The Tempest: Caliban, the Prospero Problem, and Poe
Most Shakespeare scholars would probably say that Shakespeare didn’t write horror. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and histories. And sonnets. For those who would say that he wrote horror, most would say Macbeth is the beginning and end of it. Macbeth has the uncanny, it has bodily violence, it has psychopathology, and, of course, it has witches. Oh! And it has a prophecy that comes true and ends in total slaughter. Oh! And there’s a decapitation. If anyone can tell me why that is not horror, I’m listening.
But, to my mind, Shakespeare wrote four other plays that clearly qualify as horror. Those plays are The Tempest, Othello, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Of that set, The Tempest, sometimes read as a comedy, sometimes as a tragicomedy, and sometimes as a romance, is probably the hardest sell as horror, so I’m going to start there.
In The Tempest, Prospero and his young daughter Miranda have long been stranded on an island, away from their home in Milan. While there, Prospero has acquired magical powers, and he now has utter dominion over the island. So that’s pretty punk rock. But there’s a way more punk rock backstory. In a prior generation, a witch named Sycorax was banished from Algiers, in North Africa, to live on this island. She was pregnant at the time, and gave birth to a monstrous baby boy, named Caliban. Sycorax took control of the island, and imprisoned its airy spirits, including Ariel, whom she locked into a tree.
So, we’ve got a banished, North African witch. We’ve got a bastard monstrous birth. We’ve got a secluded location. Then we’ve got two ostensibly innocent European arrivals. Perfect set up for an admittedly quite racist horror narrative, in which the non-white, monstrous, demon-worshipping Sycorax and Caliban probably bewitch, imprison, and cannibalize Prospero and Miranda. (It’s no accident that Caliban’s name is a barely concealed revision of cannibal.) Yet, that’s not what happens at all. Instead, Sycorax dies, leaving plenty of space for Prospero to colonize the island. Rather than cannibalizing Miranda or Prospero, Caliban is taught English (or, well, presumably really Milanese dialect) by them; rather than raping Miranda, Caliban becomes her father’s slave. Prospero frees Ariel from the tree, and makes him into a more nearly willing servant. From there on out, Caliban’s status as a monster is programmatically reconfirmed by the play, and his monstrosity is associated with his physical appearance, with his roughness, with his lack of some kind of innate proclivity toward (European patterns of) socialization.
As many Shakespeare scholars have written about at length, this play is one of Shakespeare’s primary grapplings with English colonialism and global capitalism in its early days.[1] He’s thinking about racial otherness, and how it seems to enable or even justify enslavement. Prospero—his name no less deliberate in its association with “prosperity” or what we now call the profit motive than is Caliban’s with cannibalism—is an enslaver, and yet he is also, quite clearly, the protagonist of the play. We’re not supposed to like Caliban very much, not only because he is an unrepentant attempted rapist, but also because his body is different, and he’s the child of an African witch.
The horror of The Tempest, if we even agree that there is horror there in the first place, is socially and economically conservative, finding monstrosity in enslaved racial alterity. And that monstrosity gets brought to heel by the ostensibly benign, white patriarchy of Prospero. Viewers in the seventeenth century were supposed to find Caliban and Sycorax horrifying, and were supposed to root for Prospero and Miranda to be relocated back to their beloved, civilized Milan, and away from this wild, magical island. Yuck.
But there is a second story at work here, and it’s the second story that I’m interested in. Because Caliban is not the only monster I think Shakespeare wants to make us scared of in an enduring way. The other one is Prospero.
My primary evidence for this lies in one line from the play. Early on, in act I, scene 2, Caliban is reproaching Prospero and Miranda for having tried to civilize him. He says, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!” (366-8) There’s a lot going on here. First, Caliban clearly understands that Prospero and Miranda expect his gratitude for having taught him their language; he doesn’t feel gratitude, however, because all it’s really occasioned him to learn is “how to curse.” That is, for him, being trained into European language brings with only bad things, evil things to him, things he wants to curse. This is a high degree of self-awareness for a putative monster, already.
