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George Herbert Journal, Volume 22, Numbers 1 and 2, Fall 1998/Spring 1999, pp. 21-40 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\*HRUJH+HUEHUW-RXUQDO DOI: 10.1353/ghj.2013.0062

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ghj/summary/v022/22.1-2.sokol.html

Access provided by University of Athens (or National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens) (6 Jun 2015 14:56 GMT) B.J. SOKOL

Text-in-History: and New World Cultural Encounter

In the mid-1960s, Edward Tayler's Renaissance poetry seminar at Columbia University "privileged" me with an unforgettable intro- duction to the enigmas of poetry in history. Tayler chose Marvell's "An Horatian Ode" to incite a discussion of a seeming clash between maintaining an honest historical poetic reading, and decency in the terms of present-day political sensibilities.1 The reconciliation of a personal response to works containing both great literary merit and also outworn, now seemingly ugly, attitudes, remains for me a painful enigma. A great teacher leaves the lucky student with a lifetime's problems or questions. As I recall, Tayler's Socratic teaching demonstrated that, typically, great poetry is untypical: hard to use to exhibit generalities, resistant to reduction, even slippery. The best English Renaissance texts tend to show us up, are humbling. I have come to wonder if like the texts themselves, problems over texts-in-history may demand an attentive and malleable approach to history also, untrammeled by stereotyping. My test case will re-examine ways in which the first English colonial ventures in North America connected with (to use a deliberately neutral term) the composition of The Tempest.1 Lately, readings of this play in terms of colonialism have been rife. Some are guided by highly theorized notions of just how The Tempest must be read historically, deriding all "critical practices" that might disagree as "complicit, whether consciously or not, with a colonialist mentality."3 Many other less restrictive readings of the play also suppose that Shakespeare's sojourners must echo attitudes congruent with the repugnant attitudes of an eventually triumphant (and triumphalist) British imperialism. 22BJ. SOKOL However that triumph was not yet a foreseeable fact when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, at the time of the very first English encounters with Native Americans. Rather, as we shall see, the circumstances of the first English settlements in North America were very unlike those that may have inspired colonialist jingoism in 1811 or 1911. It will be argued that many readings of The Tempest have overlooked aspects of the actual experiences of the English in "Virginia" between 1584 and 1610, and even more importantly, overlooked the likely vivid responses to these in London in the crucial period 1605-10. They have therefore misread the historical factors which infused Shakespeare's play with its New World theme.4 Elsewhere, together with a co-author, I have illustrated how Shakespeare's contemporaries were very eager to establish proper jurisprudential foundations, and to find legal and ethical justifications, for attempted New World plantation.5 I want to add now consider- ation of another type of ethical perplexity stimulated by the first English New World settlements. The evidence for this is more shadowy than the contentious pamphlets, admonishing sermons, local laws, and major judicial decisions involved in attempts to legitimize and give constitutional form to settlement. It is shadowy because shame by nature hides its face, and also because the matter at issue was truly baffling to the age. In brief, I will argue that The Tempest reproduces the disturbing effects of the emergence of certain indigestible facts that by 1610 could not be suppressed. These were that English settlers in Virginia were shamefully beleaguered largely on account of their own vices, and when their deficiencies were contrasted with the conduct and abilities of antagonistic Virginians, the contrasts effectively produced a living rebuke.

I Without enrolling among the very few who have denied Shakespeare intended an allusion to New World cultural encounters in The Tempest, we may still note that source hunters have been unable to make exact cases for many alleged links between The Tempest and specific New World documents.6 So Kenneth Muir judges there is "little doubt" about connections between The Tempest and the events of the 1609 Sea-Adventure shipwreck, but also adds when considering alleged "Bermuda pamphlet" sources of the play that "the The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 23 extent of the verbal echoes . . . has, I think, been exaggerated."7 Geoffrey Bullough similarly suggests that some of the writings imputed as verbal sources of The Tempest may be more "useful in showing what must have been common talk [about America in Shakespeare's] time."8 It is important to note that Shakespeare and many in his audiences very likely gathered news of Virginia, as Bullough says, "from talking with returned voyagers" or through personal contacts with members of the Virginia Council.9 For we will be considering matters that were likely to be suppressed in publication, but inviting for gossip. Indeed gossip may have flourished in inverse proportion with efforts at its suppression. Adverse public comment on Virginia that did appear in contro- versial pamphlets (mainly of offshore production), or in mocking stage plays, was sternly opposed by Virginia's powerful promoters.10 Among the more vehement replies were a 1608 sermon by William Crashawe, given at Paul's Cross, a venue which has been since described as the "Broadcasting House of its age," and a 1609 sermon by Crashawe opposing various "discouragements" and attacking the "Plaiers" who "abused Virgínea."11 The publicity and scandal of Eastward Hoe (produced and three times published in 1605), which satirizes both the wilder promises of Virginia's promoters and the low motives and personal ethics of would-be settlers, are another index of widespread interest and concern with the personnel, pro- cedures, and promises of the contemporary settlement. Negative publicity also very likely arose in relation to the story of the 1609 wreck of the ship Sea-Adventure, even though the salvation of its crew and passengers was a near-miracle that was the talk of London in 1610. This vessel, carrying the leaders of an expedition conveying hundreds of male and female settlers to Virginia, was driven apart from the rest of the flotilla by a hurricane. Sad news of the believed loss of all on board reached London in 1609. Just so, reports that following the storm in The Tempest: for the rest o' th' fleet, Which I dispersed, they all have met again, And are upon the Mediterranean float Bound sadly home for Naples, Supposing that they saw the King's ship wrecked, And his great person perish. (1.2.233-38) 24BJ. SOKOL -Adventure was frantically pumped out by all on board including the expedition's leaders, Sir and Sir George Summers, which makes a contrast with Shakespeare's idle courtiers aboard the foundering ship in The Tempest. Then the Gates and Summers ship beached amazingly on an island, as did the fictional one, without loss of life. Following a year-long island sojourn, almost all of the Gates and Summers party escaped from the Bermudas to continue onward to Virginia. From there news of their arrival, and Gates himself, reached London by 1610. This adventure, usually taken as a seed for the "shipwreck" plot of The Tempest, has a continuation even more crucial to the play.12 Together with the news of the safety of those thought dead came very worrying intelligence of the Virginia colony. Surviving docu- ments, and doubtless returning voyagers, reported some appallingly undisciplined behavior in Bermuda, and almost fatal mutiny at the Jamestown settlement. The best extant source of this information, a long eyewitness letter from to an unknown lady, was published only after Shakespeare's death, and then in a probably toned-down version.13 Like other accounts of the wreck, Strachey's letter lauds the Bermudas as fertile and secure, unpeopled, even by the "Devils and wicked Spirits" reputed to live there.14 Here Strachey repeats the common legend partly inspiring the creation of 's haunted island. But even in such a paradise some of the marooned settlers mutinied. The escape to Jamestown was no improvement. There a "blessedly holp hither" Gates and Summers party arrived to find Jamestown on the point of defeat by a well-organized Algonkian trade boycott. This so-called "conspiracy," amounting to warfare by "sanctions," was greatly aided by the settlers' own depravity. Results were starvation, disease, and insurrection. In fact, when the Gates and Summers party arrived the English fort was on the point of being burned by absconding settlers, in order to prohibit a forced return.15 Such news substantiated rumors about insubordination, laziness, and disorder at Jamestown that, according to Philip Barbour, had been circulating in England for several years.16 The news also matched contemporary gibes that many dragooned Virginia settlers were unfit and unwilling rogues.17 Strachey's and other accounts cannot hide an implicit contrast of the wretched undisciplined settlers with the flourishing, well-focused and united Algonkians. This contrast is highly relevant to The Tempest. At the play's outset, as in Virginia in 1610, sojourning Europeans entirely depended The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 25 upon the services of native inhabitants for material survival. As in "reality," so in the play, these services had at first been voluntarily offered, then they were purchased or extorted, and finally there was refusal, resistance, and rebellion. But the exact historical reality was not portrayed in Shakespeare's always prudent and magic theater. Not only safety or friendship with Virginia promoters caused him to envelop the contemporary situation with fantasy. Among the many advantages of his fabulation of a unique playworld was that, in being a parable rather than parallel, The Tempest gained in the depth of its representation of a most puzzling cultural encounter. In its very strangeness, by means of an Aristotelian dramatic positing of the probable impossible, Shakespeare's fabulation in The Tempest represented an experience of epistemological overload, of genuine bewilderment. So cries out: "All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement / Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us / Out of this fearful country!" (5.1.106-08). Such perplexity accorded with fact. Many Europeans could not candidly "see" America, and the island of The Tempest is only ambiguously situated Westward near the "still-vexed Bermudas" (1.2.230) of the play.18 Likewise many Europeans could not imagine Native Americans as fully human, and so Shakespeare's island's inhabitants are morally and often actually invisible to the interlopers. Thus The Tempest includes a complex allegory of the imperfect perceptions underlying New World cultural encounters. The play shows that the magician Prospero's "forgetting" (4.1.139) through despising of the indigenous Other was not a viable option; 's demeanor and actions were strongly felt, and demanded response. Likewise in the actual New World of Virginia any tendency to magical rendering invisible, through dismissive despising, of native Algonkians, had proved wholly untenable. More- over, in addition to material threats made against Prospero's symbolic settler's household by active resistance, the facts of propinquity, neediness, and