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Article Excerpt
"Which play / Were we in?" Ted Hughes, "Setebos" (1)
Since the peak of postcolonial approaches to Shakespeare's work in the decade between the 1980s and 1990s, The Tempest has been read as a drama of colonial expansion and a play about the subordination of the natives of the New World. (2) Yet Ariel's allusion to "the still-vexed Bermudas," (3) which expresses the play's concern with Jacobean colonial projects in the New World, also captures the ambiguities of Shakespeare's geography because the island is located in the Mediterranean, somewhere between Tunis and Naples. Despite the allusions to the New World, the location of the Bermudas in the Mediterranean makes The Tempest also a play about the Old World. The play's geographical setting in Europe, not in the colonial space of the New World, connects The Tempest to the world of humanism. Or, as Neil Rhodes has put it recently, "in The Tempest there is no centre, nor indeed any firm sense of geographical location at all." (4) Scholars have already detached The Tempest from its firm place in postcolonial criticism by reading it as a Mediterranean play. (5) The ambiguous location of the Bermudas, between worlds, makes us wonder what the play's historical concerns really were. I propose to displace the postcolonial approach to The Tempest criticism with a revisioning of this a play as allegorizing humanism's positive and negative characteristics. I will argue that The Tempest is a humanist play in the sense that it engages with the humanist world and politics at a number of levels. In arguing for the play's strong humanist orientation, however, I am not merely endorsing humanism as a practice of learning and reading as refashioned in the play. I also claim that some writers, including Shakespeare, showed humanism's negative effects, and call this self-reflective critique humanism's dark side. From the outset of the play, Shakespeare announces that humanism is under pressure, not merely upheld. The shipwreck in the opening scene, for example, could be read as a kind of over-literal satire of the Petrarchan image of the galley sinking under the weight of sighs and tears that is an early humanist cliche, an emblem of government's pinnace overfraught.
When David Scott Kastan argues that The Tempest "is much more obviously a play about European dynastic concerns than European colonial activities" and calls for "other and more obvious contexts" of the play to be uncovered, he articulates the recent critical turn away from postcolonial readings of the play. (6) Other contexts, especially the multilayered and complex web of humanism, permeate this play more systematically, more apparently, and yet no less problematically than issues of imperialism and colonialism. The dominant discourse in this play is humanism, embodied in Prospero as a teacher and narrator. Yet the play is also a critique of humanist practice of education and government, with Prospero playing a failed governor who valued humanist principles but fell short of applying them to the practice of governing.
While Jonathan Bate has argued that the master discourse in The Tempest is not that of the territorial possessions in the New World but humanist arguments about the just or unjust forms of government, Andrew Fitzmaurice has proposed that "the atmosphere" of The Tempest echoes court debates presented in Tacitus, a popular philosopher in humanist debates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about civic government and worldly corruption. (7) Neil Rhodes has also argued for the humanist foundations of the master discourse in The Tempest, seeing "poetry as a civilizing agent" in this play, and for the art of eloquence as determining its aesthetics and ideology. (8) While these critics focus on specific humanist topics--philosophy, ethics of government, poetic eloquence--I want to explore a variety of topics that connect some of the philosophical, rhetorical, and aesthetic features of the play as a composite humanist structure, and how such topics overlap in producing one of the most complex of Shakespeare's late plays. My point is not only that in The Tempest Shakespeare engages with a theory of political action, just rule, and effective rhetoric, but also that he expands and broadens (rather than deepens) the humanist fabric of the play by bringing into it resonances of other humanist topics, such as pedagogical instruction, reading, memory, and visual aesthetics. Thus, the play, I suggest, is a collage of references to humanist culture in its varied complexity.
The colonial aspect of The Tempest has been challenged long before current criticism. Thus, Frank Kermode argues in the Introduction to his Arden edition of the play that "there is nothing in The Tempest fundamental to its structure of ideas which could not have existed had America remained undiscovered, and the Bermuda voyage never taken place.''9 Before the events on the island occur there are significant enactments of power other than just the colonizing thirst that governs some actions of the play. The usurpation of Prospero's position as the governor of Milan, for example, represents one such example of the violent use of power. Meredith Anne Skura has argued that the link between Shakespeare's play and colonization is not a new argument that emerged with the burgeoning of postcolonial scholarship, but that dates back to nineteenth-century criticism. Skura reminds us that the play's construction of the subjugated native is only an extension of the period's anxiety over and attention paid to a number of other forms of alterity and otherness, both in the Renaissance and in the criticism pre-dating postcolonial theories of colonization. (10) As Skura points out, by making the New World and colonialism overarching topics of the play, new historicist and postcolonial criticism only have shifted the emphasis from multiple power relations to a specific moment in the history of power struggle between colonizer and colonized, with Caliban, not Prospero, at the center of the debate. (11) It is these other specters of power, launched by the humanism of the Renaissance, that I wish to discuss in this paper.
