Toward the Desertion of Sycorax's Island: Challenging

Toward the Desertion of Sycorax’s Island: Challenging the Colonial Contract Rachel Bryant University of New Brunswick

n the second scene of The Tempest, Prospero shares with Miranda Ithe dramatic story of his past and of his “sea-sorrow” (1.2.171)—the story of how this father and daughter of noble birth, after being unjustly discarded at sea by the usurping Antonio, came to be ensconced on an unnamed island. “By foul play … we were heaved thence,” he tells his daughter, “But blessedly holp hither” (62–63). Significantly, in identifying the source of this most crucial help, without which, he suggests, the pair would have surely perished, he singles out and champions the good Gonzalo, whose providential donations allegedly sustained the exiles throughout their long ordeal. As Prospero explains in more detail, Some food we had, and some fresh water, that A noble Neopolitan, Gonzalo, Out of his charity—who being then appointed Master of this design—did give us; with Rich garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries Which since have steaded much. So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me

ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 91–111 From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. (1.2.161–68)

Rachel Bryant is a These details have the intended effect upon Miranda, who, in seeming doctoral candidate at awe of her supposed benefactor, promptly exclaims, “Would I might / but the University of New ever see that man!” (168–69). However, what is perhaps most interesting Brunswick, where she about this list is the utter superficiality of the lauded items—the expensive studies northeastern clothing, the bed sheets, and the books. Indeed, while the food and water North American would have helped Prospero and Miranda to stave off death temporarily, literatures and literary there is very little here to ensure the long-term survival of a single father cultures. She is the and his infant child after they are shipwrecked on a barely-peopled island. 2014 recipient of the How, then, did Prospero and Miranda survive after finally drifting Bibliographical Society ashore in their “rotten carcass of a butt” (1.2.146)? The rather obvious of Canada’s Emerging answer to this question comes later in the same scene, when the sum- Scholar Prize. Her moned slave Caliban confronts Prospero with his own version of events: work on the literary “When thou cam’st first,” he bitterly recalls, functions of Wabanaki Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me wampum belts after the American Revolution is Water with berries in’t, and teach me how forthcoming in Native To name the bigger light, and how the less, American and Indigenous That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee, Studies. An article on And showed thee all the qualities o’th isle, imperial and indigenous The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. cultural geographies in (1.2.335–41) Douglas Glover’s novel Elle is forthcoming in Here, as Caliban describes an exchange of information upon and after Canadian Literature. first contact, he suggests that his initial love for Prospero and Miranda was based on a hospitable assumption of symbiosis—a belief that the trio could productively cohabitate on the island. In good faith, then, he unwittingly entered into what Mary Louise Pratt termed the contact zone: “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and estab- lish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (8). From his own cultural perspective, Caliban had no particular reason to believe that he would be viewed as an exploitable resource from the very first moment of contact, nor did he have cause to suspect that, through Prospero’s “imperial eyes,” his knowledge of how to survive on the island would be viewed as his only viable currency—apart, of course, from his labour.

92 | Bryant That similar misunderstandings occurred frequently during the long period of European colonial expansion is a well-established fact. During the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, entire communities of fledgling Europeans were routinely nursed to stability in the Americas by hospitable indigenous nations who believed, as the Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks has explained, that “sharing space meant sharing resources” (5). In 1492, upon his initial arrival in Hispaniola, Christopher Columbus offered “hawks bells and glass beads” (121) to Native inhabitants in exchange for information about where to find fresh drinking water. Of course, even after initiating this system of trade, Columbus all but disregarded the function of exchange in building and maintaining reciprocal relations, repeatedly rejecting seemingly “worthless” indigenous offerings—items like yarn and cotton—in his obsessive hunt for gold and other valuables. Some forty years later, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca published his famous 1528 account of shipwreck on the Texas/Louisiana coast, where he attributes his survival through a long and difficult winter to the hospitality of indigenous peoples and to their invaluable knowledge of where to find—and how to eat—prickly pear plants. The Mi’kmaw historian Daniel N. Paul shines light on this early dynamic in his excellent monograph We Were Not the Savages, where he powerfully argues that most Native American cultures, prior to the arrival of Europeans, were practitioners of many of the humanitarian values for which contemporary Western societies are only now tentatively reaching.1 As he explains, [the] absence of biases about the differences of others found among the majority of Amerindians is one of the best indica- tors of how far advanced their cultures were in the develop- ment of human relations [at the time of contact].… In retro- spect, if the Native Americans had not reached this stage by 1492, European colonization could not have occurred. Instead, because of their skin colour and strange religions, Europeans would have been either enslaved, repulsed or exterminated upon arrival. (7) From the perspective of the indigenous nations of the Native northeast, Brooks explains that equitable distribution and resource sustainability were the essential foundations of healthy and effective networks of relations. The collective maintenance of these networks was crucial to the physical and spiritual wellbeing of all, and, in this sense, indigenous hos-

1 My use of “Western” throughout this paper refers not to the Western hemisphere but to cultures derived from European cultures.

