The Glasgow Review Issue 1
Plantation of this Isle
John Jowett
The Tempest is no uninhabited isle. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, it admits fragments of other texts in other genres into its own texture. These give what might be described, in recognition of the play's reflective, shifting surfaces, as an intertextual shimmer. Prospero's concept of the action as a `project',[1]however, might remind us that the play in which he is situated is in turn neither formless nor passive. The play's project in part involves colonising and appropriating other texts and genres. This textual colonisation through which the play is constituted might remind us of the play's engagement with colonisation. The texts themselves occupy various positions in relation to the colonial theme, but the constituative principle that entails the organising and reshaping of otherly materials is in itself significant to actual situations where a culture is called in question and redefined through its contact with and imperfect recognition of colonised lands and peoples.
One of the literary and theatrical models, court masque, acts as a framework on which the various details of topography and typology taken from other texts can settle and find new meaning. The influence of masque is far from confined to the actual masque of Act 4, but permeates the play as a whole. There are successive moments of tableaux, music, song, dance, displays and spectacle. The play's mythic apparatus, its courtliness of tone, its gestures of compliment, and its notes of moral seriousness: all of these point outwards from the here and now of the Blackfriars or Globe theatre to the court masque proper. By doing so they invoke a courtly culture which is familiarised within the play. To this, each item of knowledge, geographical, historical, or mythical, is invited to belong.
Masque can take precedence in this way over textual models confined to the written word because it is a form of theatre analogous to the play itself. Accordingly it can be transmuted into a formal element of the play, Prospero's own dramaturgy. Other formative texts suffer a sea-change. Masque enables the play to reshape the providentialist pattern of the most influential of the Bermuda pamphlets, to reject the optimistic view of the savage condition in its encounter with Montaigne, and to decline the foundation of multiracial empire in its encounter with Virgil.[2]Masque must, however, meet its limits as a mode of drama that is alien to a play of the amphitheatre or hall theatre. It remains an inner kind of drama that the play can never itself become. Unlike the masquer, Prospero will not be able to dance with the play's paying audience at the end of the performance and become one with them.[3]Though he seems to monopolise the tools of signification, the play's meanings are neither those of Prospero nor those of masque. The equivocal structure of The Tempest allows it to tantalise us with prospects of signification that are never fully realised. The play is reluctant to affirm; it metamorphosises political issues into artistic charm; it is a Janus whose two faces are complicity and innocence.
II
For his story of shipwreck Shakespeare seems to have been influenced by several pamphlets describing Sir Thomas Gates's wreck in the Bermudas in 1609, on his voyage to Virginia. William Strachey's account was the most influential.[4]In Strachey's letter the events of the shipwreck and survival are presented in such a way that they exemplify God's favour towards the colonial project. Strachey heads his report with a summary in which the story is interpreted even as it is outlined:
A true repertory of the wreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the islands of the Bermudas, his coming to Virginia, and the estate of the colony then and after under the government of the Lord La Warre. July 15, 1610, written by William Strachey, Esquire.[5]
Strachey's providential narrative would have been a reassuring one. At the time he wrote, the future of the Virginia colony was acutely uncertain.[6] In Strachey's account, the colonial administrators' troubles, `the next fountain of woes' through which the colony has passed, are described as a `greater shipwreck in the continent of Virginia'. Thus the Bermuda events are taken as an emblem of the colony's fortunes. In both cases, wreck and redemption can be referred back to `The ground of all those miseries ... the permissive providence of God, who, in the forementioned storm separated the head from the body'. The episode ends happily for both head and colonial body. The shipwrecked voyagers were preserved; their safety both anticipated and permitted an end to the colony's `misery and misgovernment' when the survivors reached Virginia.
Shakespeare's play allows no such inferences. The sequence of Strachey's account is unlinked, and so its teleology is undone. As magician (which is to say masque-maker) and as ruler Prospero combines two quite separate stages of Strachey's account: the shipwreck in the Bermudas and Lord La Warre's subsequent government in Virginia. In the play the one event cannot lead to the other, and cannot therefore prefigure it; hence there can be no straight arrow of causation.
