7H[WLQ+LVWRU\7KH7HPSHVWDQG1HZ:RUOG&XOWXUDO %-6RNRO(QFRXQWHU 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: The Tempest 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 island 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, Ariel 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 The Sea-Adventure was frantically pumped out by all on board including the expedition's leaders, Sir Thomas Gates 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 William Strachey 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 Prospero'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.