Toward the Desertion | 93 pitality can be interpreted as a reflection of a sophisticated belief system. In other words, Europeans were sustained in the Americas, at least in part, because Native peoples knew that excluded, starving, or otherwise desper- ate beings behave in fundamentally unsustainable ways and thus represent a threat to those underlying networks upon which all life depends.2 Cer- tainly the fact that colonists and settlers almost always took advantage of these magnanimous beliefs and social practices, consistently ratifying destructive and exploitative power structures as soon as they were physi- cally able, reveals much about the European colonial project generally. Of course, this is in no way to suggest that Shakespeare’s writings reflect specific knowledge of the diverse indigenous cultures of the Ameri- cas. Rather, in what follows, I explore some of the ways in which emerging ecological approaches to Shakespeare’s plays emphasize elements of early modern thought that were in fact antithetical to the European colonial project as it was unilaterally and destructively carried out around the globe. Drawing on a small selection of plays across multiple genres, as well as Michel Serres’s idea of the natural contract and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on desert islands, I ultimately argue that The Tempest reflects a deep and characteristically Shakespearean anxiety about what might be called the colonial contract—a term meant to encompass the various ways in which explorers and colonists compulsively treated “new world” lands and populations as available resources to be acquired, exploited, and sold at market.

2 In The Common Pot, Brooks discusses this belief system in the context of the Native northeast in much more detail. As she explains, “if one person went hungry, if certain individuals were excluded from the bounty of the dish, the whole would face physical and/or psychological repercussions from this rupture in the network of relations” (5). When Europeans arrived in what Brooks calls Native space, they “brought with them ideas, behaviours, and materials that could potentially disrupt or even destroy it. A central question that arose in Na- tive communities throughout the northeast had to do with how to incorporate the ‘beings’ from Europe into Native space and how to maintain the network of relations in the wake of the consequences—including disease and resource depletion—that Europeans brought to Algonquian shores” (7). Moving beyond the northeast, the Mississauga Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson’s “Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa: Precolonial Nishnaabeg Diplomatic and Treaty Rela- tionships” opens with a quotation from the Cree activist Harold Johnson, who addresses the settler population directly, “ ‘When your family arrived here … we expected that you would join the families already here, and in time, learn to live like us. No one thought you would try to take everything for yourselves, and that we would have to beg for leftovers’ ” (94). In other words, the Cree, much like other indigenous nations, believed that European newcomers could “join” the existing networks of relations and that they could learn to respect and participate in this fundamentally inclusive and co-operative system.

94 | Bryant In his 2009 study of The English Empire in America, L. H. Roper asserts that “recent scholarship has successfully attacked the canard that Shake- speare plotted out the English colonization of a ‘New World’ [in The Tem- pest]” (44). However, in a 2010 introduction to postcolonial ecocriticism, Serres identifies Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin identify The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the three two possible texts from the Western canon that best represent “European ideas of language and colonialist projections of the Cartesian separation of mind directions in and body” (155)—this despite the fact that Shakespeare’s plays predate Descartes by several decades. These oppositional positions are reflective of which human the deep ambivalence that remains at the heart of the play’s critical legacy, and, while The Tempest continues to be routinely cited as a monolith of beings can European imperialism by some postcolonial critics, emerging ecological approaches to Shakespeare’s plays directly and indirectly undermine such move: toward readings and move to revolutionize the ways in which these works can be read and discussed. Steve Mentz, for one, believes that some “early modern death or toward literature presents narratives that emphasize proto-ecological values like interdependence, unanticipated consequences, and the limits of human symbiosis and ambition” (154). For Mentz and a growing number of others, such narratives and concerns thread throughout Shakespeare’s body of work and stability. speak to the degree to which certain early modern writers anticipated what would, centuries later, become key principles in contemporary envi- ronmentalist movements. Such narratives also pose significant challenges to the colonial contract, as defined above, and to understand how this works one might begin by considering how Shakespeare consistently portrayed forms of social and ecological exploitation as expressions of unsustainable parasitism. In The Natural Contract, the French philosopher Michel Serres argues that “the parasite is always abusive” because it “follows the simple arrow of a flow moving in one direction but not the other, in the exclusive interest of the parasite, which takes everything and gives back nothing along this one way street” (36). This conception of the parasite is immediately applicable to those of Shakespeare’s plays, as referenced by Mentz, that deal with the limits of human ambition. In a play like Macbeth, for example, we might say that the parasite moves only in the direction of the “dagger of the mind” (2.1.38)—the ominous spectre that leads Macbeth to murder Duncan, an act that becomes the first in a long chain reaction of violent acts, eventually culminating in his own death. In terms of the contemporary environmental crisis, Serres identifies two possible directions in which human beings can move: toward death or toward symbiosis and stability. He provides