When Prospero seems miraculously to save the ship's company he sets himself as viceroy to God himself. The function of providence and the figure of the colonial governor are therefore merged into one, an overdetermined figure who is also the maker of the play's inner dramas, including the shipwreck itself. This conflation might seem to intimate an extreme version of Divine Right, and as such to present Prospero within an authoritarian political framework. But in the longer term it is a step in a journey away from Strachey's providentialism. Wonder is induced by a man: a magus, or perhaps even a Baconian scientist; a masque-maker who surpasses Inigo Jones. In the mirror in which he reflects himself Prospero initially appears to supplant God, but as the play progresses the illusion disperses, until finally he resigns his magical-theatrical power to leave a disenchanted world. If providence is left room to re-emerge mutedly at the end, it is no longer directed to colonial tasks. The play has effectively subverted Strachey's confident line of destiny. Sir Thomas Gates and his party left the Bermudas to continue their mission to Virginia; in contrast, Prospero goes home.
III
In 1.2 Prospero's survey of past events in long narrative speeches builds up a sense of ongoing history motivated by something like destiny. This device of recapitulative narrative might owe something to the Aeneid, a large proportion of which consists of Aeneas retelling his own story. And indeed, a sense of destiny is an important prerequisite for the Virgilian frame of reference that is established when Ferdinand meets Miranda.
At this point the scene becomes a pageant based on Aeneas' vision of Venus after his shipwreck on the shores of Africa. The immediate prelude is Ariel's invisible song, with offstage spirits dispersedly chanting the burden. Here for the first time the enrapturing power of music and magic spectacle transforms the dramatic moment. These non-verbal artifices mingle with the words of Ariel's songs. In the first song, miraculous kisses hush the storm-waves, and the island's wild noises are domesticated to the farmyard. The second song metamorphoses Alonso's supposed death into something rich and strange. Both of these lyrics have designs upon Ferdinand; they conjure up destruction and grief in order to work them to wondering acceptance. When the couple meet in the charmed space of the moment that follows, Ferdinand responds to Miranda as does Aeneas on seeing Venus: `Most sure, the goddess / On whom these airs attend'. The echo of Virgil's `O dea certe' (I, 328) is not casual.[7] The play has opened its dialogue with, and restructuring of, Virgilian themes.[8]
Venus' visitation of Aeneas is significant in any reading of the epic, but particularly one which, in Renaissance fashion, foregrounds the hero's love affair with Dido. In the Aeneid, when Venus appears to Aeneas she tells him of Dido and instructs him to make his way to her palace. Venus also reassures him as to his `comrades restored and of thy fleet recovered, driven to safe haven by shifting winds' (I.390-91). The Tempest's audience has just heard of another such reversal of fortune:
PROSPERO Of the King's ship,
The mariners, say how thou hast disposed,
And all the rest o'th' fleet.
ARIEL Safely in harbour
Is the King's ship, in the deep nook.... (1.2.225-8)
It may be for reasons of theatrical economy that the rest of the fleet is `dispersed', but such dispersal also acts to guard the text itself from falling under the command of epic. Only the ship represented in 1.1 reaches safe haven on the island. But from Ferdinand's point of view all are lost. The Virgilian linking of shipwreck and divine vision emerge as linked spectacles of destruction and restored harmony.[9]
As the encounter is staged in The Tempest, Miranda is also presented with what is, to her, an almost godlike spectacle. Her response too is formal, formulaic, and Virgilian. Prospero portent-ously summons her in language suggesting a discovery in a theatre, specifically a court theatre: `The fringe'd curtain of thine eye advance' (1.2.409). The amphitheatres and hall theatres were equipped with curtains, but these would probably have been drawn laterally; only in masques would curtains sometimes have been advanced upwards. In reacting to the sight revealed to her uplifted eyes, Miranda herself plays Aeneas, even before Ferdinand responds to her: `I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble'. Her words paraphrase more than the declaration `o dea certe': Virgil has Aeneas say, `for thy face is not mortal nor has thy voice a human ring; O goddess surely!' In Shakespeare's play the vision of a god(dess) is mirroring, reciprocal, and is so turned into a tableau of mutual admiration and compliment. Add to this the absence of the military ethos, the ambiguity of the island as a location not in Africa but between Africa and Italy, the given fact that the human figures are neither of them really gods, the use of song and music (and probably, with Ariel, dance), the exploitation of theatrical illusion, and finally the very conceit of the spectacle's strangeness, and the effect is to redefine Virgil's epic as theatre, specifically as masque.
