Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 427 - Brave New World - Shakespeare’s Tempest and Colonialism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Brave New World, Shakespeare's Tempest and Colonialism. The infamous gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament would not come until 1605, a few years after the death of Queen Elizabeth. But other things were already exploding during her reign, not least the population. The rising number of people drove down wages and drove up prices. As usual, the wealthy ruling class were the least affected by the situation, but it did not escape their notice entirely. Indeed, economic problems throughout the 16th century helped to inspire the wave of writings on the improvement of the Commonwealth that we've discussed in previous episodes, and those were, of course, written by members of the elite. At the top of the hierarchy, economic expansion was one of the central preoccupations of Elizabeth and her council of advisors. They wanted trade to explode, too. The cloth industry was the powerhouse of the 16th century economy. It was in order to facilitate the production of wool that landowners engaged in the controversial practice of enclosure, where public lands were given over to private use, often for the grazing of animals. That practice is mentioned critically in some of the texts we've already discussed. Thomas More complained about enclosure and utopia, and Thomas Smith warned against its excessive use in his Discourse on the Commonweal. With land and resources at home seeming increasingly scarce, an alternative solution suggested itself, why not seek land and resources abroad? It was a natural thought, since the 16th century was a time of increasing links between England and other European nations. The Reformation itself was one driver of that process, for instance when Protestants fled to Britain from repression in France. This offered some economic benefits, since not a few of those Protestants were skilled craftspersons. Trade links were also established with Spain, Italy, and as far as Russia and the Balkans. Who could object to such developments? The humanists, that's who. In that widely read treatise on education, the schoolmaster, Roger Aschem, complained about the bad effects that Italian culture was having on English visitors. He compared it to the island of Circe, which seduces Ulysses and his sailors in the Odyssey. A 1606 work by Thomas Palmer entitled Essay of the Means How to Make Our Travels More Profitable used the techniques of Peter Remus to offer advice for the voyager. He agreed with Aschem when it came to Italy, a land of unfavorable climate and poor manners. Admittedly, the political ideas being tried out in Italian cities were worthy of interest, but you could read about these in books, so there was no need to go visit in person. There was a steady stream of invective aimed at Spain, too, which is unsurprising given the political, religious, and military rivalry between the English and Spanish at this time. Another travel writer, or perhaps better, an anti-travel writer named Louis Lucanor, wrote to discourage his countrymen from visiting Spain, painting it as a land of oppression. The shortcomings of mainland Europe gave the English all the more reason to turn in the other direction. We already know from our discussion of Edmund Spenser that the late 16th century saw attempts to subdue and colonize Ireland. This too was motivated in part by anti-Spanish sentiment. Robert Paine's 1589 tract in favor of the Munster plantation, a brief description of Ireland, argued that the English needed to act quickly, lest Spain establish outposts there. And then there were the Americas. The Spanish and Portuguese were well ahead in the race to exploit these newly contacted lands, so the English put their minds to catching up. In the 1570s, Barton Frobisher made three unsuccessful trips in search of a Northwest passage to Asia, and Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe by going south around South America. But the Americas offered more than an obstacle in the way of getting to China and India. Riches awaited those who could establish colonies there, like the ones set up by Walter Raleigh on Roanoke Island and mainland Virginia in the 1580s. Or so argued Raleigh's colleagues and propagandists Arthur Barlow, Thomas Harriot, and Richard Hockleuth. Hockleuth is a particularly interesting figure. Having studied theology and the new topic of geography at Oxford, he produced a whole series of works on travel, beginning in 1581 with his Diverse Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent, which was dedicated to none other than Philip Sidney. Hockleuth was painfully aware of the explorations undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese, because he was a polyglot who had been avidly reading travel literature produced all across Europe. He argued that the long history of exploration by people from the British Isles meant that there is none that of right may be more bold in this enterprise than the Englishman. Sidney was impressed, calling the work a very good trumpet for expeditions to North America. Another work by Hockleuth, his Discourse on Western Planting, aimed to persuade Queen Elizabeth and her circle of advisors that colonization was a worthy enterprise. It would not only bring riches to the nation, but also make a foothold for Protestantism. What a disaster it would be if the Catholic nations were to establish their superstitions as the religion of these newly discovered lands. Which brings us to a challenge faced by these colonizing projects. The Americas might have been newly discovered by Europeans, but there were lots of other people who already knew about them, for the very good reason that