wonder also conspired to undermine dismissiveness of the Other, as they did in Virginia. So I maintain, despite recent "theory," that Shakespeare's representation of cultural encounter does not center on power relations alone, divorced from wider human possi- bilities, including terror, ferocity, curiosity, tenderness, and even love. This may not seem borne out in Strachey's letter, which resembles all the officially sanctioned Virginia tracts in characterizing 26BJ. SOKOL native Virginians as mere impediments to Europe's expansion. So Strachey labels Powhattan's politic refusal to supply food gratis, or sell it to Jamestown, as "subtile" treachery, and applauds the salvation of the fort by a last-minute consignment of food from England.19 Correspondingly, it might seem, Caliban rebels against serving Prospero, although he reinstates his formerly voluntary offers to provide food when he meets the renegades and Trinculo. But also, in The Tempest, quite another sort of denial of sustenance to hungry Europeans is enacted, by Ariel. His assistants first offer the Neapolitan nobles a much needed banquet, taking native inhabitant shapes that Gonzalo finds benign if inhuman: For certes, 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. (3.3.30-34) But then Ariel descends "Like a Harpy" to terrorize the guilty- minded rapacious Europeans, calling their leaders "men of sin," and removing their food. Here we see in a native islander the ability to reveal and rebuke Europeans' sins. In presenting the image of an exotic islander rebuking Europeans, The Tempest implicitly conforms with some other exceptional Renais- sance texts. In these, encounters with New World peoples stimulated a skeptical sort of "curiosity about contemporary life."20 Classic among them is Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of the Cannibals," which marvels at Native Brazilian practices, and questions pre- sumptions of superiority in European mores. As is well known, this essay is actually quoted in The Tempest almost exactly as translated by John Florio.21 But Shakespeare, it might seem, side-stepped Montaigne's subversive stance. For the play uses the essay only when dithering Gonzalo fantasizes on an ideal "plantation" for Europeans, intended "T' excel the Golden Age" (2.1.174). Contrary to the spirit of Montaigne's essay, Gonzalo is wholly unconscious of non-Europeans, wishfully imagining Prospero's isle to be "desert" as well as fertile. Gonzalo also seemingly fancies himself original, while plagiarizing for his innovative plantation Montaigne's reportage on the existing Brazilian polity. In several ways, indeed, Gonzalo's dream of eliminating all scarcity, conflict, The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 27 and work is framed as farcical. His relentless and boastful optimism, although inverse to Jaques's boastful melancholy in As You Like It, attracts similar derision from shrewder, more worldly members of a castaway court, who rightly convict it of hypocrisy. Borrowing Florio's exact language, Gonzalo describes a commonwealth dispensing with "name of magistrate; / Letters ... riches, poverty, / ...contract, secession, ...use of metal, corn, or wine" (2.1.155-59). But, as would-be King, he skips Montaigne's "no name of ...politike superioritie"; and then he trips, when he adds to Montaigne's list of things the Cannibals eschew: "No sovereignty." The contradiction prompts Sebastian's and Antonio's: Seh. Yet he would be king on 't. Ant. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. (2.1.162-63) Undeterred by this valid reductio ad absurdum11 Gonzalo further elaborates schemes until King Alonso caps repetitions of "Prithee, peace" with the groan "Prithee, no more. Thou dost talk nothing to me" (2.1.176). Formerly power-grabbing Alonso lacks interest in visionary dreams because he believes he has deservedly lost his son and daughter. In contrast, the unrepentant Antonio and Sebastian find Gonzalo's day- dreams not "nothing," but an irritant. They jeer when Gonzalo distorts Montaigne's claim that cannibals have "no occupation but idleness." Montaigne clarifies, by describing their daylong dancing, hunting, drinking, and exhorting one another to the virtues of valor and of "lovingnesse unto their wives." Gonzalo insists rather on torpid ease: "all men idle, all; / And women too — but innocent and pure / ... All things in common nature should produce / Without sweat or endeavour" (2.1.160-66). Goaded by Gonzalo's mawkishness, the courtiers speculate: Seh. No marrying 'mong his subjects? Ant. None, man, all idle: whores and knaves. (2.1.171-72) This cynical remark closely matches common allegations of idleness and marriage irregularities made against many of those conscripted for Virginia settlement.23 28BJ. SOKOL In fact the fleering courtiers make telling points only where Gonzalo diverges from Montaigne's text,24 and especially where he advances overblown promises of unlimited "foison" similar to those in many New World promotional writings.25 Antonio's and Sebastian's critique therefore does not challenge Montaigne's radical cultural relativism, as often claimed.26 Moreover, their sarcasms express only their own beliefs that all men are grasping and selfish, despite one historian's suggestion that the actual Virginia settlers' similar conclusions about "human nature" followed a consensus of Shakespeare's age.27 Yet, ironically, the reductive court scoffers of The Tempest actually misconstrue sovereignty more egregiously than had weakly- reasoning Gonzalo. The practiced usurper Antonio inveigles Sebastian into an assassination attempt on King Alonso, ignoring the fact that they are marooned on an island far from coveted Naples. Compared with such folly, Caliban's, Stephano's and Trinculo's mutiny is rational, aiming at kingship of the island and sexual possession of .