IV
As his name suggests, Caliban is also an altered, comically familiarized but still dangerous variation on the fierce and cannibalistic Carib of Renaissance myth-making.[10] He is rapine and murderous, but prefers roots and berries to human flesh. Prospero can be said to `produce' Caliban, in various senses, as colonial subject and as a theatrical role; but the savage has an otherness that is beyond the master's comprehension or control. Theatrically, he is too attractive to the audience for Prospero's purposes; within the play's fiction, he is too degenerate. In contrast, and at moments relatively remote from Prospero's control, the play establishes and mocks a more favourable view of indigenous American peoples. This would be consistent with Prospero's own predispositions if we were to accept that the play offers Caliban as the truth about American Indians, but it may be rather that the inhabitants of the New World escape confinement by either of two contrasting forms of European categorisation. They are not dwellers in Utopia, nor are they mere objects of vilification called up to justify their own repression. Caliban too is presented, as the bent strands of meaning in his very name suggest, as a misrepresentation.
Shakespeare takes Montaigne's essay `Of the Canibals' as an exemplary text of the Utopian view of the savage. Montaigne himself had imposed the optimistic New-World observations of Amerigo Vespucci upon Plato's description of the ideal republic. His description of a primitive society was therefore already a set-piece of Eurocentric intertextuality.[11]Whereas Virgil presents a distant and epochal originary moment in European civilization, Montaigne is dialogic, in debate, readily accessible, and projecting imaginary futures. Shakespeare's play stands between, in a present of charmed transience.
In his vision of the ideal society in 2.1.145-62, Gonzalo closely follows Florio's translation of Montaigne's words. If the words retain the memory of Montaigne's noble savagism, the impact is drastically altered. Gonzalo relocates the Utopia in such a way that it is stripped of its value as a non-European and pre-colonial civilization. The opening proposition, `Had I plantation of this isle', summons up the very antithesis of the savage Utopia, namely the English colonial schemes for not only Virginia but also Ireland.[12]Planting implies power relations between a colonizer and a displaced indigenous population; it implies authority; it implies a transplanting of English subjects whose broad social status, social roles, and allegiances as citizens are already established. (Of course, as Shakespeare would have been aware, the notion of England as coloniser is a more complicated illusion by virtue of the recent implication of the other nation over which King James held sovereignty, Scotland.)[13]
Colonial plantation is inescapably postlapsarian, and Gonzalo's project therefore lays itself wide open to Sebastian's and Antonio's scorn.[14]Where Montaigne is an urbane voice of civility, Gonzalo, using almost the same words, can only sound ridiculous. This is especially so because the anti-Utopian Caliban has already appeared on stage in 1.2, and because Gonzalo's listeners and critics are exactly the sort of courtly sophisticates who would make his Edenic colonial project impossible. The image of primitive Utopia is `planted' within the harsh context of an aggressive, hierarchical, and `planting' society; its otherness is reclaimed by the very world against which it is proposed as an outside alternative. Utopian virtues are implausibly transferred from the potentially displaced people to the displacers themselves. Gonzalo's harmonious vision is soon answered with Antonio and Sebastian's brutal attempt at double murder.