Plus, the fact that this passage is even in here bespeaks Shakespeare’s having spent at least some time seriously engaged in trying to imagine his way into this monster’s experience—not as a monster, but as a prisoner of a culture not his own. Then, when Caliban calls the “red plague” down on his captors, an additional layer of meaning rolls into, further to criticize the ostensible positivity surrounding Prospero, profit, and colonization. Caliban is inviting us to think about the relationship between colonization and plague. Which, of course, usually goes in the direction of wiping out indigenous peoples, with no immunity to the diseases that colonizers bring in. The wages of colonization, prosperity, profit, and cultural superimposition for native peoples have essentially always been some form or other of “red plague.” And we, as contemporary readers or 17th century viewers, are made uncomfortable with that, we’re made to recognize that colonization killed untold numbers of native peoples.
The red plague was far from an abstract curse; it was a real danger. By wishing it on Prospero and Miranda, he both makes himself seem horrible, and also suggests the degree of his own dehumanization and harm at their hands, as well as the dehumanization and harm that had, by then, befallen millions and millions native peoples. The mid-sixteenth century cocoliztli (Nahuatl for plague) had wiped out between 5 and 15 million Aztecs. In combination with smallpox (a “red” plague for sure), flu, and measles, it is believed that European plagues killed 90% of indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Not just in the Americas: in the century before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the Canary Islands—off the coast of Morocco—had been colonized by European merchants and turned into sugar plantations. Soon thereafter, plagues absolutely decimated the population there, both of Europeans and Africans. Given that The Tempest tells us Sycorax was from Algiers, and decamped to a nearby island while pregnant, it seems reasonable to think that the Canary Islands were on Shakespeare’s mind as a possbile location for his monster-forward drama. When Caliban curses at Miranda and Prospero, it’s not just him being a cranky monster. It’s him venting the rage, disempowerment, and fear of colonized people throughout the colonial world.
Who’s the real monster, Prospero? Maybe it’s me and my monstery body and witchy mother. But maybe instead it’s you and your diseases and your profiteering and your patriarchy.
There is other evidence to support a reading of The Tempest that casts Prospero as at least as much of a devil as Caliban. Later in the play, having discovered that Caliban was (understandably, let’s be honest here) plotting against him, Prospero plans his own revenge. He says, pointedly:
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. I will plague them all,
Even to roaring.
Prospero, totally unable to contend with his own monstrosity, calls Caliban a born devil, says no amount of teaching could undevil him. Prospero pities himself, in the “pains” he’s taken so “humanely” to try to civilize Caliban, and decides that he will “plague” Caliban and his compatriots, “even unto roaring.” What does that mean? His plan is to torture them all. And lo: he follows through.
Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o' mountain.
The “roaring” of pain Caliban will experience will be one where his joints are ground up, his sinews shortened so he cannot walk, and he’ll be covered over with sores.
Prospero is a sadist.
Sure, on the one hand, we’re supposed to expect Prospero to take revenge for the “treacherous” plot of Caliban to overthrow him. But we already know by this point that Prospero and Miranda are going to go back to Milan in high style, in the very near future. Prospero’s decision to “plague” Caliban with ongoing agony feels mean, petty, cruel, and dehumanizing. Indeed, he compares him to a leopard at the end—a beast of the wild—not a person.
Later still, Prospero disavows his magic and “drowns his book,” thus freeing the island from his dominion. This is often read as Shakespeare disavowing his own art as a playwright, since The Tempest was his last play. And that’s fine, I buy that. But it seems to me, also, that the play is fantasizing about a reality in which the cruel, sadistic, colonial European king eventually frees all of the native spirits of the island (Caliban will still suffer, though), like the various elves of the island, and of course Ariel himself. If Prospero’s reign were really all that benign, and “civilizing,” rather than, oh, I don’t know, super authoritarian, domineering, patriarchal, and abusive, why wouldn’t the inhabitants of the island happily allow themselves to remain under his sway, like as a principality of Milan? The end of the play doesn’t make sense if we take seriously the benign patriarch narrative. The end of the play only makes sense if Caliban has a real point when he curses Prospero and Miranda back at the beginning.