II High and low alike attempt to wrest precedence in the fictive wilds of The Tempest, but then have strange confrontations with native inhabitants, much as did the inhabitants of the 1 606 Jamestown settlement. Lord Gonzalo, in seeming exception, does not strive for actual dominion, but he does fantasize grandiose sovereignty: "I would with such perfection govern, sir, T' excel the Golden Age" (2.1.173-74). Like Francis Bacon in his prudential essay "Of Plantations" (1625), Gonzalo would avoid any interactions with native inhabitants. Then, on seeing some "people of the island," Gonzalo supposes them "more gentle-kind than of / Our human generation" (3.3.30-33). But lastly he flees in terror from a manifestation their native-born leader presents of moral judgment. The contradictions of Gonzalo's "Golden Age" fantasies are deeper, but just as weakly reasoned, as those of Raleigh's Captain Arthur Barlowe. In his account of a 1584 reconnaissance mission to Virginia, Barlowe claimed: "Wee found the people most gentle, loueing, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as liued after the manner of the golden age."28 Then later, in the same discourse, Barlowe unblushingly reported the Algonkian also to have conducted senseless warfare and a treacherous massacre at a feast.29 He may even have hushed killings of his own men. The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 29

Barlowe's sort of glossing over of the dangers of Virginia was by 1610 fit for derision. By then English settlement was well known to be challenged by very "un-loving" Algonkians. There seems also to have been widespread knowledge that the colony was undermined by the deportments of both high- and low-placed settlers, resembling either the violent usurping younger brother Antonio, or the loutish and rebellious Stephano. There are depressingly many instances of miserable turmoil amongst the leadership of the ill-governed Jamestown settlement.30 And even an official Virginia Council report of 1610 confirmed that certain English renegades had "created the Indians our implacable enemies by some violence they had offered," while detailing as "an incredible example of [the settler's] idleness" that "some of them eat their fish raw, rather than they would go a stones cast to fetch wood and dress it."31 Arrogance and folly among some Virginian prospectors was not news. Between 1581 and 1583 Raleigh's half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, fancying himself a great feudal landowner in North America, fraudu- lently "sold millions of acres ...which he had never seen, to anyone who would give him money for it and agree to hold it under his lordship."32 Following this lead, the haughty attitudes of younger sons of "good" family or would-be aristocrats beleaguered successive Virginian administrations.33 Moreover, Shakespeare had no lack of models for the crassness of Sebastian and Antonio, who remark, probably thinking of a commercial freak-show exhibition of Caliban: "Will money buy 'em?" (5.1.268). But quite different views of Native Americans were also recorded in Shakespeare's age. Thomas Harriot's often reprinted scientific treatise, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588), showed a particularly open attitude.34 Harriot opposed the oppressive actions of the 1585 Virginian expedition which he accompanied,35 and analyzed with great admiration elements of Algonkian technology, mores, and beliefs.36 If we ask if such a position was entirely anomalous, we may note that the laws officially promulgated for Roanoke and later Jamestown severely penalized oppression of native inhabitants and theft from them. These suggest at once a need to restrain expected European misdeeds, and a belief that Algonkians would reciprocate decency.37 Yet quite different views are implied in two 1610 publications of the Virginia Company, listed by Bullough with "probable sources" for The Tempest?* One lists the "Maine Ends" of plantation: 30BJ. SOKOL to preach, & baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of that Gospell, to recouer out of the armes of the Diuell, a number of poore and miserable soûles, wrapt vpp vnto death, in almost inuincible ignorance. Secondly, to prouide and build vp for the publike Honour and safety of our gratious King and his Estates ...some small Rampier of our owne [against Spain], in this opportune and generali Summer of peace, by trans-planting the rancknesse and multi- tude of increase in our people; of which there is no vent, but age; and euident danger that the number and infinitenesse of them, will out-grow the matter, whereon to worke for their life, and sustentation, and shall one infest and become a burthen to another ...Lastly, the apparance of assurance of Priuate commodity to the particular undertakers, by recouring and possessing to them-selues a fruitfull land.39

The conjunction here of saving "poore and miserable soûles" with "trans-planting the rancknesse and multitude of [English] increase" into their territory is repeated in the other Virginia Company tract of 1610, which adds, concerning the Spanish: ... to preach the Gospell to a nation conquered, and to set their soûles at liberty, when we haue brought their bodies to slauerie; It may be a matter sacred in the Preachers, but I know not how iusti- fiable in the rulers. Who for their meere ambition, doe set vpon it, the glosse of religion. Let the diuines of Salamanca, discusse that question, how the possessor of the west Indies, first destroied, and then instructed. The [best method of conversion], belongs to vs, who by way of marchandizing and trade, doe buy of them the pearles of earth, and sell to them the pearles of heauen ... it is not unlawfull, that wee possess part of their land and dwell with them, and defend our selues from them. Partlie because ther is The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 31 no other, moderate, and mixt course, to bring them to conuersion, but by dailie conversation, where they may see the life, and learn the language each of other. Partlie because ther is no trust to the fidelitie of humane beasts, except a man will make a league, with Lions, Beares, and Crocodiles.40 