Toward the Desertion | 95 ample evidence to suggest that Western society has been marching steadily toward the former while recognizing the extreme difficulty of collectively “[changing] direction” (34). This idea is again deeply relevant to Macbeth, who, once he begins moving down parasitism’s one-way street, finds it next to impossible to change his course. In a pivotal moment of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy, Macbeth recog- nizes the potentiality of an alternative path—the path, in terms of Serres’s model, toward symbiosis and reciprocity. In 3.5, the troubled King declares, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Return- ing were as tedious as to go o’er” (135–37).3 After locating himself on a threshold in-between two opposing paths of action—“returning” to his community or “[going] o’er” into oblivion—he decides to defer to the wisdom of the three “weird sisters” (132). This decision only reiterates Macbeth’s refusal to productively or responsibly engage with his violent history and with the difficult consequences of that history. He chooses instead to drift passively with the flow of the river of blood or to continue on in the direction of the dagger, a decision that is at once easier and, ultimately, fatal. In Serres’s terms, Macbeth is unable to “master [his] mastery,” or to impose limits on his own parasitic ambition, and “the excesses [he has] committed against [his] hosts”—the inhabitants of the community of which he was once a part—“put [him] in mortal danger” (34). In other words, after forming a “one-sided contract” (37) with the world, a contract that furthers only his own desires and appetite for power, he finds himself unable to alter the terms of that contract and, as a result of this failure, he dies. More specifically, Macbeth dies when his host, the world upon which his parasitism has been feeding, ceases to hold him, and, dramatically, this collective rejection is performed by the community in 5.4, at which point Malcolm commands his soldiers to cloak themselves in tree branches before descending upon Macbeth. Here, then, as in other plays, such as Richard iii, Shakespeare suggests that parasitic behaviour is fundamentally unsustainable in the long term. By choosing to maintain his own imagined mastery over the world in which he lives, Macbeth unwittingly invites the intervention of what Serres calls “the judicial,” which “invents a double, two-way arrow that seeks to bring flows into balance through exchange or contract; at least in principle, it denounces one-sided contracts, gifts 3 The nineteenth-century Pequot writer William Apess borrowed Macbeth’s lo- cution in A Son of the Forest, where, in situating himself between white and Native worlds, he writes, “what to do I knew not; shut out from the light of heaven—surrounded by appalling darkness—standing on uncertain ground— and having proceeded so far that to return, if possible, were as ‘dangerous as to go over’ ” (42).

96 | Bryant without countergifts, and ultimately all abuses” (36). This is the inevitable process through which, over time, the host purges itself of its parasites—an undoubtedly ominous warning for contemporary readers in light of our continued refusal to truly temper our selfish excesses in the face of an ever-worsening climate crisis. Arguably, the judicial also represents a warning against other forms of exploitation, and Serres’s theory of parasitism thus provides a useful way of thinking about colonialism as a one-sided contract that seeks to extract profits while offering up nothing in return. Richard H. Grove opens his monograph on Green Imperialism by tracing colonialism’s “capital- intensive transformation of people, trade, economy, and environment” back to “the beginnings of European colonial expansion, as the agents of new European capital and urban markets sought to extend their areas of operation and sources of raw material” (2). At this time, certain resources, such as timber, had been knowingly depleted in the so-called “old world,” and as powerful European interests, motivated in part by increasingly strict environmental regulatory protocols at home, gradually came to imagine the larger world as a viable source of untold riches and of seemingly limitless resources, these exploitative views and agendas were met with skepticism and resistance in other established sectors of early modern thought. Shakespeare takes on the myth of limitless resources directly in Timon of Athens, a play that, according to John Jowett, demonstrates “the corruption of human relationships in a world awash with high living, and then the power of gold to unleash destruction on that same society” (82). Especially when read within the contexts of pre-industrial mining provided by Jowett, this play draws a series of important parallels between the expectations of Timon’s freeloading friends—who compulsively behave as though Timon’s wealth can naturally multiply and regenerate itself— and the irresponsible expectations of industrialists and imperialists, who greedily take from nature until it has nothing left to give, believing all the while that “the generosity of the earth can be limitless” (86). For Timon’s “friends,” money is quite separate from friendship, and resources, even among such supposed allies, are “subject to hoarding” (81). With this play, then, we are to understand that Timon’s generosity is foolish because his actions represent an assumption or expectation of social and material reciprocity under the direction of what he calls a “Common mother” (4.3.178). His hamartia, and that quality which encourages his audience to empathize with him, is his refusal to recognize the unsustainability of his generosity in a parasitic capitalist society in which the other members hoard their wealth. He fails to abide by the social norms of Athens, a soci-