V
The play returns to both Montaigne and Virgil in the central scene 3.3. Montaigne is summoned up for another dismissal during the spirits' banquet, the prelude to Ariel's appearance as a Virgilian harpy. The courtiers debate the meaning of the `several strange shapes' who bring in the banquet. These have entered to `Solemn and strange music,' danced `with gentle actions of salutations', and, with an `excellent dumb discourse', invited their guests to eat. The spectacle is one of utmost courtly gentility. It goes beyond or even parodies the Utopian writers' descriptions of natural courtesy amongst American Indians. Tellingly, the courtiers cope with their novel experience by placing it within the context of proverbially untrue travellers' tales. Gonzalo goes a step further and stumbles into error of interpretation: `for certes these are people of the island'. With a certainty that equals in its error Ferdinand's `Most sure' when he hails Miranda as a goddess in 1.2, but in his own quaint way of expression (`certes'), Gonzalo thinks he has discovered something like his ideal world in actual existence. Certainty belongs with Prospero, who deals with others by destroying then rebuilding their knowledge of reality. In the last scene he points to `Some subtleties o'th' isle, that will not let you / Believe things certain' (5.1.124), and soon after is able to assert `Know for certain...' (5.1.158). Here in 3.3 the audience is able to be more knowing than Gonzalo; it can see that Prospero is high up `on the top' overseeing an illusion produced by his spirits. Their more-than-European civility has been called up only to be overturned by the ravaging harpy. Gonzalo's moralising on the `islanders', though it is approved by Prospero for the unwitting comment it implies on Sebastian and Antonio, entirely misses the mark:
Who though they are of monstrous shape, yet note
Their manners are more gentle-kind than of
Our human generation you shall find
Many, nay almost any. (3.3.31-4)
In l. 33 the emphasis is, I take it, on Our: - us as opposed to these islanders, with little if any recognition on Gonzalo's part that they are not human. Gonzalo plays the amateur anthropologist, mistaking wonders for culturally locatable signs. The idealized image of American Indians proves to be, quite literally, an illusion. So wonder is shifted from the anticipatory joys of cultural relativism to the quiescent pleasures of theatrical spectacle.
VI
Ariel's appearance as a harpy, which enables Prospero to bring the courtiers under his control, can be seen as the formal precondition for the masque of 4.1. Here, even more emphatically than in 1.2, the presentation is masque-like but the terms of reference are strictly and manifestly Virgilian. In the Aeneid, III, 209-62, the chief of the harpies warns Aeneas of future starvation as a punishment for his impious banquet on the harpies' cattle and goats.[15] As in Montaigne's account, the classical source is conjoined with colonial themes, most immediately the threat of starvation. The courtiers, like Aeneas, are potentially pre-colonists, and the play's devouring harpy may relate to the description of the Indian ambusher Powhattan as a `greedy vulture' in the official record of the Bermuda wreck. But the specific details of the harpy episode derive most decisively from Virgil.
The Virgilian episode is reshaped to the conditions of Jacobean stage spectacle. Virgil's bird-like harpies come from the skies; on the stage Ariel must therefore surely enter in flight by being lowered from the `heavens' on a wire.[16] Despite the Folio text's unhelpful `Enter', we may be fairly confident about this detail, and it is an important one. It brings into the scene a modest but effective playhouse equivalent to the descents of court masques, in which a whole group of figures mounted on an ornamented wooden frame might be lowered by machinery from aloft. Further, it establishes a visual parallel between the punitive harpy of 3.3 and Juno's auspicious blessings in the following scene, for she too `descends' from the heavens. The parallel extends to the respective exits.[17] The harpy vanishes aloft in thunder; Juno similarly vanishes, almost certainly to the heavens, and to that noise described as strange, hollow, and confused. The noise probably emanates, like the thunder, from above. These visual and aural repeats might draw attention to similarities in symbolism, especially as the masque, with its visions of Juno, Ceres, and Iris, is also Virgilian. Alonso's `ling'ring perdition' is associated, through the vanishing banquet, with the punishment of slow starvation prophesied for Aeneas; Juno and Ceres promise exactly the opposite, the spring in harvest of endless fruitfulness. And each spectacle has a comparable but contrasting family meaning for its stage audience: for Alonso, the loss of his son; for Ferdinand and Miranda, marital unity.
