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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“In act ,4 scene 1, of The Tempest (first performed, so far as we know, in 1611 and first published in 1623), the elaborate masque that Prospero and Ariel present in order to show Ferdinand and Miranda "some vanity of [Prospero's] Art" and to celebrate the couple's betrothal suddenly dissolves; the dancing reapers and nymphs "heavily vanish" "to a strange, hollow, and confused noise." ' As the moment of festivity and hannony fractures in dissonance, the artful, magical spectacle, which draws on prestigious classical and courtly traditions, disappears: "Our revels now are ended," says Prospero (I. 148). The disruption occurs because Prospero "starts suddenly, and speaks" about Caliban, the "servant-monster," and his brewing plot. “I had forgot that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against my life./The minute of their plot Is almost come.”(II. 139-.142)

At the moment in which Prospero basks in self-congratulation, Caliban's plot-the scheming subordinate's subplot-which Paul Brown has identified as "a kind of antimasque," interrupts Prospero's master plan, prompting him to ruminate on transience and mortality. Although Prospero knows about, and even stages and manipulates, Caliban's plot, at this moment we sense briefly possible narratives other than that of Prospero's mastery. According to Peter Hulme and Francis Barker, "the sub-plot provides the only real moment of drama when Prospero calls a sudden halt to the celebratory masque." This "real drama" results from our sense that Prospero is not completely in control and that the outcome is not wholly predictable.

As Hulme and Barker argue, this is the first moment in the play when it is possible to distinguish "between Prospero's play and The Tempest itself." In this instant, we can imagine a play in which Caliban is the protagonist governing the main plot, a play in which he is once again his own king. The disruption reveals the fragility not only of the masque and the celebration but also of Prospero's power. Caliban's disruptive intrusion is recognizably linked to the narrative of petty treason. Although Prospero rapidly recovers himself and consults with Ariel about how to curtail and punish Caliban's insubordination, Caliban's plot threatens to derail Prospero's elaborate schemes to regain his dukedom, marry off his daughter, and punish/educate his usurping brother. It threatens simultaneously the form and coherence of the play at its most gorgeous, most confident moment of aesthetic display.

Like the petty traitor and his betrayal, the threats to Prospero and his agenda, to the patriarchal social and political order these represent, and to the form of The Tempest come from inside Prospero's household, from the character introduced as "my slave" (1.2.311). Recent criticism connects The Tempest to various discourses of power in Renaissance culture. Focusing on Caliban's compelling narrative of how Prospero wooed then enslaved him and on how he was degraded from "mine own king" to "all the subjects that you have" (1.2.3+1- +s), critics demonstrate brilliantly the play's relationship to discourses of colonialism and the processes of exploration and exploitation in which they participate. In addition, Curt Breight articulates the relationship between The Tempest and discourses of treason. As he shows, the play includes two treason plots, one presented as a false accusation, the other as actual: Prospero accuses Ferdinand of being a traitor; Sebastian and Antonio plot to kill Alonso, king of Naples.

The play's prehistory, which generates its plot, centers on Antonio's usurpation of his brother's dukedom and attempt to eliminate him. From the perspective of recent critics, at the intersection of these discourses of power, Prospero, as sovereign and as imperialist, stands compromised by his power over others and the brutality with which he wields it. Yet the play also presents Prospero as compromised by his dependency on and vulnerability to those who serve him: first his brother, then his servants. Just as The Tempest participates in discourses of colonialism and treason, it is also in dialogue with discourses of petty treason. Since Caliban acts both as Prospero's only subject and as his domestic servant, his plot against Prospero is both high and petty treason.

The conflation of public and private, political and domestic, so evident in the legal construction of petty treason, particularly applies to the shrunken, enclosed world of The Tempest, in which Prospero's household is the commonwealth. He is master, father, and king, and his daughter and servants are his only subjects. Petty and high treason are so analogous in The Tempest that most readers and viewers have not distinguished between the two. Yet the relationship between Prospero and Caliban is first presented as a domestic one. When Prospero narrates his time on the island and his relationship to its original inhabitants in order to chastise Ariel and defer his request for freedom, he first identifies Caliban as the one ''whom now I keep in service" (1.2.288).

