Prospero:

The Tempest: Lecture 2 & 3

Lectures 2&3 focus on the performative nature of language in The Tempest and on the production of Caliban as an Other. Our point of departure is Prosperos we are such stuff as dreams are made on speech:

Prospero:Our revels now are ended; these our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air;And like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And like this insubstantial pageant fadedLeave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity.If you be pleased retire into my cell, And there repose. A turn or two Ill walkTo still my beating mind. (4.1:156-63)

It is quite striking that before this admission of powerlessness, and meditation on the illusory nature of the world, Prospero is at the height of his power.

His marriage plan has worked out, and he is entertaining everyone with a masque. The masque demonstrates his power as a magus (a good magician). He introduces the masque, which is really about chastity, by invoking Iris, who is Junos messenger and an intermediary between heaven and earth (she is the rainbow in Greek and Roman mythology). In a sense, she reflects what Propero regards as his own role, which is to bring earthly passions in alignment with celestial restrictions.

Prospero introduces the masque with a rather brusque command: No tongue! All eyes! Be silent! (4.1:59) This demonstrates the way the masque is entangled with the imposition of Prosperos will. He is not merely providing entertainment, he is using the masque in a didactic way to ensure Ferdinand and Mirandas chastity and to guarantee that they submit to culturally endorsed nuptial rites. The difference identified between performative speech and descriptive speech by the speech act theorist J.L. Austin is relevant here. At this point, the lecture provides a close description of the difference between these two forms of symbolization, and makes the point that utterances which seem descriptive can in fact play a performative function.

Shakespeare shows us how stories tend to enforce roles: they serve an ideological purpose. What seems merely descriptive or entertaining can actually be doing something. One irony here is that The Tempest has itself been used, especially in the 19th century, to justify colonialism. Like Prosperos wedding masque, Shakespeares narrative has been deployed to enforce a particular ideological understanding on people.

However, Prosperos spell over everyone is broken when, at the end of the masque, he remembers that Caliban is plotting to take his life. Suddenly his mood changes radically it is almost as if he changes into a feeble old man. How do we account for this abrupt shift from an empowered, somewhat autocratic performance to a meditation on the fragility and brevity of life?

In fact, the lecture suggests, this abrupt shift reflects a historically located debate about agency and the role of the individual that attended on the rise of humanism as a philosophy in the Early Modern period (i.e. the Renaissance).

To understand this, we need to know something about humanist as a philosophy, particularly as it was articulated by theorists such as Pico Della Mirandola and Marsilo Ficino.

Pico asks why is man such a wonderful creature? and then responds that it has to do with the way God made humankind. Below is an extract:

He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him "Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world's center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine. Pico Della Mirandola: Oration On The Dignity Of Man (15th C.)

The idea is that man (and Pico does in fact refer to men rather than women here) is located at the centre of the world, a place traditionally reserved for God. Man is autonomous. He decides his own shape; he is not bound by nature or by natural laws.

Shakespeare produces a series of meditations on this new idea of the autonomous individual that characterizes humanist thought. Prospero is actually a good example an example of Picos idea of the human subject. He is not limited even by natural laws, because he can perform magic. His magic allows him to connect heaven and earth. He fashions himself into whatever form he chooses, whereas Caliban seems to belong to the world of beasts and is therefore confined to a lower form.

But Prosperos we are such stuff as dreams are made on speech calls all of this into question. Here we have Prospero, who is also an embodiment of agented Renaissance humanist individuality, claiming that we just phantoms, that we are made out of dreams, that we are just actors in a story.

In some ways, this is implicit already in Picos optimistic description. If we have no fixed shape, does this not imply that we are a bit like dreams? If we determine reality according to our desires and judgements, doesnt this result in a dream-like reality? In other words, if you read Pico closely, there is already something a bit ambiguous and troubling about his apparently optimistic view of human nature and human potential. If we control nature, can we also have a fixed nature?

But more importantly, the play calls attention to a tension between two different understandings of what it means to be human. On the one hand, to be human is to be divine, to have power, autonomy, reason. On the other hand, and this is a view that can be termed constructivist, we are just social products: we are shaped by the forces around us, and our authority is dependent on other people. We are produced in the stories other people tell about us. Even Prospero, the most powerful person on the island, needs our applause to be set free at the end. This applause is a kind of performative gesture that allows him his liberation and continued existence.

Prospero is a powerful story-teller, so his version of reality is the dominant one. But if language gives us power, it can also take it away from us: if we can tell a story about others, and mold them to our desires, they can in fact also tell a story about us. In this view, we exist as beings mediated by fictions in an intersubjective world where individual authority is really a performative illusion.

As character, Caliban is integral to the plays exploration of such a constructivist understanding. On the one hand, The Tempest seems to say that Caliban is simply a monster by nature. But it also explains in a very sophisticated and detailed way how Caliban is produced as a monster. He is at the centre of the plays debate: are we in control of our own nature, or are we simply the products of other peoples fantasies and ideas about us?

The lecture then explains how Caliban accords with the idea of a wild man, and discusses the processes of Othering with specific reference to late-medieval and Renaissance travel writing.Essentially, Caliban is constructed in opposition to the civilized people on the island, who have manners, culture, respect for property, and so on. But if Caliban is a murderous savage, cant we say the same about Antonio and Sebastian who decide to murder Gonzalo and Alonso? Yet Antonio and Sebastian are clearly representatives of the civilized European world of the court. The play incessantly challenges the savage/civilized dichotomy that Prospero so frequently invokes.

The lecture then demonstrates the strong sense of familiarity between Prospero and Caliban, culminating in Prosperos admission that he is the owner of this thing of darkness at the end of the play.

In fact, Caliban is made by Prospero as an element of Prosperos self-fashioning. He can point to Caliban as his Other, but he remains bound to him: without Caliban, he loses his own sense of consistency. Caliban allows Prospero to define his own charity and civility.

The lecture demonstrates this by considering Prosperos description of Caliban in Act 4:

A devil, a born devil, on whose natureNurture can never stick; on whom my pains,Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost. (4.1:188-90)

We should recognize this as a way for Prospero to name himself. Caliban represents nature, which is antithetical to culture: in this way, Caliban allows Prospero to define himself as cultured against Calibans nature. If he could civilize Caliban, it would mean that he is, himself, merely a Caliban, that civilized people are simply civilized barbarians. If Prospero acknowledges that Caliban can be made into a civilized person, it would mean that being civilized is simply a cultural ritual, a mode of existence that can be taught. In this case, the essential distinction between him and Caliban would evaporate. We can say that Prospero naturalizes the division between nature and culture. It also allows Prospero to claim that he is a civilizer, a kind person, while at the same time excusing his treatment of Caliban as his slave.

Throughout the play, Caliban articulates his sense that his interiority is possessed by some external force; that he is not identical to himself. Consider his remarks to Trinculo: Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep,Will make me sleep again, and then in dreamingThe clouds methought would open and show richesReady to drop upon me, that when I wakedI cried to dream again. (3.2:133-141)

This is actually a very powerful image of ideological control. Prospero does not merely control Calibans body, but also his consciousness and his perceptions. The real magic that allows Prospero this control is of course language, which is one way of understanding what Caliban is getting at when he says You taught me language, and my profit ont / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language in 1.2:362-65.

The lecture then uses Ngugis comments in Decolonising the Mind to explain how this might work. If your subjectivity can only be couched in is a discourse that negates and belittles you, and language is the ground of culture, the very act of speaking relegates you to a position that is predetermined and inimical to your interests.

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