Toward the Desertion | 97 ety defined by predatory notions of ownership and property, and, in the end, it costs him everything. Here Shakespeare powerfully demonstrates that generosity and hospitality are only sustainable beliefs and actions Shakespeare when practised by society as a whole. As Jowett further explains in his essay, many early modern industri- challenges the alists believed that the earth was animate and that it could “actively … produce metals by a process equivalent to the generation of animals and cruel and plants” (85). From this context, he goes on to examine the scene in which Timon discovers a hoard of gold while digging with his spade in the for- corrupt est: “Earth, yield me roots,” the self-exiled Athenian commands; “Who seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate / With thy most operant poison. imperial logic / [He finds gold] / What is here? / Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?” (4.3.23–6). Jowett explores several possible interpretations of Timon’s that would discovery, suggesting, for example, that the buried treasure was likely stolen by thieves and subsequently hidden in the woods. This reading is compulsively particularly useful for its reinforcement of the idea that “the total resources available to humanity have not increased” (86) upon the discovery of this treat natives, gold. Moreover, this interpretation of Timon’s discovery is consistent with 2.1, where Shakespeare challenges the myth of limitless resources even animals, and more directly as a senator breaks from conventional social wisdom by openly acknowledging the inevitable fact that Timon’s wealth “cannot hold” other beings (12), especially given the parasitic behaviour of his so-called friends. In other words, the senator avers, Timon’s riches cannot naturally regener- as available ate themselves, for wealth, like all other resources, is finite. With this play, then, and, in multiple ways, Shakespeare suggests that what is borrowed or marketable must always, in some way, be paid back if unpleasant consequences are to be avoided. Again, systems based on “one-sided contracts” and “gifts resources. without countergifts” (Serres 36) are fundamentally unsustainable and invite the intervention of the judicial. Plays such as Macbeth and Timon of Athens demonstrate and reinforce the inevitably devastating consequences of unchecked parasitic behaviour and thus provide useful contexts for The Tempest, where Shakespeare challenges the cruel and corrupt imperial logic that would compulsively treat Natives, animals, and other beings as available or marketable resources. In short, while many of the European characters of this play hope to profit or otherwise benefit through the exploitation of “new world” peoples and materials, few imagine these withdrawals as debts to be in any manner repaid, and their actions are therefore fundamentally unsustainable. Trinculo, for example, dreams of exporting Caliban from the island and of transporting him to London, a place where “any strange beast … makes

98 | Bryant a man” (2.2.29) or makes a man wealthy. His initial inability to decide whether Caliban is “a man or a fish” (24) makes direct reference to irresponsible and unsustainable fishery operations, such as the English, French, and Portuguese cod fisheries in the northwest Atlantic, through which imperial interests worked, over time, to further the desertification of various sea environments. Certainly Caliban is perceived as an exploitable resource whether man or fish, and, thus musing, Trinculo goes on to reason that although English men and women “will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (30–31). Here European social negligence, combined with a misguided and insatiable hunger for new world commodities and curiosities, is used to legitimize horrific violence on the international stage—an of course deeply flawed line of reasoning that is almost immediately repeated in the text as Stefano arrives on the scene. Believing himself to have found “some monster of the isle with four legs” (62), Stefano compulsively resolves, “If I can recover him and keep him tame and get to Naples / with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s / leather” (65–67). The “entrepreneurial” spirit of the European colonist, much esteemed in certain sectors of his- torical discourse, is here clearly represented as predatory and parasitic. It is additionally worth pausing to consider the manner in which Ste- fano uses alcohol to pacify and subjugate his new found “devil” (2.2.92), reasoning, “If I can recover him and keep / him tame, I will not take too much for him” (72–73). And as Caliban drunkenly promises to “show” these politically ambitious fools “every fertile inch o’th’ island” (140), hop- ing to achieve emancipation and a kind of social rebalancing in return, we are reminded of the oppressive ways in which Prospero has been using other kinds of “spirits” to control and torment his indigenous slaves. As I have already suggested, there is contextual evidence in The Tempest to suggest that Caliban initially met the arrival of Prospero and Miranda with an assumption of symbiotic reciprocity. He reasonably believed that each member of the group could make the lives of the others easier and, by extension, better; however, by 3.2, a much-abused Caliban has learned that his only currency within the imperial order that has overtaken the island is his knowledge of the land. In grief and desperation, then, he attempts to gain footing by wielding this knowledge against others. In urging Stefano to discipline Trinculo, for example, Caliban threatens, “He shall drink naught but brine, for I’ll not show him / Where the quick freshes are” (64–65). To comfort and manipulate Caliban, Stefano promises that he will be made a viceroy within the new order—a promise of respect and solidarity that is, of course, almost immediately broken in 4.1, at which