VII
At the end of the play the punishment is annulled and the marriage is made good. The final tableau is linked to what might be called the punitive antemasque of the hunting of `King Stefano' just as the masque in Act 4 is linked to the harpy episode. But the discovery of Ferdinand and Miranda also harks back to and redefines their blissful first meeting, now re-presented in more socialized terms as a union between Naples and Milan that will settle past conflicts in the present. As the horizon of the end falls towards the present, it is Ferdinand's father Alonso, the real and surviving King of Naples, who is ritually summoned as an enchanted audience, and is transported from distraction and mourning to joy. Prospero has assimilated Ferdinand into his family spectacle. The new encounter is more highly formalized, and yet more literal. Where Ferdinand was previously `charmed from moving', a specific charmed circle contains the new stage audience. An actual curtain replaces the fringed curtain of Miranda's eye.
Behind this curtain, in Prospero's cell, Miranda and Ferdinand are playing chess. In view of the structural parallel between this scene and the earlier overt reference to Aeneas' vision of Venus, it is not fanciful to find an allusion to the cave where Dido and Aeneas consummated their love. The discovery space probably coincides with Prospero's `cell', which on the analogy of masque scenery might be thought of as a cave.[18]The game of chess celebrates political power transfigured into a courtly game, and marks a similar transfiguration of dangerous sexuality.[19] We may recall the discomfiture of Venus and Cupid in the masque of Act Four. The masque, as John Pitcher has argued, rewrites the story of Dido by banishing Venus and celebrating the blessings of marriage as a reward for premarital chastity.[20]Virgil says of Dido's and Aeneas' love-making, `That day was the first cause of death, the first cause of woe' (Aeneid, IV, 169-70), as if the Edenic serpent itself lurked in the cave. Such disasters have been circumvented by Prospero's trials, his insistence on icy restraint, and now his refiguration, in allegorical spectacle, of sexuality as Tamed Desire.
The charmed audience in the magic circle very literally represents evil contained. But no sooner has the couple been displayed to them than Miranda once again inverts the boundary between actors and audience, reinterpreting the audience-space of the charmed circle as the stage-space of her `brave new world'. Once again, echoing Aeneas and Ferdinand, we hear the words `Is she the goddess ...?' (5.1.187). Again, and even before these words are spoken, Miranda makes the vision reciprocal, when she apostrophizes the new world that meets her eyes (5.1.182-4).
The political modus operandi is now marital diplomacy, not colonisation. Epic is slipping away from sight altogether as the play becomes self-referential and narcissistic. A shift from `Virgilian' to `Ovidian' may be implied here; but the self-referencing between episodes of the play and the mutual mirroring of characters is more particularly the narcissism that Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong identify in the masque itself, the naricissism of self-congratulatory exclusion.[21] The marriage is European, to the marked exclusion of the African Caliban. Happy endings have to be unambiguous, though the ambi-guities have to be left visibly excluded, still essential to the whole.