Just as overseas exploration, discovery, and proto-colonialism constitute some of the political activities within the transatlantic (and Mediterranean) worlds of the play, so does humanism constitute a historical contingency in The Tempest. While Jonathan Dollimore's critique of Kiernan Ryan considers humanism as a larger category that is "always inherent in human nature," I look at humanism as historically specific, involving newly emerging knowledge, new theories of the state, new moral thought, and the classical heritage, which imbued Shakespeare's times and to which his work is responding. In particular, eloquence, instruction, and learning are models for the simultaneous creation of new knowledge and ideologies in the Renaissance, also allowing for a critique of that knowledge and values. (12) In a play in which the production and use of knowledge, mostly through Prospero's magic, affect the characters and actions, humanism furnishes material for the play's allegories in a number of ways. I am interested both in rebuilding the context of humanist learning that makes up the rhetorical and thematic fabric of this play, and, in doing so, recovering the origin of the despondence that eclipses the world of this play. The language of colonization, I suggest, is not the only language that reveals humanism's other side in The Tempest.
Shakespeare's vision in this play grows from the historical upheavals and major changes in the cultural, political, and intellectual context of his world, and its shift towards modernity. One of the distinctive features of modernity essential to the humanism that Shakespeare scrutinizes in The Tempest is that man decides his fate. The Tempest as a humanist play implies--through Prospero's abjuration of magic, his return to Milan, and the restoration of a civil order--that the ultimate end of these acts in which man governs his life depends upon a human being, not the upheaval of magic. Shakespeare's play, in fact, animates some of the sentiments regarding Milan and Naples that have their imaginative correlatives in the events in The Tempest. For instance, a seventeenth-century translation of Giovanni Botero's Relations of the Most Famovs Kingdoms and Commonweales Thorough the World states that "the States of Naples and Milan are in the hands of a Prince, absent and far off, and therefore circumspect to raise innouations." (13) Botero's text echoes Shakespeare's play, in which Prospero is represented as an "absent" prince who neglects his governing duties, even though one could say that his interest in magic makes him less "circumspect" of innovations. Another translation brings together The Tempest and Italian history. In The Historie of Gvicciardin the volatility of Naples and Milan is detailed, specifying one Ferdinand and one Anthonius embroiled in the battle for political dominance in Milan. (14) We can establish the larger imaginative context for Shakespeare's play not only through the two names that appear in both texts, though in a different relationship in The Tempest, but also in the affiliation of political violence and instability in the humanist city-state. The fact that these two Italian texts in translation circumscribe some aspects of Shakespeare's play point to a pronounced English interest in the Italian humanist politics as a model for new humanist governments, as well as warning of the dangers that might afflict those states.
That the fin de siecle, to which Shakespeare's play of "sophisticated decadence" belongs, (15) was a period of profound shifts in governing the world and the shaping of the human subject did not escape the attention of Shakespeare's contemporaries. One of the most evocative of those reflective moments appears in the Dedicatory Epistle to Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, of Samuel Daniel's The First Part of the Historie of England (1612). Daniel describes the late sixteenth century as
a time not of that virility as the former [of the Plantagenets], but more subtle, and let out into wider notions, and bolder discoveries of what lay hidden before. A time wherein begin a greater improuement of the Soveraigntie, and more came to be effected by wit than the sword: Equall and iust incounters, of State, and State in forces, and of Prince, and Prince in sufficiency. The opening of a new world, which strangely altered the manner of this, inhancing both the rate of all things, by the induction of infinite Treasure, & opened a wider way to corruption, whereby Princes got much without their swords: protections, and confederations to counterpoise, and prevent overgrowing powers, came to be maintained with larger pensions. Leidger Ambassadors first imployed abroad for intelligences. Common Banks erected, to return and furnish moneys for these businesses. Besides strange alterations in the State Ecclesiastical: Religion brought forth to bee an Actor in the greatest Designes of Ambition and Faction. (16)
Daniel invokes the world of autocratic control and of the balance of power between the state and the monarch; of colonial expansion and quest for goods and resources; the launching of foreign diplomacy and the establishment of (and anxiety over) the banking system; and...
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