Toward the Desertion | 99 point the Europeans move once more to enslave the non-European other, loading their stolen goods onto Caliban’s back. Arguably, by depicting the enslavement of Caliban as an inevitability rather than as a possibility, Shakespeare suggests that this system of exploitation will continue for as long as the island is managed as an object of European industry. According to Prospero, the relations between Caliban and the Euro- peans only broke down after Caliban attempted to rape Miranda. For the European settlers, this failed attempt at violence immediately justifies the enslavement of the Native—a move that conveniently provides the father and daughter with “more time / For vainer hours” (1.2.174–75). However, as other scholars have noted, it is important to recognize the way in which Shakespeare situates the story of Caliban’s thwarted act of sexual aggression within a larger context of European cultural violence. Addressing Caliban directly, Miranda describes the evolving trajectory of the settler/ Native relationship thusly: I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved more than a prison. (1.2.356–65)

In the beginning, then, Miranda chauvinistically pities Caliban because he is not European. Her refusal or inability to imagine the existence of any culture or identity that is not in some way connected to her father’s leads her to view Caliban as an empty vessel, a receptacle to be filled up with Europeanness. Thus, according to the terms of this one-sided contract, recognition of the Native’s worth and humanity is conditional upon his success in becoming culturally European. However, Miranda’s generous efforts to “civilize” or “improve” the Native are undermined when Caliban proves himself to be that which he has already been thoroughly imagined to be: a genetically inferior and subhuman “savage” who can never, mimic as he might, become European. Indeed, if Miranda’s story demonstrates

100 | Bryant anything definitively, it is that this was never viewed by Miranda or Pros- pero as a relationship between or among equals. Critics have debated the degree to which Shakespeare meant for his readers to agree with Miranda’s bitterly racist assessment of Caliban’s character. In one reading of this scene, Joan Pong Linton argues that Miranda’s attempts to “improve” Caliban or to “imprint him with her cultural values and meanings (taught her solely by her father) comes to mirror his fantasy of engendering copies of himself upon her”; in this context, Linton argues, Miranda’s “education of him … operates as a form of cultural rape, to which his attempted rape of her serves as a symbolic payback” (155). Arguably, however, one need not even go so far as to describe the attempted rape of Miranda as “payback,” for to do so is to implicitly accept Prospero’s partisan version of history. As the play progresses, we learn the degree to which Prospero views himself as the protector of his daughter’s “virgin- knot” (4.1.15), and, considering the thick lines compulsively drawn between the imperial self and the abhorred Native other, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Prospero would have classified the prospect of forging a community with Caliban as a threat to his daughter’s chastity from the first moment of contact. Moreover, as Rebecca Blevins Faery notes in her work on the role of sex and gender in the invention of America, “the belief that Indians [were] ‘naturally’ inclined to sexual violence” was long an established and essential component of colonial rhetoric, where it was commonly “used to construct essentialist versions of Indian identity and to justify … expansionist politics” (46). By consistently portraying Native men as sexual predators, colonists reinforced conventional and deeply partisan European notions of “savagery” while simultaneously diverting attention from their own predatory attempts to acquire and control indigenous lands and resources. In other words, if we uncritically accept Prospero and Miranda’s version of events, then we also, in a way, accept Caliban as the parasite in their relationship—an identification that is not otherwise supported by the play. And while it is impossible for us as readers to draw any definitive conclusions about what took place in a past that we are not privy to, Prospero and Miranda’s utter rejection and condemnation of Caliban may reveal less about the Native’s capacity for violence than about their own “need” for slaves and their lack of investment in the creation of a co-operative community on the island. In postcolonial studies, colonization is often imagined as a kind of worlding, which Gayatri Spivak defines as the inscription “of a world upon supposedly uninscribed territory” (153). This is the logic through which European colonists worked to characterize indigenous lands as empty