Plans for the settlement of millions on the basis of saving the souls of "Lions, Beares, and Crocodiles" may suggest, as demonstrated in The Tempest of Gonzalo's settlement plans, that "the later end of [the] commonwealth forgets the beginning." Indeed, contradictions underpinning English relations with native Virginians went deeper than sanctimonious excuses for mercantile or colonial gains. Harriot may have been nearly unique amongst English writers in expressing strongly reasoned personal admiration for the Algonkians, but even in the above propagandist tracts we see a theoretical notion of benefits from "dailie" contact between nations who "see the life, and learn the language each of other."41 Moreover, observers such as Strachey could not help indicating in scattered and evasive ways the finesse of the Algonkians' well-adapted culture. So Strachey admires "a delicate wrought fine kinde of Mat the Indians make, with which (as they can be trucked for or snatched up) our people do dresse their chambers ...which make their houses so much the more handsome."42 Thus, whilst condoning theft,43 he reveals his admiration of splendid abilities of generally despised savage 44 weavers. Many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, like scholarly Duke Prospero of The Tempest, lacked the will or the capacity to conceive the wholly unfamiliar cultural forces binding the humanity of the denizens of a New World. Rather, they typically characterized one and the same people as "savage" and "noble" according to percep- tions of their "grosser" or "finer" characteristics. Such bifurcations find a fabulous representation in The Tempest, partly through the division of the island personages Caliban and Ariel. Yet these creations are not simply figures in an allegory or double moral vision of the "savage" and "noble." Rather, each separate figure in itself serves as a mirror of living mental confusion. So we have Caliban's famous refinement in poetic diction, and his artistic responsiveness to "sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not."45 And although Ariel is 32BJ. SOKOL "delicate" and "dainty," yet he is also awkwardly sulky, "quaint," and "tricksy." Ariel's attendants "are of monstrous shape" in the Harpy scene, yet present "a most majestic vision" in the masque. Nevertheless, generally speaking, Caliban is of earth and Ariel of the air. An objection might be raised that Ariel cannot represent the spiritual side of schizophrenic European perceptions of the New World peoples because Native Americans were rarely portrayed by Englishmen as spiritual, except by Harriot, who admired both their abstemiousness and their religion. But, as we have seen, supposedly inhuman Ariel judges the conscience of noble Europeans, and in some instances stimulates it. My further claim is that the dramatic image of Ariel implies ethical reflections inspired by New World encounters reaching far beyond an admonitory image of well-adapted, well-governed, and personally self-controlled Americans practically bettering roguish European interlopers in economic survival. To establish that, it is useful first to distinguish two opposite types of early European writings on the New World. In one Ameri- cans are seen as mainly exotic, and often savagely so. Thus, in a brief report of the voyages of Magellan, Peter Martyr Anghiera's De Orbe Novo (1517), depicts exotic Patagonians "giants." Shakespeare apparently knew this report through a translation of the book by Richard Eden;46 it includes two mentions of a native Patagonian god "Setebos," the name also of 's god invoked by Caliban in The Tempest 1.2.375 and 5.1.264. The god is named in Anglerie, 1555 at leaf 219v in the often cited "they rored lyke bulles and cryed uppon theyr greate deuyll Setebos to helpe them," and again at leaf 220v, which describes a Patagonian's reaction to seeing a crucifix: "On a tyme, as one made a crosse before him, and kissed it, shewyng it unto hym, he suddenly cryed Setebos [fearing] Setebos would enter into his bodie and make him brut." This second instance, in which Martyr depicts a cultural encounter producing superstitious fears of punish- ment, and savage terrors and ignorance, may well recall Caliban's continuing fears that Prospero's spirits, may "hiss me into madness" (2.2.14), "will chastise me" (5.1.266). In a converse sort of early New World writings, punishments depicted of indigenous inhabitants are actual, and the savagery is European. Most famous were the condemnations of cruel maltreat- ment and enslavement in the Spanish West Indies of the 1540s, written by Bartolomé de la Casas, a Dominican bishop, and the The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 33 Dominican jurist Francisco de Vitoria. By Shakespeare's time there were many English responses to such revelations, usually claiming that the English would be kinder.47 In fact, the issues raised excited widespread European interest, as seen for example in the "widely and eagerly read" traveler's tale the History of the New World by Girolamo Benzoni ofMilan, Shewing His Travels in America from A. D. 1541 to 1556 (1565), which is striking in its accounts of cruelties to native Americans (even leading to mass suicide), and to African slaves.48 Thanks to a textual discovery by Eleanor Prosser, the common awareness of a scandalous "leyenda negra" of New World atrocities can be connected with spiritual and ethical aspects of the wide- ranging allusiveness of Ariel and Caliban. Prosser found a second echo of Florio's Montaigne in The Tempest, beside Gonzalo's famous borrowing from "On the Cannibals."49 This is from Montaigne's essay "Of Cruelty." I believe that a sharp difference in the two Montaigne essays parallels disjunctions in the symbolisms implied by the characterizations of Caliban and Ariel. "On the Cannibals" implies an admiring awe at Brazilians' fortitude and physical courage, but the later-placed essay "Of Cruelty" implicitly downgrades stoical excesses like those of the Brazilians. Thus in "On the Cannibals" Montaigne recounts how, when expecting to be mangled and eaten, the cannibals never quailed, but jested with their captors and scorned betraying any desire