly, welcoming native who suddenly turns hostile suggests that demonization is not the first response—unless one assumes that white Europeans are never strangers. So, too, Caliban's first response is not to demonize the “stranger” Prospero but to welcome him. Skura also claims that “Shakespeare was the first to show one of us mistreating a native, the first to represent a native from the inside, the first to allow a native to complain onstage, and the first to make the New World encounter problematic enough to generate the current attention to the play” (58). This peroration contains a set of highly problematic and offensive assumptions that reveal the difficulties of her critical approach. Her references to the “universality of racial prejudice” (56) and “general psychological needs” (69) are specifically linked to her assertion that Shakespeare was the first to show one of us mistreating a native. These assertions, like her insistence on the universality (yet uniqueness) of Shakespeare, rely on the notion of a unified and universal white subject—in other words, herself. Who is included in the italicized “us” that we are shown in the play? Any reader of the play? Any literary critic? Any teacher? Am I, a black feminist critic of Shakespeare part of the “us” that Skura imagines? Like those who accept Prospero's narratives as the “truth,” Skura assumes that all readers are potential Prosperos.

10. Although “gypsy” is usually glossed as a shortened form of “Egyptian,” it typically carries connotations of darkness as well as associations with lechery and deceit. Sir Thomas Browne calls gypsies “Counterfeit Negroes” in the section “Of Gypsies” in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. See also Alden and Virginia Vaughan's discussion of gypsies in Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History, 33-36.

11. Ania Loomba suggests that the association of Cleopatra with eating also locates her as a racial other: “The recurrent food imagery reinforces her primitive appeal: she makes men hungry, she does not cloy their appetite (II. ii. 240-42); she is Antony's ‘Egyptian dish’ (II. vi. 122), she is ‘salt Cleopatra’ (II. i. 21). She is the supreme actress, artifice herself, and simultaneously primitive and uncultivated” (78). Cultural critic bell hooks sees the desire for the primitive in modern capitalist culture as rooted in an ethos of consumption: “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other” (hooks, Black Looks 23).

12. For discussions of this portrait see Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, 135-41. See also Andrew and Catherine Belsey, “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I,” 15-17. Ania Loomba draws a more sustained connection between the ways in which Elizabeth I and Cleopatra “evoked specifically Renaissance fears of female government” (76).

13. I thank Gwynne Kennedy, whose paper on the correspondence between Lady Mary Wroth and Lord Denny, “She ‘thincks she daunces in a net’: The Reception of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania,” addresses the use of the oyster in the exchange of poems between Wroth and Denny.

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