Toward the Desertion | 101 and/or available, and it is the logic through which Prospero and Miranda move to “improve” the supposedly vacuous Caliban through the inscriptions of their imported behaviours and customs. To further explore how The Tempest may pose challenges to such designs, we can more generally consider the play’s unnamed island setting and the behaviour of the European characters in that setting. According to Gilles Deleuze, islands represent the continuous battle between water and earth; on a basic level, they remind us “that the sea is on top of the earth” and that “the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface” (9). Islands thus represent something that is unbearable to the dominant Western imagination, for Westerners “cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained” (9). To forge successful lives, then, Western- ers find ways to forget about the ongoing battle between land and sea—to forget, that is, that the world is governed by forces and processes that operate beyond the limits of their control and understanding. A key way in which they achieve and maintain this forgetfulness is by forging and adhering to strategic cultural fictions about the world and about their supposedly privileged place therein or by inscribing their desires onto a supposedly uninscribed planet earth. In this context, the collective need to forget what the island represents, and to thereby forget the ocean as evidence of a much larger system of global interconnectivity, can be classified as part of what Robert Pogue Harrison refers to as “the law of civilization” (2), under which imagined authority the Western world has worked across centuries to define and insulate itself against the complexities and mysteries of the world. To a certain degree, then, Shakespeare’s well-documented aversion for the pastoral provides an interesting window into his critique of colonial expansion in The Tempest. Critics such as Robert N. Watson and Lynne Bruckner have explored the degree to which Shakespeare’s plays consistently cast “the pastoral [as] an aristocratic construct” (Bruckner 230), and in his analysis of As You Like It Watson speaks of the basic “difference between likeness and identity” that “haunts[s] all the play’s similes” (80). At the beginning of 2.1, Duke Senior celebrates his new life of imposed exile by proclaiming, “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious courts?” (3–4). He moves from this favourable interpretation of his surroundings to nonsensically find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (16–17). For Watson, the muddled nature of the Duke’s similes only reinforces the fact that “things are named by our need for them” (81). In other words,

102 | Bryant the Duke uses what little power he still has in his exiled state to superfi- cially speak for a world that exists beyond the limitations of his staunch aristocratic worldview, and, in so doing, he imaginatively remains within the safety of the court. Orlando employs a similar strategy in the composi- What tion of his “bad fruit” (3.2.105)—the trite love poetry that he composes for Rosalind and then carves into the trees of the forest. Here, according to Shakespeare Watson, “the difficulty of knowing nature objectively becomes part of the entire subject-object problem, as well as the problem of other minds and consistently its subsidiary problem of erotic desire” (90). When Orlando is faced with a romantic situation over which he has little control, he moves to harness critiques in his and dominate other beings—the trees—and the words he makes them speak are clichéd and pathetic. In this sense, his seemingly submissive and portrayals of the romantic acts—his literal inscriptions on the trees of the forest—emerge as thinly veiled acts of aggression that are rooted in insecurity and frustra- pastoral is the tion. For contemporary readers, and especially in the context of colonial expansion, his actions function as a useful reminder of the difficulties way in which that Western peoples have historically encountered when attempting to speak for beings different from themselves. In addition, these portrayals human beings pose a significant challenge to the imperial logic that would lead so many Europeans to believe that they could restore themselves in the Americas cleave to their through what Perry Miller calls an “errand into the wilderness.” In As You Like It, then, both Duke Senior and Orlando inscribe their reductive views and desires onto the supposedly uninscribed other—“nature.” And, more specifically, they move to speak for a natural world that they simul- epistemolo- taneously work to remain in control of or insulated against. Thus, what Shakespeare consistently critiques in his portrayals of the pastoral—and, gies as a way I would argue, in his portrayal of colonialism—is the way in which human beings cleave to their reductive epistemologies as a way of denying the of denying the existence and complexity of a larger world. Indeed, with The Tempest Shakespeare suggests that the impulse to inscribe the European self onto existence and the unknown other is a fundamentally violent and irresponsible act—one that invites what Joan Pong Linton refers to as “payback” (155)—and the complexity of a lasting consequences of such efforts are embodied by the tormented and damaged character of Caliban. In what are perhaps his most famous lines larger world. of the play, Caliban relates that 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

Toward the Desertion | 103 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. (3.2.130–38) Here, according to Julia Reinhard Lupton, Caliban “imagines a rain that would be the creative and fructifying antidote to the violence of Prospero’s flood” (171). His description of this dream of balance and harmony on the island is at the same time his account of the devastating loss of that dream, and in this context we might once more consider what occurred—or failed to occur—after Prospero and Miranda arrived on what we might provi- sionally call Sycorax’s Island. Ironically, Prospero describes Sycorax, Cali- ban’s late mother, as a “damned witch” (1.2.265) who once controlled the island and imprisoned its indigenous inhabitants with her magic. Given the depth of Prospero’s contempt for Caliban, and his own proclivity for enslaving Natives and using magic, it is again unclear to what degree this assessment of history is reliable or trustworthy. In fact, that Caliban initially greeted the Europeans hospitably betrays his previous unfamiliarity with the system of abuse and enslavement that Prospero brought to the island. Certainly in the context of early North American texts, hostile or suspicious behaviour on the part of indigenous peoples was generally indicative of a history or legacy of contact with violent or untrustworthy European colonials. In any event, it is interesting to imagine the island as an essentially feminine space, and in his essay on “Desert Islands” Deleuze offers a viable framework for approaching this element of the text. Before considering how Deleuze’s idea of desert islands might be applied to The Tempest, it is worth briefly outlining some of the key points of his essay. According to his theory, the “deserted island” is not necessarily uninhabited, and, as Deleuze explains, some people can occupy the island—it is still deserted, all the more so, provided they are sufficient, absolute creators. Certainly, this is never the case in fact, though people who are shipwrecked approach such a condition.… In certain conditions which attach them to the very movement of things, humans do not put an end to desertedness, they make it sacred. Those people who come to the island indeed occupy and popu- late it; but in reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, they would give the island only a dynamic image of