for escape, and how they admired and imitated Portuguese tortures because they were more "smartfull, and cruell" than their own.50 "Of Cruelty" praises, in contrast, a living virtue sensitive to mental pain, and so capable of voluntary sacrifice. Ariel makes a lively application of these ideas when he prompts angry Prospero to forgive his enemies, urging him to allow his "affections" to become "tender." To Prospero's question "Dost thou think so, spirit?" Ariel answers: "Mine would, sir, were I human" (5.1.20). Prospero follows this paradox with the noble passage, "Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick," echoing verbally, as Prosser discovered, the opening of "Of Cruelty." So, with profound ethical insight, Ariel leads Prospero to appreciate, as Montaigne does in "Of Cruelty," a painful "vertue . ..more noble" than merely benign "goodnesse," or honorable vengeance, no matter how brave.51 Although only hypothetically human, Ariel instructs a princely magus, as he had earlier rebuked transgressing nobles. Shakespeare allows this supposedly non-human islander extraordinary scope. 34BJ. SOKOL

III Even passion-driven Caliban, representing the dark side of European perceptions of "natives inhabitants," clearly betters in intelligence and focus his fellow conspirators, the drunken renegades Stephano and Trinculo. That he has superior capacities is no imposed modern view,52 but consistent with Montaigne's admiration of Brazilian mores in which "there is a wondrous distance betweene their forme and ours."53 Yet both highborn and lowborn rogues of The Tempest appraise Caliban in terms of profits to be made from European freak-shows (2.2.27-34, 2.2.68-70, and 5.1.267-69).54 And Caliban is identified as a "salvage and deformed slave" in the First Folio's "Names of the Actors." He is certainly Prospero's valued property, seven times called his "slave" in the text. We may note that, aside from a few places indicating Petrarchan service (and in one exceptional context, Othello 1.3.137), the term "slave" is applied abusively throughout Shakespeare's work. Accordingly, Prospero's and Miranda's attitudes toward their "poisonous slave" Caliban, whose material services they "cannot miss" (1.2.312-15), is abhorrence. This may seem to pry earthy Caliban and dainty Ariel even further apart, but are they so distinct? Certainly Prospero wants to keep them separate, and becomes conspicuously testy when recalling that the chafing Ariel had called himself his "slave." So Prospero indignantly mocks the self- appellation, addressing Ariel, "Thou, my slave, / As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant" (1.2.271-72). Following his sarcastically inverted applications of "slave"/"servant"he implicitly contrasts the mild service he now asks with Sycorax's former evil "hests," "earthy and abhorred" (273-74). As I have shown elsewhere, the arrangements between Prospero with Ariel more closely resemble those of a master and grumbling apprentice than of slavery.55 Autocratic Prospero is harsh and threatening to Ariel on occasion, but at the play's end, when he has "bated" his helper one full year of an unlucky thirteen years of indentures, he beautifully expresses regret at their parting: "Why, that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee, / But yet thou shalt have freedom. — So, so, so" (5.1.97-98). This tenderness presents an extreme contrast to the nauseous epithets Prospero hurls at Caliban: "Freckled whelp, hag-born" (1.2.284); "Dull thing" (1.2.286); "Thou earth, thou" (1.2.316); "Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself" (1.2.321); "Thou most lying slave" (1.2 346); "Filth as thou art" (1.2.348); "Hag-seed" (1.2.367); "malice" (1.2.369); The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 35 and so forth until finally "this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.278-79). Yet, immediately after Prospero's most ferocious imprecation, "Filth as thou art," Caliban reveals the breakdown of a formerly tender relationship with him. Sullenly but beautifully bemoaning a lost family-like mutuality, he complains: I must eat my dinner. 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. (1.2.332-40) There are many dimensions to such an extraordinary lament, but the one most significant here is how closely Caliban's history mirrors contemporary events in Virginia. The prominence of feeding in his recollection of lost affection recalls how early Virginia visitors like Barlowe movingly described being feasted and caressed by "gentle, loueing" Algonkians.56 Somewhat later, as Harriot, Strachey, and others recount, skillful "dams ... for fish" like those offered by Caliban and hospitality, including much-needed food, were generously given by Algonkians to the English settlers.57 But before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the Algonkians of Virginia, like Caliban at the start of the play, had become the forced, reluctant, and necessary providers for European interlopers. By 1610 local Algonkian bands, firmly marshaled under Powhattan, very effectively boycotted Jamestown, denying services just as Caliban did to Prospero. Ariel's role, too, fit contemporary events in Virginia. Knowledge that efficient and virtuous Native Americans starved and nearly drove away the English weakened by their own insubordination, divisive- ness, laziness, licentiousness, and mutiny lent special poignancy when Ariel passed judgement on greedy European "men of sin," denying them food. Thus fantastic creatures of The Tempest reflected inner and outer aspects of a real crisis of clashing cultures in Virginia. There a decay of former good relations with Algonkians not only imperiled 36BJ. SOKOL the settlers, but also presented their predicament in an unflattering mirror, showing their folly, blindness, and arrogance. Beyond putative "discourses of power," symbolic representations in The Tempest of encounters between Europeans and exotics involve fury, betrayal, misunderstanding, unbelief in shared humanity, but also learning, tenderness, forgiveness, and regret. Thus the play's poetic concerns include the emotional as well as socio-political challenges of cultural encounter.

