A Different Kind of Threat: How Caliban Regains his Place in The Tempest’s Colonial Discourse
The imbalanced relationship between Prospero and the enslaved Caliban within The Tempest has always been entangled in colonial and postcolonial discourse, largely under the assumption that Prospero arrives much like a colonizer on Caliban’s island and seeks to assert his dominance over whom he sees as “savage.” Critics like Paul Brown have argued that such a situation necessitates and validates Caliban as the dangerous “other” Prospero must colonize in order to dispel the threat (Brown 281), but his work has been subsequently been critiqued. Deborah Willis counters Caliban can be neither colonial threat nor the true “other” due to his presentation as a sympathetic comic relief, and Antonio must instead be the true “other.” (Willis 324). Brown identifies that Prospero’s “othering” of Caliban is a result of feeling a threatening anxiety, but his argument is focused primarily on Prospero’s psychology rather than that of the audience, which is what Willis attacks. However, neither critic considers that perhaps Caliban is a colonial threat to Prospero because his attitude is sympathy-inducing—his misfortune as the “poor colonized slave” captures the sympathy of the audience and challenges Prospero’s position as the hero of colonist ideology. The danger of Caliban lies in his power to sway favor in his direction while he is supposed to be representing a bestial hazard instead, suggesting that the real “threat” and involvement of colonial discourse in the play is not physical resistance from a native people, but a moral challenge to colonial mentality and the praise-seeking Prospero.
Caliban within this discourse is rightfully a source of disagreement, as Willis takes Brown’s identification of the character as a part of colonial discourse and objects to it thoroughly. Brown’s argues that Caliban’s “resistance to colonization” (283) from the beginning allows him to disrupt the traditional colonial order and become a psychological threat and the easily-identifiable, necessary “other.” Willis, on the other hand, counters that Caliban is a “ridiculous” (Willis 332) character whose plight is “trivialize[d]” (333) by the fool he makes of himself in his attempts to resist Prospero’s usurping of his island, implying he cannot be the “other” of colonial discourse. To Willis, Prospero itches to dispel the “threats embodied” (Willis 333) by other, non-colonial issues in the play—such as Antonio’s political usurping—to gain power, and Caliban invites us “not to perceive him as a real threat” and to “sympathize” (324) with him instead. But despite this analysis, Caliban may still represent a colonial threat, not in spite of the sympathy he provokes from the audience, but because of it. It then becomes necessary to establish why that is so.
Thus, considering Caliban’s position requires also considering what Prospero’s character has to lose, what his mission is, and what exactly would “threaten” that mission. What most explains his motivations throughout the plot, and perhaps also most explains why Caliban has the capability to scare him so fervently, is the fact that Prospero’s ultimate “project…was to please” (The Tempest Epilogue 12-13). Despite his “crimes” (19), he wants to be seen favorably by the audience he compels to “set [him] free” (20), and wants to appeal to an crowd composed of those who can sympathize with him—such as the “European and North American” colonists who Francis Barker and Peter Hulme note speak Prospero’s power-hungry language (305). By turning directly out of the narrative and to the ones watching, Prospero admits that his purpose in any of his plots is to gain sympathy, and his vulnerability is in that which can take that sympathy from him. Therefore, once the epilogue delivers that knowledge, the play in hindsight can unfurl, especially in terms of Caliban’s effects on Prospero’s “project” as an “other” undergoing foreign subjugation. Any instance in which Caliban can please the audience instead of Prospero becomes a threat to Prospero’s desire to be seen as “pleasing” and superior, and thus, threatens the moral validity of his colonial-esque mission and tips the play back into colonialist discourse waters.
Keeping in mind this vulnerability Prospero exposes at the play’s conclusion, Caliban gains the opportunity within the plot to become a danger to Prospero’s mission in a way neither Brown nor Willis consider. Initially, it does seem that Caliban is not actually a threat to Prospero’s colonization, as Prospero is easily able to quell him into submission: “If thou neglect’st or dost unwillingly/ What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps,” (The Tempest 1.2. 371-372). Caliban’s response to this is merely that he “must obey” (375). But instead of this victimization minimizing his threat, it is arguable that Caliban is hazardous to Prospero and entangled after all in colonial discourse because this mistreatment invokes our sympathy. He is no traditional, physical danger in the way Prospero can easily coerce him with only the threat of “old cramps,” but yet he poses a moral challenge to the audience right from his introduction. By delivering a speech defending his rights as a colonized victim, Caliban offers to the audience a critique of Prospero’s “heroic” mission:
This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in ‘it, 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.
Cursed be that I did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which was first mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island (The Tempest 1.2. 334-347)
Caliban in this moment reveals not only his initial willingness to cooperate with this uninvited foreigner, and the breadth of his island intelligence, but also how Prospero betrayed his trust and “tak’st” the island that was rightfully his. He pleads the case of his humanity—had a “mother,” a claim to the island, a willingness to “love” Prospero and “show” him the island, and yet he was betrayed. This look into the perspective and mistreatment of a conquered people becomes a chance for Caliban to appeal to the audience Prospero hopes to be “pleasing” this entire time, and propose the question of whether Prospero for all his talk of “humane care” (349) and a noble purpose had any right to capture and enslave someone with obvious ownership of the island and human emotion and intelligence. If Prospero intends on appearing as the “good guy” of the play—the clear motivation behind his dismissal of Caliban to Miranda as a “lying slave” (347)—the fact that Caliban gives not only his audience of Miranda, but the audience of the play a chance to sympathize with the colonized instead of the colonizer becomes a serious threat to Prospero’s mission to please, persuade, and control. He is not just a sympathetic joke de-legitimatizing a colonialist discussion of the play; he threatens the very core of colonization that proposes colonizers like Prospero are always in the right, and does so almost immediately within Prospero’s plotline.