104 | Bryant itself, a consciousness of the movement that produced the island. (10)

The desert island is “deserted” by virtue of its relative isolation or by its utter independence from the non-indigenous cultural world that has for- gotten it. People who are shipwrecked can exist on a deserted island for as long as they remain cut off from those systems of knowing that allow them to feel safe and contained—the systems, as previously discussed, that allow people and populations to forget about the continuous battle between land and sea. In other words, the space remains deserted when the people who come to the island lose or surrender their rigid ties to a previous cultural vision, when they are suddenly unable to locate themselves in the world, and when no one in the world knows where they are. Out of nothing, in this situation, the shipwrecked individual must forge a new way of being, a way of living from the ground up, and in this way the individual intuitively takes on the creativity of the island itself—the island that, we are reminded, once made itself out of the sea floor. In the concluding section of his essay, Deleuze argues that “from the deserted island it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew” (13). He goes on to develop an idea of the desert island as “an egg,” or as a fertile space representing the continuous possibility of creation, and this idea provides a way of thinking about how The Tempest may portray contact, particularly within the European imperial context, as an urgent choice. According to Deleuze’s model, the contact zone need not operate as a site of “coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 8); instead, it is the potential site of “fertilization,” the place where new ways of being, and of being together, can be generated. When, for example, Prospero arrives on Sycorax’s Island, the collision of two cultures—one indigenous and one European—represents a valuable opportunity to co-operatively create new and collective cultural myths and a new kind of symbiotic community. However, while he is certainly creative, Prospero, much like Duke Senior, compulsively views his new environment as an extension of his European homeland, and within the European environment Prospero is a lofty Duke. Thus, instead of living from the “ground up,” he imposes his imported and rigid cultural scripts from the top down, refusing to fully live on the island or to sever his ties to a previous culture. His compulsion to privilege European perspectives over what he encounters abroad is the primary source of his violence against the island’s indigenous inhabitants. Interestingly, however,

Toward the Desertion | 105 Shakespeare tempers this characterization of Prospero in the concluding moments of the play, where, instead of enacting a final vengeance against his enemies, Prospero suddenly—to reintroduce Serres’s model of parasitism—“changes direction,” electing to forgive all those who have wronged him. Here Shakespeare gestures toward a potential change in the dominant order, inspired in part, perhaps, by the new heirs. In keeping with Deleuze’s model, Miranda and Ferdinand eventually achieve a kind of provisional isolation on the island. When Ferdi- nand believes himself shipwrecked and alone on the island, he intuitively follows Ariel’s music inland from the coast. Encountering Miranda, he believes himself to have encountered a “goddess” (1.2.425) of the island, and the pair spontaneously forge a new, if still in many ways imperfect, community bond. Here, for what we might reasonably assume to be the first time, Miranda challenges the authority of her father, who once more moves to enslave the outsider to further his own ends. Moreover, in 3.1, the young lovers briefly demonstrate the workings of a new kind of community loosely based on mutual care and respect for other members. As Ferdinand carries logs for Prospero, he notes, Some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odius, but The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead, And makes my labours pleasures. (2–7)

Here Ferdinand sets aside his European title, along with his conventional desire for power and wealth, as he intuitively embarks on an alternative social trajectory. Miranda reciprocates by offering to carry logs for Ferdi- nand, who is technically here her “subject,” while he rests. In short, Shake- speare gestures toward a significant alternative to exploitative colonial norms by suggesting that communities should not be built on the backs of the enslaved but rather on the desire and willingness of each individual to benefit the other members—a foundation that is ultimately endorsed by the goddess Ceres, who, together with Iris, rewards the sustainable “contract of true love” (4.1.84) with a blessing of health and plenty. Of course, this is not to suggest that the relationship between Miranda and Ferdinand represents the intervention of an entirely restorative or symbiotic vision; indeed, one could easily argue that this community-of- two is instead based on a mutual ability to intuit one other’s conventional