In this disciplinary narrative, Prospero characterizes himself as the good master by reminding Ariel what it was like to be tormented and imprisoned by a bad mistress, Sycorax. Ariel dearly has the ability to irritate his master by requesting liberty and provoking a monthly reminder of his history, but he is presented as the good servant, as opposed to Caliban: the ''villain" and "slave." Although he is presented as monstrous and dangerous, Caliban is also presented as invaluable; Prospero and Miranda depend on him. We cannot miss him./He does make our fire,/Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/That profit us. (1.2.31+-16) Stephen Greenblatt shows how many explorers of the new world depicted themselves as dependent on the natives to supply them with food, as entrusting basic subsistence needs to those they did not trust. They thus placed themselves in a relation of fearful dependency on those they violently subjugated as their inferiors and slaves.

Greenblatt links this "determination to be nourished by the labor of others weaker, more vulnerable, than oneself' to a desire to distinguish one's self as a gentleman. By such means Europeans created a class hierarchy in the New World, a hierarchy in which virtually any European would be above the natives. Like Europeans exploring the New World, then, Prospero needs a native to show him "all the qualities o' th' isle"; he also needs a slave so that he can proclaim himself a master. Just as Prospero and Miranda cannot survive on the island without Caliban, Prospero cannot be a king without a subject, or a master without his servants. Such dependency motivates the fear of petty treason.

Since Prospero's mastery depends on Caliban's and Ariel's subordination and his bodily life depends on Caliban's exertions, he must use force, threat, and magical torments to secure the submission of the subordinates on whom he depends and with whom he is so intimate. The danger of such dependency and intimacy is represented through Caliban's attempt to rape Miranda. As Prospero reminds Caliban: “I lodg'd thee/In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate/The honor of my child" (1.2.3+9-SI). Only Caliban's attempt to rape Miranda convinces Prospero that Caliban, unlike most servants, cannot live in his house, cannot be a member of the family. As critics have noted, Prospero reminds Caliban of the rape and its relation to his "lodging" in order to construct Caliban as a bad servant, a betrayer of the household that has welcomed and included him, and therefore to sidestep Caliban's construction of Prospero as the betraying father/master and usurper of the island.

Thus, to protect his own interests and displace blame, Prospero counters Caliban's narrative of tyranny and usurpation (a narrative too much like Prospero's own account of his lost dukedom) with a narrative of attempted rape. Prospero also counters Caliban's claim that he is a victim with the charge that Caliban is a perpetrator and agent. Prospero holds Caliban accountable to the extent that this serves his own interests. In Prospero's view, Caliban is subhuman and monstrous, a ludicrous rival for rule. Yet Caliban is also responsible enough to work for Prospero and possesses enough agency to be held accountable and punished, first for the rape and later for the plot against his master. To manage the disturbing possibility that a Caliban could have legitimate claims to the kingship of his own island, a world "new" only to its invader, Prospero deploys the familiar, household discourse of master-servant relations.

Caliban's paradoxical position, which enables Prospero to manipulate his relation to Caliban and Caliban's accountability, is not particular to this amphibious inhabitant of an enchanted isle but corresponds, in part, to the status of the early modern household servant. As Michael MacDonald argues, "many households in early modern England harbored a Caliban, a 'servant-monster,' partly adult, partly child, partly domestic beast of burden." MacDonald's vivid evocation of domestic servants as both familiar and strange, as monstrous in their conflation of categories, points to the difficulty of locating servants within early modern social order and the anxiety this could cause.

Those critics of The Tempest who have acknowledged class conflict in the play have oversimplified it as dualistic. They have not recognized the significance of Prospcro's and Caliban's relationship as master and servant; nor do they address the complex, shifting relation of the roles of master and servant to social hierarchies. Brown, for instance, argues that the play defines the aristocracy against the masterless (Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban) and that "the masterless therefore function to bind the rulers together in hegemony." Breight agrees that "Caliban's conspiracy appears to present a precis of Elizabethan fears regarding masterless men." Yet, as Brown acknowledges at some points but disregards at others, Caliban is not mastcrless.

Nor is the domestic hierarchy of master and servant quite the same as the social hierarchy of the aristocracy and the masterless (which elides the middle of the social order and the majority of the population) or the political hierarchy of governors and governed. Also, while the master-servant and kingsubject relationships are analogous, as the definition of petty treason articulates, and while both of these hierarchical relations are associated with class hierarchies, the connections are complex. Excepting the king, each of the inhabitants of the realm is a subject; that subjection embraces every social class. Like the category "subject" or "governed," "servant" incorporates many social and economic classes.