The earlier sneer of Claribel's being loosed[22] to an African at 2.1.123 followed almost immediately on the discussion of Carthage and widow Dido (2.1.73-99). Caliban as a potential sexual partner figures only as a potential rapist. Like Venus, he is kept at bay: there will be no tragedy of Dido here. But Virgil's tragedy of betrayal was necessary so that Aeneas could continue on his journey and Rome could be founded. It anticipates the later defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars and the transmutation of Carthaginian territories into a colonial region called Africa. Shakespeare's play declines both sexual embrace and definitive military conquest. Or rather, it pursues a monocultural love-encounter that leads to the proto-colony being abandoned.[23]
VIII
Masque is therefore the undoing of epic, but needs undoing itself if the island is to be left. It offers a dangerously idealist projection of mind upon the world; it dangles the temptation of the golden age, spring in harvest, paradise, the dream-place where Ferdinand could `live ever here'. But the techniques of masque and antemasque are finally incapable of dealing with Caliban. When Prospero at the end of the play acknowledges the `thing of darkness' as his own, he is admitting the inadequacy of masque as a process. Caliban has successfully resisted designation as a merely symbolic figure of antemasque; as the Caribbean writer E.K. Brathwaite has noted in entitling one of his 1990 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures `Caliban's Garden', there are gardens other than Prospero's to plant and protect.[24]
In the face of such resistance, masque can only fail in its project of restoring the golden age. Accordingly Prospero has rejected masque and magic. In a masque the illusion is finally extended to the audience itself when the masquers dance forth. Something similar happens, as we have seen, when Miranda comes forward to hail her brave new world - even if she does so without musical accompaniment (which is questionable) and without inviting the others to dance. But neither Miranda nor Prospero can break the charmed circle of the theatre itself. At the end of The Tempest Prospero stands alone on the stage; in Rilke's words, `he draws / the wire into his head, and hangs himself / beside the other puppets, and henceforth / begs mercy of the play', emphasizing the gap between the audience and him, the last player. With such `Putting off', the field of narcissistic encounter cannot possibly become the theatre as a whole.[25]
This resignation of the masque process, with its projects of integration and harmonization, leaves no resource for maintaining the proto-colonial space of the island, which is the play itself. The play ends with separation and departure: Prospero leaves Caliban on the island, he draws apart from the other characters, he divests himself of himself and stands forth as an actor; the audience applauds and itself goes home. This is one way of coming to terms with the seeming impossibility of a colonial destiny. Prospero wants to forget Caliban. The colonial space can offer no more than a temporary mirror for the familiar world, a mirror that is now a corrective opposite, now a flattering fantasy. Wonder and illusion are visibly emptied of their colonial politics, at one level in the name of marital diplomacy, but finally in the name of ever-disintegrating theatrical enchantment.
Historically, we may look into the seeds of colonial violence in this refusal, for if Caliban represents real fears he opens up a scenario in which the alternative to declining the tempting opportunity presented by colonialism is to enforce it brutally. England, of course, maintained and extended its new colonies. The Tempest is knowing in relation to its own historical moment, but it has no immunity against appropriation by later colonial discourses. It can be absolved from the guilt of a world it at most merely foreshadows. To future colonial projects it is practically blind.
Notes
[1] The word occurs in The Tempest more frequently than in any other Shakespeare play.
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[2] My account may be compared with the more theorized reading that reaches towards the play's `political unconscious' given in Paul Brown's study, `"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine": The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism,' in Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 48-71 (p. 48). Brown finds the play to be `a register of beleaguerment and a site of radical ambivalence' (p. 68). Meredith Anne Skura, in `Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest',' in Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), pp. 42-69, extensively reviews criticism of the play's relation to colonial discourse, arguing strongly that the colonial theme should not monopolise readings.
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[3] See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975), p.39: `The climactic moment of the masque was nearly always the same: the fiction opened outward to include the whole court, as masquers descended from pageant car or stage and took partners from the audience. What the noble spectator watched he ultimately became.'
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[4] The text was unpublished in 1610, when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. He presumably consulted a manuscript version.
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[5] Cited from Stephen Orgel's edition of The Tempest (Oxford, 1987). `Repertory' modernizes Strachey's `Reportory', which might usefully have been retained. References to the play are from Orgel's edition, and his astute critical introduction has influenced my thinking on many points.
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[6] See Frank Kermode, in his edition of The Tempest (London, 1954), pp. xxvi-xxvii, and, for fuller details, C.M. Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York, 1917), and Leslie Hotson, I William Shakespeare. . . (London, 1937), pp. 217-33.
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[7] The Aeneid, in the Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (London, 1934). T.W. Baldwin, in Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, 1944), II, 456-96, is plausible in claiming Shakespeare knew Virgil in the original; I therefore quote below, passim, H. Rushton Fairclough's translation in Loeb.