they lived there. But the propagandists tried to spin this as just another opportunity. Pushing back against the idea that the Native Americans were savage cannibals, they emphasized their pacifism and religiosity. Barlow wrote in his report of a journey to the eastern American coast that the Natives there were, most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age. Harriet likewise argued that the Native people encountered in Virginia were not to be feared, and that since they already believed in a greatest god who rules over other minor deities, it should be relatively straightforward to convert them to Christianity. He also made more chilling remarks, as when he noted that the Natives would have cause both to fear and love us. There was already good reason for the part about fearing, because, as Harriet noticed, Natives were dying of illness in droves just after meeting European visitors as if shot by invisible bullets. We tend to assume that to the Europeans, the Natives of the Americas seemed like nothing they had ever experienced. But in fact, these English aristocrats thought about them in much the same way as they thought about two other, much more familiar groups of people. First, the laboring classes of England, the sort of people who would be displaced by enclosure. Of course, men like Raleigh weren't establishing colonies only for the sake of the English poor. He wanted to get rich himself. In addition to his North American adventure, Raleigh tried to locate El Dorado in South America, correctly believing that precious metal would be found in these lands, albeit on the incorrect grounds that the climate was similar to that of West Africa, which was known to have gold. But even if this found, the Americas could also be settled by what men like Hakluyt considered as the excess population of England. They would be exported to cultivate the newly claimed lands. Second, we have the Natives of Ireland. Again, Raleigh's name comes up here because he was involved in the colonization of Ireland, too. Harriet, in fact, wound up living on the estate Raleigh established there. As we know from that discussion of Spencer, the Irish were considered to be uncivilized, and this was used as a rationale for displacing and massacring them. So, the colonizers were hardly going to hesitate to use the same techniques against the Native Americans. The English liked to present themselves as being more gentle and pious in their approach than the Spanish, and Raleigh in particular was uncomfortable with the prospect of enslaving or exterminating the native peoples. But the travel literature of the time leaves no doubt that these people could rightly be placed under European stewardship. They might have their own kings, but these primitive monarchs should submit to the greater authority of the English monarchy, assuming the invisible bullets didn't get them first. And of course, the greatest benefit they could have from association with the English would be belief in Protestant Christianity. These were intelligent and rational people, but they were still, in the words of Harriet, savage and deprived of the true knowledge of God. Tellingly, and supporting the parallel I just drew with the case of the Irish, Harriet's report on Virginia included artistic renderings of the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles who were made to benefit from domination by more civilized folk. It had worked long ago in Britain, so why not now in America? Reports of exploration were avidly consumed by a wide range of readers, well beyond those who had the political and economic resources to respond to demands for even more exploration, even more conquest. They reached, for example, William Shakespeare. One of his late plays, The Tempest, draws on an account of a shipwreck in the Bermudas, after which a number of sailors incredibly managed to survive on an uninhabited island. Any playwright could take inspiration from such titillating material, but it took Shakespeare to fashion the story into one of the first reflections on colonialism in English literature. Or at least that's a very popular reading of the play, which we'll be exploring for the rest of this episode. The central character of The Tempest is the magician Prospero, who, like a humanist scholar, is so fond of his books that he prefers them to a kingdom, which is just as well, since he used to be Duke of Milan but was deposed by his wicked brother and exiled to a remote island, along with those books and his daughter Miranda. With the help of his magical assistant, Ariel, Prospero summons the titular storm in order to bring his enemies to the island so as to take vengeance, vengeance he will ultimately forgo. In a peaceful ending urged upon him by Ariel, he chooses the path of forgiveness. Appropriately to his name, Ariel is a font of good advice. If Prospero is the key figure in the drama, the key figure for the interpretation we're interested in is Caliban. His name, a near anagram of the word cannibal, has over the past century come to stand for the victims of colonialism. For example, Aimé Césaire, a leader of the néretude literary movement, did a French version of The Tempest that sets the play in a colony and focuses our attention on Caliban's efforts at resistance. A book about the political thought of the great Africana philosopher C.L.R. James is called Caliban's Freedom, while a book by Octave Manoni, inspired by a colonial uprising in Madagascar, was translated into English as Prospero and Caliban, the psychology of colonization. Indeed, for the modern reader, this way of understanding Caliban can seem almost inevitable. Prospero calls him my slave. He is portrayed as subhuman, of a vile race, a monster, a demi-devil, and a thing of darkness. There is a good