Toward the Desertion of Sycorax’s Island:
Challenging the Colonial Contract
Rachel Bryant
University of New Brunswick
In the second scene of The Tempest, Prospero shares with Miranda
the 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
doctoral candidate at
the University of New
Brunswick, where she
studies northeastern
North American
literatures and literary
cultures. She is the
2014 recipient of the
Bibliographical Society
of Canada’s Emerging
Scholar Prize. Her
work on the literary
functions of Wabanaki
wampum belts after the
American Revolution is
forthcoming in Native
American and Indigenous
Studies. An article on
imperial and indigenous
cultural geographies in
Douglas Glover’s novel
Elle is forthcoming in
Canadian Literature.
These details have the intended effect upon Miranda, who, in seeming
awe of her supposed benefactor, promptly exclaims, “Would I might / but
ever see that man!” (168–69). However, what is perhaps most interesting
about this list is the utter superficiality of the lauded items—the expensive
clothing, the bed sheets, and the books. Indeed, while the food and water
would have helped Prospero and Miranda to stave off death temporarily,
there is very little here to ensure the long-term survival of a single father
and his infant child after they are shipwrecked on a barely-peopled island.
How, then, did Prospero and Miranda survive after finally drifting
ashore in their “rotten carcass of a butt” (1.2.146)? The rather obvious
answer to this question comes later in the same scene, when the summoned slave Caliban confronts Prospero with his own version of events:
“When thou cam’st first,” he bitterly recalls,
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.
(1.2.335–41)
Here, as Caliban describes an exchange of information upon and after
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 establish 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.
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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 indicators of how far advanced their cultures were in the development of human relations [at the time of contact].… In retrospect, 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 hos1 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 desperate beings behave in fundamentally unsustainable ways and thus represent
a threat to those underlying networks upon which all life depends.2 Certainly 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 physically 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 Americas. 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 Native 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 Relationships” 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 Shakespeare plotted out the English colonization of a ‘New World’ [in The Tempest]” (44). However, in a 2010 introduction to postcolonial ecocriticism,
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin identify The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the three
texts from the Western canon that best represent “European ideas of language and colonialist projections of the Cartesian separation of mind
and body” (155)—this despite the fact that Shakespeare’s plays predate
Descartes by several decades. These oppositional positions are reflective of
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
European imperialism by some postcolonial critics, emerging ecological
approaches to Shakespeare’s plays directly and indirectly undermine such
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
literature presents narratives that emphasize proto-ecological values like
interdependence, unanticipated consequences, and the limits of human
ambition” (154). For Mentz and a growing number of others, such narratives and concerns thread throughout Shakespeare’s body of work and
speak to the degree to which certain early modern writers anticipated
what would, centuries later, become key principles in contemporary environmentalist 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
Serres identifies
two possible
directions in
which human
beings can
move: toward
death or toward
symbiosis and
stability.
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 recognizes 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, / Returning 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 locution 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 “capitalintensive 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 sociToward the Desertion | 97
Shakespeare
challenges the
cruel and
corrupt
imperial logic
that would
compulsively
treat natives,
animals, and
other beings
as available
or marketable
resources.
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
when practised by society as a whole.
As Jowett further explains in his essay, many early modern industrialists believed that the earth was animate and that it could “actively …
produce metals by a process equivalent to the generation of animals 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 forest: “Earth, yield me roots,” the self-exiled Athenian commands; “Who
seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate / With thy most operant poison.
/ [He finds gold] / What is here? / Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?”
