Prospero's counter-pastoral - criticism of John Milton - Critical Essay

by Kevin Pask

AT THE BEGINNING of the period in which Caliban was to acquire his strongest association with revolutionary energies of every sort, William Hazlitt lodged what remains a powerful if underappreciated critique of this association. Writing in response to the report of a lecture in which Coleridge described Caliban as "an original and caricature of Jacobinism, so fully illustrated at Paris during the French Revolution," Hazlitt responded with some heat:

   Caliban is so far from being a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that
   he is strictly the legitimate sovereign of the isle, and Prospero
   and the rest are usurpers, who have ousted him from his hereditary
   jurisdiction by superiority of talent and knowledge. "This island's
   mine, by Sycorax my mother," and he complains bitterly of the
   artifices used by his new friends to cajole him out of it.

Rather than Coleridge's envious Jacobin, Caliban is in fact much more like "the bloated and ricketty [sic] minds and bodies of the Bourbons." (1) Hazlitt is obviously attacking Coleridge from the left, even if his position is one hardly recognizable to more recent attempts to read The Tempest in a historical and political register. Coleridge's association of Caliban with the Jacobins was not a complimentary one, but his relatively conservative reading of Caliban turned out to be considerably more influential than others for the New Historical and Postcolonial readings of the play.

Hazlitt understands the "radical" content of the play to be aligned with Prospero rather than Caliban, and this reading reflects the influence of Milton's engagement with The Tempest. In Milton's early revision of the masque form, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle generally known as Comus, the enchanter and tempter Comus first appears to the Lady as a shepherd, but, as the representative figure of the aristocratic pastoral, his counsel to the Lady is to spend rather than to hoard her erotic energy. The Attendant Spirit (also dressed like a shepherd) later informs her brothers that Comus is of divine birth, son of Bacchus and Circe, and he also leads a "monstrous rout" who "are heard to howl / Like stabbed wolves, or tigers at their prey." (2) Comus is both libertine aristocrat and leader of a plebeian mob, and the association of Comus with bestial release puts him in the lineage of Caliban. (3) Still, Milton's Masque does not fail to reveal the genuine temptation Comus offers the Lady, a temptation at least partly Shakespearean in character. (4)

Milton provides us with the terms to re-inflect the critical disagreement between Hazlitt and Coleridge: Caliban as both Hazlitt's "rickety Bourbon" and Coleridge's revolutionary Jacobin. Such a reading of pastoral necessarily relies on William Empson's expansive version of pastoral as the literary mode whose characteristic "trick of mind" is to imply "a beautiful relation between rich and poor." (5) The Tempest hardly seems to bring off this trick; rather, it is something more akin to the photographic negative of the Renaissance pastoral, even Shakespeare's own ironic playfulness with the genre. Prospero himself appears to associate Caliban with a narrower understanding of pastoral when his own wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda produces the pastoral dance of nymphs and reapers. In watching this conventionalized pastoral, however, what Prospero actually seems to see is Caliban, producing the play's most dramatically unsettling moment in Prospero's sudden dissolution of his own masque: "I had forgot that foul conspiracy/ Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/ Against my life." (6) I shall return to this moment in the play, but only after elaborating a double plot, Miranda's courtship and Caliban's rebellious claim to the island, that makes it so resonant in the play. "What is displayed on the tragic-comic stage is a sort of marriage of the myths of heroic and pastoral," writes Empson with Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay in mind, "a thing felt as fundamental to both and necessary to the health of society." (7) The Tempest, on the other hand, puts the tragicomic double plot through its usual paces, but in order to reveal the dynastic Realpolitik that produces it. The play's double plot thus insists on the divorce of the aristocratic myths of heroic and pastoral in what is effectively Prospero's counter-pastoral. (8) His island, that is, becomes a pastoral retreat associated with the repression of pastoral in its traditional guise: otium and erotic release. (9)

2

Caliban's claim to the island--his first extended speech in the play--is not, as Hazlitt recognized, a utopian one:

   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)

"Thou most lying slave," Prospero responds immediately, but the force of his rebuttal is directed to the latter part of Caliban's speech and the accusation of mistreatment:

   Thou most lying slave,
   Whom stripes may move, not kindness, 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.
   (1.2.344-48)

Caliban's original--and dynastic--claim to the island remains undisputed; he is, like Prospero himself, a usurped ruler. Regal language ("mine own king") belongs to Caliban as much as to Prospero. (10) David Norbrook has noted the use of the familiar "thou" in the first part of Caliban's speech, arguing that it "takes on the overtones of a recollected solidarity and mutuality." (11) In the context of Caliban's dynastic claim to the island, it is also Caliban's aristocratic punctilio, his insistence on the equality of his status with Prospero's.

Caliban's dynastic claim comes from his mother Sycorax--a claim founded on Sycorax's magic. Prospero's new claim is based no less on magic. It is simply the case that his magic is stronger, a fact that becomes abundantly clear when Caliban invokes "all the charms of Sycorax"--nothing more than toads, beetles, and bats. All that remains of Sycorax's power is Caliban's knowledge of the island: "the fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile." This sort of knowlege is the basis of Caliban's "earthiness," a favorite appellation of Romantic criticism of the play. Prospero, on the other hand, characteristically controls the climate and spirits of the air, including Ariel. Still, there are obvious connections between Prospero and Sycorax. Sycorax imprisoned Ariel in a tree trunk; Prospero threatens Ariel with the same punishment. A potential aristocratic alliance between the families of Sycorax and Prospero haunts the play, even if one that subordinates the maternal lineage represented by Sycorax: aerial magus, terrestrial sorceress, step-brother and step-sister (Caliban and Miranda). It seems that Prospero had previously recognized something of that relationship by taking Caliban into his dwelling. Everything about Prospero's present control of the island is designed to prohibit such a symbolic alliance, but, as Stephen Orgel notes, Sycorax remains "insistently present in [Prospero's] memory--far more present than his own wife--and she embodies to an extreme degree all the negative assumptions about women that he and Miranda have exchanged." (12)

Prospero's rebuttal of Caliban's claim to sovereignty, as we have already seen, is largely the explosive counter-charge of Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda: its force such that Caliban's dynastic claim is almost obliterated. The charge remains, even in readings sympathetic to Caliban, powerful and resonant. The later history of English colonialism--a particularly intensified mobilization of anxieties concerning rape and miscegenation--makes Caliban's status as a proto-colonized subject of Prospero especially difficult to modify. The narrative design of The Tempest, however, suggests other possibilities, including the unsettling one that Caliban's illicit lust is much closer to the play's normative world of aristocratic alliance than the reading of Caliban as plebeian or colonized subject allows us to appreciate fully.