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The Logic of Inequality: Caliban's Baseness in The Tempest

mong the broad changes in Shakespearean criticism of the last thirty years, none is starker than the shift in views of The Tempest. Where idealist readings were once hegemonic, it is now impossible to teach the play without some discussion of colonialism. In recent stage presentations, Caliban often appears in the costume of some colonized nation. Dignity and value attach to him because of it, and Prospero appears much less benevolent than before. This shift has been valuable, but colonialist interpretations have suffered from a certain narrowness of approach, and have failed to deal with the distance between the historical context of the play and the modern vocabulary of colonialism. Arguments that the play constitutes propaganda for English colonialism suffer from the newness of English colonial experience: the first successful expedition to Virginia had landed only four years before the first production of this play, so there was not much time to develop a discourse and implant it in the unconscious of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This article will seek to nuance the relation between the play and colonialism by bringing the discussion closer to the language of the work. The relation between Prospero and Caliban being basic to a colonialist understanding of the play, this paper will argue that the fundamental category for this relation is “baseness”, the chief characteristic attributed to “natural” slaves, and the justification for their enslavement. Since it clearly may be attributed to Caliban, he is identified as a low creature, enslavable if anyone is. This category derives from European experience, and may most helpfully be presented in terms of social relations within Europe: there is no need to appeal to the infant English experience of overseas colonialism. It will be argued that the contempt of “savages” derived from existing scales of inequality in Europe. “Baseness” is a category applied to Europeans by Europeans, and, for the English, turned overseas only at a later date than this play. We shall see that Shakespeare’s use of the category to justify enslavement in The Tempest had difficulties with respect to his audience. In England, the practice of slavery was widely condemned, and Englishmen took pride in a country that purportedly had no slaves. Yet baseness was not contested, as it was fundamental to contemporary views of humanity. A study of contemporary attitudes toward baseness will serve to clarify the relations between Caliban, as a base creature, and Prospero, Ariel, Stephano and Trinculo, who bear varying relations to baseness. We may see how Caliban was formed from seventeenth-century views of humanity. Finally, we shall see how the very exalted view of sovereignty on the part of James I, at the opposite end of the scale, contributed to the play’s view of Prospero as immeasurably superior to the base characters. Recent views of Prospero and Caliban have placed their inequality into the context of history since Shakespeare’s time. With the end of the colonial empires, The Tempest was put to new uses, which foregrounded the inequality between Prospero and Caliban. In 1960, the Jamaican novelist George Lamming “made use” of the play “as a way of presenting a certain state of feeling which is the heritage of the exiled and colonial writer from the British Caribbean”.1 His discussion of Shakespeare is interspersed with horrific descriptions of eighteenth-century slave ships. The Martinique playwright Aimé Césaire read Lamming, and wrote an adaptation of the play “for Negro theatre”. In Césaire’s version, Caliban’s first word is “Uhuru”, “freedom” in Swahili, and his last, when Prospero has gone, is “liberté”.2 In the 1980s, New Historicism provided an opportunity for more rereadings, not so creative now and more thoroughly based in contemporary texts. Such critics as Paul Brown, Peter Hulme, Francis Barker and Stephen Greenblatt turned to economic history and to the exploration literature of the Americas for parallels to the play.3 Paul Brown argued from such evidence that the play is a