The fact that Caliban effectively gains some level of sympathy from the audience by the close of the first act allows his later actions to be all the more crucial in understanding why he should not be removed as a danger to Prospero’s mission or colonial persona. Caliban breaks free from the identity as a “monster” (The Tempest 3.3. 129) necessitating a master when Prospero is not around, and offers a further demonstration of his intelligence and humanity by showcasing his linguistic control:
Be not afeard. 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 sometimes voices
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 (130-138)
Even in a language not his own, Caliban is able to speak in rhythmic iambic pentameter, breaking free of his stereotypical curses and insults to hint to those watching that he is not some “monster of the isle” (2.2.62) or “present for any emperor” (66), but a recognizable, relatable human with artistic, narrative abilities just like Prospero. In this moment, Caliban challenges his own label as the “savage other” of colonial discourse, but this shift in perspective does not remove him as the antagonist to colonialism within the text; it actually makes him more of a threat to colonial order as the “not-so-savage other.” Caliban projects his human “dreaming” and tears in a beautiful passage onto an equally human audience, and can appeal to that humanity by presenting himself as being deserving of admiration and understanding, disrupting the assumption that the colonial “other” is beastly, illiterate, and worthy of being conquered. In this manner, Caliban’s true threat lies in his ability to reveal his humanity to the audience and win their favor in opposition to Prospero, the traditional “pleasing” colonist.
Caliban’s danger to Prospero accumulates in the crucial fallout of Act IV’s masque scene, where it can be explicitly seen that Prospero not only is threatened by Caliban’s disruption to his physical plots, but fully realizes when his artsy illusion shatters that there is a further threat on his audience-dazzling as well, and he needs to expel it. Caliban’s actual rebellion poses no menace to Prospero’s authority, but he still challenges his place in the traditional colonial order in a psychological manner more related to the audience than Prospero himself. Act IV finds Prospero back at his mission to please in full force, hosting a grand masque for his daughter Miranda to show her “some vanity of [his] art” (The Tempest 4.1. 41). It is in the middle of this masque when Prospero suddenly remembers “that foul conspiracy/ Of the beast Caliban and his confederates” (139-140) and becomes possessed “with anger so distempered” (145), Miranda had never witnessed it before. If hosting this masque is an expression of Prospero’s audience-pleasing, then that fantasy is fragmented not by Caliban’s impending physical attack, but by remembering that Caliban has already been introduced earlier as a character victimized and worthy of sympathy, and if his plan succeeds now, he may destroy completely the idea that he is a lower creature undeserving of vengeance and glory. This is why Prospero is so quick to disguise the truth of Caliban’s plot from Miranda and Ferdinand, brushing his anger off as illness: “Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled” (159)—he wants to keep up his pleasurable illusion to the couple and not sacrifice any of it to Caliban and his order-disrupting antics. Willis may not see Caliban as a threat to Prospero’s quest for power, but Prospero still does, even if Caliban poses no real physical danger—after all, Prospero defeats him in the latter half of Act IV, Scene I by simply turning invisible and distracting his posse with fancy clothes. But yet, Prospero is still angered at the interruption to his audience-pleasing schemes and quick to cover up the possible consequences. If Prospero cannot toss aside Caliban’s plot quickly and without reasserting that Caliban is “a born devil” (188) and not a man righteously reclaiming his stolen land, Caliban gains the chance to reappear as a hero and accumulate more sympathy, and Prospero, as Caliban’s colonizer, won’t receive his “applause” at the play’s conclusion—embodying a moral challenge to colonial order.
Ultimately, Brown and Willis both articulate a valid claim: Caliban has a place in colonial discourse as the threatening “other,” and Caliban’s position and disposition make him a sympathetic character to the audience. Putting those two ideas together instead of opposing them allows it to be seen that Prospero is threatened by Caliban because of the danger Caliban poses to his audience-pleasing purpose, and thus, if Prospero loses sympathy to the “savage” Caliban, his place at the top of the colonial hierarchy is threatened, and Caliban becomes the dangerous “other” in an entirely new way. Prospero is quick to shut down Caliban’s valid claim to the island and appeal to his peers and audience because even as a silly, sympathetic character, Caliban is still undoubtedly a primary opponent to Prospero’s stolen authority of the island and his quest for audience validation. In this way, Caliban and the play still has more than a foot in the door of colonial discourse, and to ignore this role and present him as only a physical disruption to order or a figure of pity is to ignore the cracks he places within the morality and “pleasing” capabilities of colonialism as a whole.
Works Cited
Barker, Francis and Hulme, Peter.”Nymph and Readers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 268-92. Print.
Brown, Paul. “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 268-92. Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 10-88. Print.
Willis, Deborah. “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 322-33. Print.