The Tempest is a play with two monsters: Caliban, the monster who behaves like we expect a 17th century monster to behave. And Prospero, the monster we’ve only come to expect in the 21st century.
Indeed, you might think I’m superimposing a 21st century ethical sensibility on a 17th century text? I might be, I might be. But if I am, then Edgar Allen Poe was doing something real similar in the first half of the 19th century. Because The Tempest, and particularly Prospero’s own monstrosity, were repeatedly fascinating to Poe, and inspired some of his best known and best loved horror stories. Poe, that is, clearly grasped that Prospero—not Caliban—is the soul of horror, and that it's because of his predatory, capitalist, imperialist tendencies that bad things happen. And Poe plays that all out even more darkly than Shakespeare had, although Poe distributes his engagement with The Tempest across multiple works. Like it took him a while to work it all out in his own mind.
In “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), Poe imagines a horrible disease surging across Europe. The disease kills people by having them bleed out through their pores; it is lethal within a half hour of contracting it. To avoid this horrific scourge, everyone who has the means goes into hiding. There is one wealthy aristocrat who holes up, along with a throng of other wealthy people, in his palace, to ride things out. The aristocrat decides to throw a great big masquerade ball one day, and it’s a rollicking good time. Until a horrible, evil, terrifying figure strolls in, dressed as the plague itself: the Red Death. The aristocrat, incensed at this guest’s seeming insensitivity, orders him out. But the Red Death masquer won’t go. Increasingly enraged, the aristocrat shouts at Red Death. No avail. By the time Red Death has reached the end of the party chambers, plague envelopes the palace, killing everyone. Including the main aristocrat. Whose name was Prospero.
The red plague rid you for learning me your language indeed. That shit was definitely horror, and Poe knew it, and he rewrote it as a revenge horror. Poe stood with Caliban, intent on punishing the overweening, overbold, and overconfident Prospero for his excesses, his profligacy, and his brazen belief that he could, somehow, control nature.
He revisited his revenge narrative for Caliban seven years later, when he wrote “Hop-Frog.” This story is about a dwarf—a dwarf that a colonizer-king had stolen from a land far away (a land far enough away, we later learn, that it had orangutans) and brought back to Europe. The dwarf walks asymmetrically, and has a body that the king and his courtiers mock by calling him, of course, Hop-Frog. The king is cruel, domineering and abusive of Hop-Frog, treating him in a manner strongly reminiscent of how Prospero treats the colonized subject Caliban in The Tempest. Hop-Frog tolerates the dehumanization with relative equanimity until the king attacks Trippetta, a female dwarf whom the king also owns, and whom Hop-Frog loves. This, this abuse of his beloved friend, Hop-Frog will not stand; his innate sense of righteousness will not brook it. So he creates a vast revenge scheme, wherein he has the king and his ministers dress up as orangutans, ostensibly to scare all the guests at the palace. When Hop-Frog says that the costumes will in particular terrify the women, the king cries out, “Capital!” Terrorizing women, “Hop-Frog” recognizes for the second time, is more typically the pastime of patriarchal rulers, than of those they have enslaved. Once the king and his ministers are clad in flax, to make them look like blond apes, Hop-Frog hoists them aloft using a system of ropes and lights them on fire. Flax being flammable, they burn to death, and quickly. Poe describes the human wreckage in pointed terms: “the eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass.” Chains, blackness, indistinguishable; this story reads as an enslavement revenge narrative, engaging with and revising The Tempest. There, the enslaved, deformed, non-white “monster” Caliban remains enchained in agony on his own island. Here, the formerly enslaved, now free, deformed, non-white “monster” Hop-Frog chains up his jailers and brings them to the final form of human objectification, by turning them into charred bodies.
So, maybe I’m wrong to see a counter-capitalistic, anti-colonial horror narrative in The Tempest. But if I’m wrong, I’m in good company.
[1] See for instance Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004); Roberto Fernando Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays (1999).