106 | Bryant European sameness. Arguably, however, by veering from certain of the dominant cultural scripts that had previously coloured and limited their experiences and perspectives, the pair powerfully if indirectly demonstrate the potential of European peoples to break harmful cycles of behaviour or to “change directions.” Moreover, our identification of this subtext provides one way of thinking about how Shakespeare may be subtly working to portray colonialism as a choice and to critique England’s rush to empire. The Tempest, and indeed many of Shakespeare’s plays, was written during a period of intense colonialist propaganda. In the mid-sixteenth century, Spain engaged in a very public critique of the abuses committed by the Spanish Empire on the international stage, and accounts of these findings were subsequently printed in French and English, inspiring what would come to be known as the “black legend.” According to John Gillies, a key consequence of the dissemination of this information throughout Europe was that any prospective colonising effort by a protestant power in the New World was obliged to distinguish its own treatment of the Indians from that of the Spaniards. Thus it was that the English emphasized the peacefulness of their relations with the Indians and the legitimacy of claiming land in exchange for the higher gifts of language, civilisation and religion. (152)

In other words, the black legend inspired a significant body of prideful English Protestant stories about how Britain might “do” empire more effectively, and more ethically, than the Spanish. This was the political and rhetorical climate in which The Tempest was conceived, and, while there were certainly few vocal critics of empire in England during this period, Shakespeare’s established and consistent interest in critiquing unsustainable modes of behaviour alerts us to what is a likely central concern of this play: that the excesses of empire popularly associated with Spain might too easily become England’s. Arguably, this concern is nowhere more evident than in the deeply ambiguous final moments of The Tempest. The villainous Antonio, newly stripped of his dukedom, only utters two lines in the final scene, where, upon meeting Caliban for the first time, he echoes the previous senti- ments of the fool Trinculo, identifying the much abused Native as “a plain fish, and no doubt marketable” (5.1.269). Here, as the Europeans prepare to leave the island, we are given no reason to suspect that either he or Sebastian will mend their violent and scheming ways. In this sense, the

Toward the Desertion | 107 “resolution” of the play is haunted by a likelihood of continued violence, and this in itself is significant, for in the end the play suggests that violent and exploitative behaviour overseas can only be overcome through dif- The ficult epistemological changes in powerful European centres or by accom- plishing the extremely difficult task of collectively “[changing] direction” ambiguity of (Serres 34). Certainly the Europeans who are here preparing to take leave of the island were never prepared to arrive in the first place. To add to this final scene the ambiguity of this scene, Prospero forgives his enemies and frees Ariel from bondage, but he continues to curse Caliban, strangely conceding, may simply “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (277–78). In the context provided by the surrounding lines, he seems here to be simply once more represent claiming ownership of his abhorred slave; however, this utterance has also been interpreted as a kind of traumatic breakdown in Prospero’s imaginary another way in between the previously “distinct” and inherited ontological categories of light and darkness, civilization and savagery, and self and other. A reading which that combines both of these interpretations finds a frustrated Prospero grappling with regret and with the difficult question of who is now respon- Shakespeare sible for what Caliban has become under his oppressive and profoundly damaging imperial order. This issue of accountability is only reinforced works to by the final uncertainty of Caliban’s fate, and the question of whether or not he leaves the island with Prospero ultimately goes unanswered. In the portray the end, the ambiguity of this final scene may simply represent another way in which Shakespeare works to portray the colonial contract as a choice, colonial contract and, dramatically, Prospero extends this choice to the play’s audience in his famous epilogue. as a choice. Within the contexts provided by Shakespeare’s larger body of work, the elements of future or imminent violence that haunt 5.1 represent not only the likely continuation of colonial exploitation but the equally inevitable consequences of the judicial—the processes through which, over time, the world purges itself of its parasites. While it may be difficult to draw definitive conclusions about the play’s final scene or ultimate message, it is equally difficult to argue, as many critics still do, that Shakespeare “plotted out” the process of English colonial expansion with The Tempest. In light of what might represent Shakespeare’s final warning against parasitism, it is worth briefly considering how the work of colonization in the Americas would play out. How, in other words, would English colonists behave themselves when the indigenous peoples of the Americas offered a natural contract? In September of 1620, ten years after The Tempest was published, a famous ship filled with Europeans closed in upon the coast of Massachusetts. In the first relations of this famous landing in the so-called

108 | Bryant new world, Edward Winslow describes “whales playing hard” alongside the boat, accompanying the Mayflower toward land. “If we had instruments and means to take them,” he continues, “we might have made a very rich return, which to our great grief we wanted. Our master and his mate, and other experienced in fishing, professed we might have made three or four thousand pounds worth of oil” (16). Like other colonists before them, the Mayflower passengers would be woefully unprepared for the oncoming winter. Ideas of wealth and resources would do little to build their shelters or plant their crops, and while many among them would die from exposure, others would be sustained over time by members of sophisticated indigenous nations who believed that sharing space meant sharing resources. And the treatment those nations would eventually receive in return would be so shameful as to obscure the possibility that any sector of early modern European thought could have once hoped for a different outcome. This is but one way in which ecological approaches to literature provide us with a more complex picture of early modern England.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Randall Martin for providing notes on multiple drafts of this article. Thanks, too, to Elizabeth Mancke for talking to me about the black legend.

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