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[8] Echoes of the Aeneid were first collated by J.M. Nosworthy, in `The Narrative Sources of The Tempest,' in Review of English Studies, 24 (1948), pp. 281-94 (pp. 288-94). See also Jan Kott, `The Aeneid and The Tempest,' in Arion, NS, 3 (1976), pp. 424-51, and his `The Tempest, or Repetition', in Mosaic, 10 (1977), pp. 9-36; John Pitcher, `A Theatre of the Future: The Aeneid and The Tempest', in Essays in Criticism, 34 (1984), pp. 193-215; and Robert Wiltenburg, `The Aeneid in The Tempest,' in Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987), pp. 159-68.
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[9] Barbara J. Bono, in Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley, 1984) describes Shakespeare's `transvaluation' of Virgil as an `increasingly subtle study of the intimate embrace of eros and civilization'(p. 139).
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[10] See Hayden White, `The Noble Savage: Theme as Fetish,' in First Images of America: The Impact of the Old World on the New, edited by Fredi Chiappelli, co-editors Michael J.B. Allen and Robert L. Benson, 2 vols (Berkeley, 1976), I, pp. 121-35, especially p. 126. Neither idealized nor debased image corresponded to reality, with tragic results for the American Indians, as Bernard Sheehan charts in Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, 1980).
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[11] See Aldo Scaglione, `A Note on Montaigne's "Des Canibales" and the Humanist Tradition', in Chiappelli, I, pp. 63-70 (p. 66).
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[12] For the relation between `English expansion within and without the British Isles' see Karl S. Bottigheimer, `Kingdom and colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise 1536-1660', in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650, edited by K.R. Andrews, N.S. Canny, and P.E. Hair (Liverpool, 1978), pp. 45-63, and N.S. Canny, `The permissive frontier: social control in English settlements in Ireland and Virginia, 1550-1660', in The Westward Enterprize, pp. 19-44.
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[13] An imperial `Britain' is a logical synthesis from the opposition between Rome and ancient Britain in Cymbeline.
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[14] Kermode says of the natural life: `It is over-simple to assume that this perennial theme is destroyed by the cheap jeers of Antonio and Sebastian' (p. xxxviii). This is misleading in that it implies that Gonzalo gives a simple and unproblematical exposition of the theme. Leo Marx takes the view that Shakespeare satirizes Montaigne, in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Eden in America (New York, 1964). See also Philip Brockbank, `The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire', in Later Shakespeare, edited by J.R. Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 8 (London, 1966), pp. 183-201 (pp. 194-5).
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[15] There may too be an echo of Virgil's description of the torment in Hades where the fiercest Fury prevents famished sufferers from eating the rich banquet spread before them (Pitcher, pp. 193-5).
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[16] See John Jowett, `New Created Creatures: The Stage Directions in The Tempest'', in Shakespeare Survey 36(1983), pp. 107-20.
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[17] David Lindley notes of the masque that `This show, like the lords' banquet, is snatched away' and considers that the banquet and the glistering apparel used to distract Caliban's co-conspirators are parallel false treasures of the isle, in `Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest,' in The Court Masque, edited by David Lindley (Manchester, 1984), pp. 47-59 (p. 52).
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[18] Orgel, in his edition, p. 40, n. 4, notes that Shakespeare describes Dido and Aeneas as `Curtained within a counsel-keeping cave' (my emphasis), in Titus, 2.3.23. Jan Kott (`The Aeneid and The Tempest',' p. 429) refers to the illumination in a tenth-century Vatican manuscript of the Aeneid which `shows Aeneas and Dido as a medieval couple playing chess'.
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[19] Compare Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, `Ferdinand and Miranda at Chess', in Shakespeare Survey 35 (1982), pp. 113-18.
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[20] Pitcher, pp. 204-5.
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[21] Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (London and Berkeley, 1973), I, pp. 1-15.
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[22] Orgel modernizes the Folio's `loose' to `lose', but recognises that both senses are present.
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[23]I In contrast also with Robinson Crusoe, who eventually appropriates the island as `my new colony'.
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[24] In a lecture given at the University of Kent at Canterbury, November 1990.
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[25] Rainer Maria Rilke, `The Spirit Ariel', in Selected Works, 2 vols (1976), II, pp. 292-4 (p. 292).
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