deal of emphasis on the fact that he formerly lacked language, or at least the language spoken by Prospero and Miranda. It was she who taught him to speak, something Caliban sees as valueless. You taught me language, he tells her, and my profit on it is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language. And there are more subtle clues that Shakespeare wanted to thematize colonialism and servitude in this play. The question, where is the master, appears twice in the chaotic opening scene when the boat is struck by the magical storm. And Caliban allies with two servant characters from the boat, the buffoonish Trinculo and the drunkard Stefano, whom Caliban welcomes as a new master. Ironically, Caliban equates becoming Stefano's servant with freedom from the tyrant he had previously served, namely Prospero. The most straightforward interpretation of all this would take Shakespeare as sympathizing with Prospero and approving of his sovereignty over the degenerate Caliban. After all, as a child of his age, Shakespeare would hardly be likely to challenge the right of Europeans to dominate the non-Christian peoples of the New World. When at the end of the play, Caliban comes to regret his rebellion and promises to be wise hereafter and seek for grace, we are meant to feel that order has been restored. The fact that Caliban was in cahoots with the lowly Trinculo and Stefano confirms the aforementioned parallel seen by many at this time between the inhabitants of the Americas and the lower class inhabitants of England. The underlings are put back in their lowly place even as Prospero is restored to his lofty dukedom. As Shakespeare himself might put it, all's well that ends well and the happy ending here is assertion of power of European lords over their subjects, both domestic and foreign. But this is Shakespeare, so we probably shouldn't settle for the most straightforward interpretation. We can start with that story about the real shipwreck in the Bermudas. It did not involve any encounter with natives, so if Shakespeare did mean Caliban to stand in for such people, then he was at least altering his source material. Also, Shakespeare, genius though he was, could not have known that the British were going to spend the next centuries colonizing and enslaving the rest of the world, so we should be careful in taking our own historical knowledge for granted and reading the play through that lens. Furthermore, the play's representation of Caliban doesn't really suggest a threatening colonized figure who is put down before he can overthrow his rightful rulers. Rather, the uprising of the three servants is consistently played for laughs. Nor is Caliban even the most brutish of the three. When Triculo and Stefano discover some fine clothes and start putting them on with drunken abandon, it is Caliban who has the presence of mind to try to get them back on mission. Then too, Caliban isn't exactly a native of a newly discovered land. He is there because of his mother, the witch Sycorax, who is from North Africa. Shakespeare allows Caliban to shout at Prospero, This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother, which thou takest from me. We are then told that Caliban started to get rough treatment from Prospero only after he tried to rape Miranda. This scene obviously puts Caliban in a bad light, but it also raises the question of whether Prospero has a rightful claim to rule the island. To understand the role of Caliban in the play, we need to attend to the fact that he is thematically paired with two other characters. Firstly, Ferdinand, Miranda's love interest. He is obviously a more appropriate suitor than Caliban, and his courtship of Miranda fits with Prospero's political designs. Yet Prospero treats him too as a threat to his daughter's chastity and issues dire warnings about what will happen if he takes her virginity before they wed. Secondly, and more importantly, Ariel. Ariel and Caliban are in a way opposites. Ariel is as obedient and helpful as Caliban is recalcitrant and rebellious, and the two are associated with the opposing elements of air and earth. It's mentioned twice that Caliban has been confined to a prison made of rock. Still, both are servants, and both spend much of the play complaining about their servitude. Yet it seems much harder to read Ariel as symbolizing inhabitants of the New World, as has so often been done with Caliban. This spirit of the air is more reminiscent of Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream. So the parallel between Ariel and Caliban confirms that Shakespeare was thinking about lordship and servitude, but tends to undermine the notion that he was thinking specifically about colonial lordship and servitude. Could even be that the two servants are meant to represent something more psychological than political. The two may allegorize the higher and lower parts of Prospero's own soul. A hint at this comes at the end, when Ariel persuades Prospero to take pity on his enemies. The magician says, with my nobler reason, against my fury, do I take part. But before we abandon the notion that Shakespeare was even thinking about the New World and its peoples, or at least the notion that he was thinking about it in any depth, we should deal with one further complication. It comes in the form of another source he drew on when writing The Tempest, an essay by Montaigne called On Cannibals. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, there's a scene in The Tempest that is clearly inspired by a passage from this essay. In it, an irritatingly long-winded but basically sympathetic character named Gonzalo gives a speech imagining the kind of society he would like to establish on this apparently uninhabited island. It's a kind of miniature version of Thomas More's Utopia. Adopting the same outside-the-box thinking we associate with Montaigne, Gonzalo imagines a commonwealth with no magistrate, letters, riches, poverty, and use of service, none, no occupation, all men idle, all and women too, no sovereignty. He concludes, I would with such perfection govern, sir, to excel the golden age. Which is as good a time as any to reveal that I've been taking all the episode titles for Renaissance Britain from Shakespeare. I would with such perfection govern was the title for episode 412 about British political thought. If you notice this already on your own, then you can take quiet satisfaction, but better not tell anyone, because as Shakespeare said, there is not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself. On Cannibals is one of Montaigne's most famous essays, but I held off on discussing it until now because it makes for such interesting reading alongside The Tempest. It is one of the first texts to propose a positive attitude towards the natives of the Americas, in an anticipation of the noble savage idea that will later appear so famously in Rousseau. Montaigne writes that if these peoples are wild, then they are so only in the sense of wild fruits that grow in nature without human interference. The natives are, he says, close neighbors to their original state of nature and thus spontaneously obey the natural law. Thus their elders preach two things only, bravery before their enemies and love for their wives. Montaigne actually meant a so-called savage who was brought to France from the Americas. He was unable to communicate with him, but could still call on his Shakespeare-like ability to put himself in the shoes of very different people. So he speculates about how Europe must have seemed to this man, how he would be amazed that so many people put up with grinding poverty and don't just kill the few who are wealthy. A further example of experimentation in human sympathy is found in another of Montaigne's essays, On Coaches, where he imagines how the natives of the Americas would have seen the Spaniards when they first arrived. Unknown monsters within shining skin, namely their armor, bearing blades and cannons. Montaigne says, we took advantage of their ignorance to pervert them toward treachery, toward every kind of cruelty and inhumanity by the example of our own manners. Montaigne has frequently, and rightly, been celebrated for these passages. He didn't know what was going to happen over the next centuries either, but if he could have seen into the future, he would not have been surprised. He knew already that it was the Europeans who were monstrous, not the natives. If we accept that with his own delicate monster, Caliban, Shakespeare was indeed trying to represent newly contacted peoples, then we also have to accept that that representation was far more ambiguous than what we find in Montaigne. Shakespeare was under no illusions as to the cruelty of the English, as shown by a remark of Stefano in the play, in England, they will not give a single coin to relieve a lame beggar, but they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Shakespeare also has Gonzalo say of apparitions summoned by Prospero, these are people of the island, 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. So the spirit of Montaigne seems to have found its way into this play alongside the spirit of Hakkut. Which of these two spirits claims Shakespeare's own allegiance? I find it hard to say, so will content myself by observing that the question of colonialism in The Tempest relates closely to the other question most commonly asked about the play, are we supposed to see Prospero as representing Shakespeare himself? Like the identification of Caliban with a new world cannibal, this identification is a tempting one. Prospero's magic may symbolize the magic of the theater, and his valedictory closing remarks are sometimes thought to voice a kind of retirement speech by the playwright. Our revels are ended, it says, before referring to the magic spirits as actors, and saying that the great globe shall dissolve, which of course sounds like an allusion to the globe theater. But if we do assume that Prospero is Shakespeare, we will be hard pressed to adopt a nuanced reading of the role of Caliban in the play. After all, the more we empathize with the plight of this demi-devil, the more we will take umbrage at his mistreatment, and the more our admiration for Prospero would be undermined. I can readily believe that Shakespeare, having read Montaigne, had misgivings about England's colonial adventures, but if so, I find it impossible to believe that he cast himself in the role of the colonizer. I should say that this last observation about the connection between the Caliban question and the Prospero question is inspired by another podcast which I highly recommend. Actually, it's a series of recorded lectures called Approaching Shakespeare from Oxford professor Emma Smith. Well worth checking out, not least for the occasional flashes of wordplay and humor. In the first episode, she has a nice line about the hazards of dating Othello. I'm increasingly tempted to do what she does in that series and devote about 30 episodes to these plays, given how rich a mine of philosophical treasures they are proven to contain, but I'm going to exercise restraint and do only one more episode on a Shakespearean theme. Unlike Prospero, I won't be abjuring rough magic, because next time, we'll be looking at one of the most unnerving features of 16th century culture, witchcraft, and how it features in one of Shakespeare's most unnerving plays. So join me as we ask, what did Lady Macbeth say to her annoying dog? Yes, that's right. Out out, damn spot. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.