As a result, historians argue that "servants did not understand themselves, and were not understood by early modern society, to be part of a labouring class, youthful proletarians." Indeed, so many people, including aristocrats at court, spent some part of their life in service that it was considered a developmental phase more than a permanent social status. As Ann Kussmaul notes, "For most servants, it was a transitional occupation, specific to their transitional status between childhood and adulthood." Since most servants were youths, servants "constituted around 60 percent of the population aged fifteen to twenty-four" in early modem England.' Furthermore, by Peter Laslett's calculation, "a quarter, or a third, of all the families in the country contained servants in Stuart times."

Integral members of the households in which they lived and worked, servants obtained their social status from their masters. They were thus woven into hierarchies that governed social order in early modem England and into households and families. Servants were neither distinguishable nor separable as a social group; because of their intimate relationship with their employers, servants were confusing, even threatening, figures. The threat lay not in their stark opposition to their masters or their demonized otherness but in their very familiarity and their insinuation into all social groups and situations. Furthermore, the role of service as a developmental phase reveals the dependency and deference that permeated social relations throughout early modem England.

Dependent yet depended upon, familiar yet not wholly known or controlled, a class yet not one, servants blurred boundaries and confused categories. To the complex positioning of the domestic servant in early modem England, the characterization of Caliban adds the further complication of racial difference; Caliban seems to occupy the same "curious outsider-within stance" that Patricia Hill Collins describes as typical of African-American women domestic workers in white upper-class households. In The Tempest, as in the situations that Collins describes, this position enables the servant to see the master/employer demystified and vulnerable. The story of the insubordinate dependent, the petty traitor, is the story of the outsider-within as told from the perspective of the threatened master; it articulates the fear that the other and the enemy might be the person who makes your fire, prepares your food, and lodges in your own cell.

Pointing out that Ferdinand takes Caliban's place when Caliban is freed from log-toting to plot his rebellion, Breight argues that "in structural terms Prospero always needs a demonic 'other'." It is important that Prospero needs not an other as much as a servant, a servant who, while he may be demonic, is also domestic. One of the threats Caliban offers as a servant is that he is not "other" enough: He once lived with Prospero; he remembers happier days of being petted; he is a thing of darkness whom Prospero feels compelled to acknowledge as his own. Like the attempted rape that leads to Caliban's domestic exile and imprisonment, Caliban's plan to kill Prospero hinges on his role as the familiar, included member of the household as well as the estranged, monstrous "other."

Displaying his knowledge of Prospero's habits and vulnerabilities, Caliban suggests to his confederates that they deprive Prospero of his power by "seiz[ing] his books" and then kill him during his customary nap: "'Tis a custom with him/the afternoon to sleep./There thou mayst brain him" (p.87-89). Turning on the inside information that a servant would have, this plot constitutes a particularly intimate, domestic betrayal. Prospero commands magical forces, but his books and "brave utensils" arc vulnerable to seizure and destruction by one who knows their place and power. Caliban is so consistently characterized as a servant that he appears to internalize that characterization and to construe his actions as petty treason rather than as the reclamation of his own usurped kingdom.

…Brown argues that the comic treatment of the conspiracy in The Tempest serves to restore social, political, and aesthetic orders; the aristocrats' "collective laughter at the chastened revolting plebians" enables them to displace responsibility for their own failures onto "the ludicrous revolt of the masterless" and to celebrate their reclaimed authority. Addressing the social function of Renaissance dramatic forms more generally, critics such as Louis A. Montrose argue that Renaissance comedy performed social work by provoking and alleviating tensions. According to such arguments, with which I agree, a play like The Tempest represents Caliban and his fellow conspirators in order to trivialize and overmaster them; it grants them their own plot in order to subordinate it to a plot structure and a larger cultural narrative that diminish their significance and locate power and prestige elsewhere-in the master and his story.”

- Frances E. Dolan, “The Subordinate’s Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion.” in Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550 - 1700

#dangerous familiars #the tempest #shakespeare #cw: rape #colonialism #history #renaissance #jacobean #stuart #servants #slavery

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