The notes here concentrate on the particular aspects discussed in the class.

Absence of mothers

Undoubtedly, in the figure of Caliban we see a reflection of the knowledge of the new, distant, overseas lands Europeans were exploring and settling, wherever the island may be ostensibly set. For confirmation, Shakespeare half-quotes from Montaigne's essay Of Cannibals, which discusses Brazilian Indians.

However, it is worth noting that there is no actual evidence that Shakespeare is thinking specifically of the New World. The only place-name mentions are of Algiers (where Sycorax seems to have come from) and the Bermudas, where Ariel was once sent to fetch dew. The island is generic, and in this sense Caliban is, too, standing for the concept of the peoples Europeans met on their explorations.

It is also all too easy to imagine that somehow the discovery of indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere had just happened, and American indigenous peoples were the only ones of notice - a bias to be found in commentators (especially American commentators, obsessed with the sins of colonialism) as well as students.

The first African captives from south of the Sahara were taken back to Lisbon in 1441. The Portuguese had set up posts in Sumatra by 1513, and established themselves in Goa (on the Indian coast) in 1520, the year Magellan recorded a reference to a Patagonian god Setebos (Caliban's 'dam's god'.). By 1610, the Spanish treasure galleons had been plying the Atlantic to and from central and South America for 107 years, the British, through the East India Company, were established in the Far East, and the Ottoman empire had also explored and expanded eastwards. Lisbon had a large African slave population.

Thus non-Europeans (or people of non-Mediterannean origins, since once again one must not forget the Ottoman empire) were certainly not unknown to Europe by 1610. One can, though, perceive an increased interest, exemplified by Montaigne, in natives from those areas without a recognizable civilization, who lived off the land in what was seen as a semi-natural state, and who were to lead to Rousseau's concept of the 'noble savage'. The very recent start of colonialization in North America (Jamestown, Irigina, 1607, Quebec, 1608), and the bringing back of North American 'savages' accelerated this trend.

Thus around the figure of Caliban we see a number of features that probably reflected the attitudes of the day toward such different humans (and vice versa):

It is interesting to see that this could be a catalogue of subsequent European attitudes to North American natives and Afro-American slaves.

However, it should be noted that all these are views of Caliban are held by characters in the play, and Shakespeare's attitude to him is much more complex and equivocal. Three elements in particular mollify the perceptive audience's (if not the character's) view of Caliban:

1. Caliban has easily the most beautiful and poetic language in the play (before Prospero's final speeches).

   Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
   Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
   Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
   Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
   That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
   Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
   The clouds methought would open and show riches
   Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again. (III.2.130-138)

   is not the speech of an completely unsympathetic brute, and Shakespeare seems to be aware (in a way that now seems very modern) of Caliban's knowledge of and care for what we would call the ecology of the island. This is the purer, elemental side of the 'wilderness' theme in Shakespeare.

2. Shakespeare as playwright doesn't seem to take sides on the issue of the original ownership of the island (see below, governance). It is difficult not to notice that Caliban does seem hard done by, and that Prospero does treat him very harshly.
3. There is a  usually unnoticed anomaly in the story about Caliban trying to rape Miranda.  The only evidence we have for it is that Prospero thinks he tried to. Caliban's riposte is equivocal, and quite natural in the circumstances - of course he would, if he could, people the island with little Calibans/Mirandas, since that (until the arrival of the ships) seems the only way humankind will continue on the island, and he also needs successors to his supplanted ruling of the island. The surprising thing is that Miranda, at  Act I scene 2, lines 354-365, does not take up the allusion at all, but defends herself and accuses Caliban on all sorts of other grounds, almost as if she is feeling guilty about this incident. Indeed, one wonders whether she might not have led Caliban on (after all, she then had no possibility of knowing anyone else), and one wonders, when she reacts with such awe at the sight of all the other men, quite how that marriage with Ferdinand will fare.
    

Miranda and Caliban
A painting by James Ward (1769-1859) source

Paul Falconer Poole. A Scene from the Tempest, 1856
Oil on canvas, 35 x 38.5 inches. The Forbes Magazine Collection, New York. source

George Romney.
Emily Hart as Miranda, 1785-1786. source

In The Tempest Shakespeare yet again explores the question of governance, and many of the themes of governance in earlier plays return here. The differences, or new elements, are:

Illusion and reality

“There are many things that seem to exist and have their being, and yet they are nothing more than a name and an appearance”
Quevedo, end of 16th Century

The duality between the spirit and the flesh, between the dream and reality, that co-exist but (like the 'urban' and the 'wilderness', or intellect and nature), which was such a preoccupation with 16th Century and early 17th Century Europe, culminates in The Tempest (the other great expression of this theme is Cervantes' Don Quixote, first published in 1605, and in English translation in two parts in 1612 and 1620).

There a a number of obvious elements of illusion, deception, and incorrect assumptions:

As for deception:

And there are other symbols of transformation connected with illusion and reality:

The tempest:

Sleep:

Dream:

Music:

Henry J. Townsend. Ariel.
Steel engraving, approximately 10.5 x 6 inches, by C. W. Sharpe. The engraving is from Charles Knight's two-volume Imperial Edition of The Works of Shakespere (London: Virtue and Company, 1873-76). source
Typical of the Victorian preoccupation with fairies.

Amid the illusions on the island, there is another illusion in The Tempest, for the island is itself and illusion.

Its O is the O, the round of the theatre, the Globe, in which the original audiences were, and it is the O, the round of the globe, that is the world itself, and the illusion that you, the audience, are in reality is the illusion of the theatre, and the illusion that you, inhabitors of this earth, are in reality, is the illusion of the world itself.

Here, in the O of the Globe that is the theatre, is Prospero, the great stage-manager, directing the illusion of events in the island, but directing the illusion of the events in the theatre, so that the two are inseparable:

Prospero: You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

In such a situation you, the audience, the world, reality and illusion are inseparable. The play becomes a metaphor for the theatre itself, and one realises that Prospero is not merely the stage-manager, he stands for Shakespeare himself, summing it all up and laying down his pen, his final play a summation of the world he has both created and been created by. As sson as one sees Prospero as Shakespeare, his final speeches take on a different cast:

Prospero Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

until one arrives at the end of the play, and Prospero's marvellous epilogue. Imagine it is Shakespeare talking about himself, breaking the staff of his magic of creating illusion that is the theatre:

Prospero Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

1) Plumb, J.H. The Horizon Book of the Renaissance. New York: American Heritage Publishing. 1961. p.174 return to quote