(4.3.23–6). Jowett explores several possible interpretations of Timon’s
discovery, suggesting, for example, that the buried treasure was likely
stolen by thieves and subsequently hidden in the woods. This reading is
particularly useful for its reinforcement of the idea that “the total resources
available to humanity have not increased” (86) upon the discovery of this
gold. Moreover, this interpretation of Timon’s discovery is consistent with
2.1, where Shakespeare challenges the myth of limitless resources even
more directly as a senator breaks from conventional social wisdom by
openly acknowledging the inevitable fact that Timon’s wealth “cannot hold”
(12), especially given the parasitic behaviour of his so-called friends. In
other words, the senator avers, Timon’s riches cannot naturally regenerate themselves, for wealth, like all other resources, is finite. With this play,
then, and, in multiple ways, Shakespeare suggests that what is borrowed
must always, in some way, be paid back if unpleasant consequences are
to be avoided. Again, systems based on “one-sided contracts” and “gifts
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 historical discourse, is here clearly represented as predatory and parasitic.
It is additionally worth pausing to consider the manner in which Stefano 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), hoping 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 Europeans 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 Prospero 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 “virginknot” (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, Westerners 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,
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the Duke uses what little power he still has in his exiled state to superficially 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 composition 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
Watson, “the difficulty of knowing nature objectively becomes part of the
entire subject-object problem, as well as the problem of other minds and
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
and dominate other beings—the trees—and the words he makes them
speak are clichéd and pathetic. In this sense, his seemingly submissive and
romantic acts—his literal inscriptions on the trees of the forest—emerge
as thinly veiled acts of aggression that are rooted in insecurity and frustration. For contemporary readers, and especially in the context of colonial
expansion, his actions function as a useful reminder of the difficulties
that Western peoples have historically encountered when attempting to
speak for beings different from themselves. In addition, these portrayals
pose a significant challenge to the imperial logic that would lead so many
Europeans to believe that they could restore themselves in the Americas
through what Perry Miller calls an “errand into the wilderness.”
In As You Like It, then, both Duke Senior and Orlando inscribe their
views and desires onto the supposedly uninscribed other—“nature.” And,
more specifically, they move to speak for a natural world that they simultaneously work to remain in control of or insulated against. Thus, what
Shakespeare consistently critiques in his portrayals of the pastoral—and,
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
existence and complexity of a larger world. Indeed, with The Tempest
Shakespeare suggests that the impulse to inscribe the European self onto
the unknown other is a fundamentally violent and irresponsible act—one
that invites what Joan Pong Linton refers to as “payback” (155)—and the
lasting consequences of such efforts are embodied by the tormented and
damaged character of Caliban. In what are perhaps his most famous lines
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
What
Shakespeare
consistently
critiques in his
portrayals of the
pastoral is the
way in which
human beings
cleave to their
reductive
epistemologies as a way
of denying the
existence and
complexity of a
larger world.
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 provisionally call Sycorax’s Island. Ironically, Prospero describes Sycorax, Caliban’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 populate it; but in reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently
creative, they would give the island only a dynamic image of
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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 forgotten 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 Ferdinand 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 Ferdinand, who is technically here her “subject,” while he rests. In short, Shakespeare 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-oftwo 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 sentiments 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
The
ambiguity of
this final scene
may simply
represent
another way in
which
Shakespeare
works to
portray the
colonial contract
as a choice.
“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 difficult epistemological changes in powerful European centres or by accomplishing the extremely difficult task of collectively “[changing] direction”
(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
the ambiguity of this scene, Prospero forgives his enemies and frees Ariel
from bondage, but he continues to curse Caliban, strangely conceding,
“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
claiming ownership of his abhorred slave; however, this utterance has also
been interpreted as a kind of traumatic breakdown in Prospero’s imaginary
between the previously “distinct” and inherited ontological categories of
light and darkness, civilization and savagery, and self and other. A reading
that combines both of these interpretations finds a frustrated Prospero
grappling with regret and with the difficult question of who is now responsible for what Caliban has become under his oppressive and profoundly
damaging imperial order. This issue of accountability is only reinforced
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
end, the ambiguity of this final scene may simply represent another way
in which Shakespeare works to portray the colonial contract as a choice,
and, dramatically, Prospero extends this choice to the play’s audience in
his famous epilogue.
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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