Notes

1He did this with particular reference to a running critics' debate over whether there is irony in the passage about Ireland. 2For a classic discussion, with a survey of earlier critics, see Frank Kermode, ed., The Tempest (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. xxv-xxxiv. All quotations from Shakespeare will be from the electronic edition of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, : The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989). 'Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, "Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest," m Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 204. 4For an incisive critique of reductive approaches in general see Anne Righter [Barton], ed., The Tempest (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) pp. 7-51, especially pp. 21-25. Although all-inclusive theories of "discourses of power" are still often posited, for a decade many have questioned the appropriateness of these to The Tempest, including Meredith Anne Skura, "Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest," Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 42-69; Deborah Willis, "Shakespeare's Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," SEL, 29 (1989), 277-89; Ross Macdonald, "Reading The Tempest," Shakespeare Survey, 43 (1991), 15-28; Robin Headlam Wells, "Locating Texts in History," in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1994), pp. 323-32; William M. Hamlin, "Men of Inde: Renaissance Ethnography and The Tempest," Shakespeare Studies, 22 (1994), 15-44, especially p. 20. 5BJ. Sokol and Mary Sokol, "The Tempest and Legal Justification of Plantation in Virginia," Shakespeare Yearbook, 7 (1996), 353-80. 'Reporting general acceptance of an American theme in The Tempest, Skura concludes "E.E. Stoll and Northrop Frye are the only exceptions I have seen cited" (p. 44). Later, Alden T. Vaughan, "Shakespeare's Indian: The Americanization of Caliban," Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 137-53, The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 37 concludes that "intentionalist" theories of Caliban's American identity "should be discarded ... because ...Shakespeare's contemporaries and their descendants for nearly three centuries did not associate The Tempest's savage with American Indians." Chapter 5 of Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), attenuates this conclusion. 7Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 280. 8Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 240. 9Bullough, pp. 240 and 239. 10On Virginian promotion and "discouragements" see Sokol and Sokol, pp. 354, 358-69, 375, 377-78. "See: William Crashawe, A Sermon Preached in London before the Lord Lewarre, Lord Gouernor and Captarne Generali of Virginia Febr 21 1609 (London, 1610); PJ. Wallis, William Crashawe, The Sheffield Puritan (Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 1960-63), vol. 8, pts. 2-5, p. 29; Sokol and Sokol, pp. 364-66, 377-78. 12A good brief account, intended for a different purpose than here, is found in Aviam Soifer, "Assaying Communities: Notes from The Tempest," Connecticut Law Review, 21 (1989), pp. 885-88. "William Strachey, "A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight," in Purchas his Pilgrimes (London, 1625), part 4, book 9, chap. 6, pp. 1734-58. "Strachey, "A True Reportory," pp. 1737-38; also seev4 True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, rpt. of London 1610, in Tracts and Other Papers, ed. Peter Force (Washington: Wm. Q. Force, 1844), vol. 3, no. 1, p. 10. 15See John Smith, Works, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), 2:233-35. 16Philip L. Barbour, The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter 1606- 1609 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, for the Hakluyt Society, 1969), 1:68. 17See Sokol and Sokol, pp. 365-69, 377-78. 18Tunis is presumed strangely remote from Naples (2.1.251-62); Caliban twice mentions the Patagonian deity Setebos, in 1.2.375 calling this idol "my dam's god"; in 1.2.262 Ariel says Sycorax was born in Algiers. On the symbolic geography of Africa and America in the play, see Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (Frogmore, St. Albans: Paladin, 1974), pp. 167-200. "Strachey, "A True Reportory," pp. 1751-52 and 1756. 20The phrase is from David Beers Quinn, North American Discovery Circa 1000-1612 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. xlvi. 21Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1965), 1:215-29. 38BJ. Sokol 22Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), calls the generalization of this "Gonzalo's paradox" (pp. 125-26 and 187-88). 23Sokol and Sokol, p. 366. "Shakespeare did not take "everything from Montaigne except the point," pace Stephen Orgel, ed., The Tempest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 36, but rather deployed Montaigne-like irony. 25For instance Silvester Jourdan, A Discovery of the Barmudas (London, 1610), often placed among sources of play, resembles at large a Good Food Guide. See Kermode, p. xxxv, Levin, pp. 74-81, and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 49-50 and 55. 26For suggestions that their mockery reflects Shakespeare's dubiety concerning a marveling at cannibal polity, see Kermode, p. xxxiv, Fiedler, pp. 193-94 and 201, and Ryan, p. 102. 27Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), suggests that although the Roanoke promoters "sincerely believed that the Indians would be won over by a pacific approach," yet the colonists themselves "could not place their trust in that belief because of contemporary ideas about human nature. Relationships between people were seen as always potentially involving conflict and treachery. Keeping your guard up was universally necessary ... As a propagandist for the later Jamestown colony put it, 'trust is the mother of deceit' " (p. 67). 28Arthur Barlowe, "Discourse of the First Voyage," in The Roanoke Voyages, ed. David Beers Quinn, vol. 1 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1955), p. 108. 25Barlowe, pp. 113-14. 30For contemporary accounts see George Percy, "Observations by Master George Percy, 1607," in Narratives of Early Virginia, ed. Lyon Gardiner Tyler (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1946), p. 22, or John Smith, 2:188-90 and 234-35. ,lA True Declaration, pp. 15-16. 32Quinn, North American Discovery, p. 185. 33It may be significant that Humphrey Gilbert and many of those who settled Virginia had soldiered in Ireland where they acquired unchristian attitudes to native inhabitants, combined with a hunger for their land. See Kupperman, p. 67. 34See my "The Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot's A briefe and true report of his Discoveries in North America," Annals of Science, 51 (1994), 1-15. 35"A briefe and true report of the new founde land of Virginia, 1588," The Roanoke Voyages, ed. David Beers Quinn, vol. 1 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1955), p. 381. The Tempest and New World Cultural Encounter 39

36He described with delight especially the great ingenuity and skill of Algonkians in implement making and food production, and greatly praised their temperate appetites; see my Invisible Evidence: The Unfounded Attack on Thomas Harriot's Reputation (Durham: Thomas Harriot Seminar, 1995). 37On Roanoke's laws see Kupperman, p. 66, and for Jamestown's, William Strachey, "Lawes Divine, Morali and Martiall, &c. For the Colony Virgínea Britannia," Tracts and Other Papers, ed. Peter Force, vol. 3, no. 2 (Washington: Wm. Q. Force, 1844), pp. 11, 13, 27. '"Bullough, pp. 295-99. ^A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia (London, 1610), pp. 2-4. mA True Declaration, pp. 6-7. 41Concerning modern views of the acquisition of Algonkian linguistics, in relation to power and subversion, see my "Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot's A briefe and true report." 42Strachey, "A True Reportory," p. 1753. 43The nice euphemism "snatching up" leaps from the page. Compare Strachey, "A True Reportory": "and to take any thing from the Indian by force, we neuer vsed, nor willingly euer will: and though they had well deserued it, yet it was not now time" (p. 1751), with The Jamestown "Lawes Divine, Morali and Martiall" edited by the same William Strachey, which severely punished any theft. 44Despite evidence of their skills and intelligence, native Americans were often poorly esteemed by Shakespeare's countrymen. David Beers Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), contrasts English attitudes with French ones: Champlain from 1603 onward showed an immense capacity for making friends with many Indian chiefs and producing a continuing atmosphere of mutual trust ... in closer intercourse, Englishmen came easily to despise Indian socio-political arrangements ... and tended to equip themselves, as the French rarely did, with a built-in attitude of superiority (p. 101). 45Caliban uses excellent blank verse, as opposed to the demotic of his confederates, a conventional sign of elevated standing. Yet Caliban's "world is near-sighted, tactile, downward-looking, lacking in distant prospects" according to A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts ofAllegory: A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Logic ofAllegorical Expression (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 140. 46Published in London in 1555 as The Decades of the newe World of west India, and in 1577 again as The History ofTrauayle in the West and East Indies. 40BJ. Sokol 47Some examples were rather cynical; see Sokol and Sokol. 48The phrase indicating popularity is from the editor, W.H. Smith, of the Hakluyt Society edition (London, 1862), p. ii. This was translated from the octavo edition Venice 1572, not the original folio, Venice 1565. 49Eleanor Prosser, "Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the Rarer Action," Shakespeare Studies, 1 (1965), 261-64. 50Montaigne, 1:147 and 1:223. David Quint, "A Reconsideration of Montaigne's Des Cannibales," MLQ, 51 (1990), 451-89, contrasts the same two essays and finds "as many dystopian as Utopian features" in Montaigne's stoical "cannibal culture" (p. 473). "Montaigne, 2:108. "Servile status alone was not an index of ethical unworthiness in Shakespeare's late work. A "peasant" servant in King Lear avenges the blinding of Gloucester; Timon of Athens's loyal steward is the one good man of the play; in The Tempest itself, princely takes over Caliban's "wooden slavery" (3.1.62). "Montaigne, 1:227. 54In Henry VIII a Porter bawdily asks: "Or have we some strange Indian with the great tool come to court, the women so besiege us?" (5.3.32-33). 55BJ. Sokol, "Numerology in the Time Scheme of The Tempest," Notes and Queries, 41 (1994), 53-55. 56Barlowe, pp. 107-09. 57See, for instance, John Smith's account of his 1608 explorations of Chesapeake Bay, in Quinn, North American Discovery: "their men, women, and children, with dances, songs, fruits, fish, furres, & what they had kindly entertained us ...stretching their best abilities to expresse their loves" (p. 306).