"Are We Being Historical Yet?"  

        Colonialist Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tempest



                    By Ben Ross Schneider, Jr.



     Not long ago, Carolyn Porter, in an article entitled "Are We

Being Historical Yet?", assessed the achievements of the "new histori-

cists".  Agreeing with Louis Montrose that new historicism was "on its

way to becoming the newest academic orthodoxy," especially in Renais-

sance studies, she concluded, that although new historicism had pro-

vided a much-needed corrective to traditionally ahistorical literary

study, the answer to the question raised in her title was "No."~  In

what follows I shall extend her critique to recent work on The Tem-

pest, a play that has attracted widespread attention among new

historicists as a paradigm of early modern colonialism.~  My findings

corroborate Professor Porter's conclusion:  we still have a long way

to go before we can feel even somewhat confident that we are histori-

cizing, if we ever can.



     According to Professor Porter, it is their fixation on Foucault's

conceptualization of power that stands between the new historicists

and effective historicization.~ 



     Foucault's perspective on the discursive field apparently fosters

     [a tendency in new historicist practice] to exclude, which is a

     necessary precondition for addressing a particular cultural

     discourse, but then to repress the fact of that exclusion, so

     that a particular discourse, or set of discourses, comes to stand

     for the horizonless field of Discourse.~Thus she watches Stephen Greenblatt and Steven Mullaney marginalize

the very others (Algonkians, Welsh) whose othering they so clearly

deplore, erasing their history, in the process of showing how power on

the Foucauldian model, "absolutized as a transhistorical force, . . .

relentlessly produces and recontains subversion."~  As a result, we

are



     limited to one set of discourses - those which form the site of a

     dominant ideology - and then reifying that limit as if it were

     coterminous with the limits of discourse in general.  It is this

     issue of framing the discursive field which new historicists most

     urgently need to address.~     It is "this issue of framing" that I shall address again in a

study of eight recent analyses of The Tempest.  By choosing

colonialism as a frame,and then "reifying" that frame as if it were

coterminus with the limits of discourse in general, I find that they

do indeed marginalize not only a large field of pertinent contemporary

discourse, but also The Tempest itself.  For as we are constantly

reminded, we must explore, "both the social presence to the world of

the literary text and the social presence of the world in the

literary text."~  To carry out this project, we have to answer the

question, "What difference did The Tempest make to what fields of

discourse?"  By too assiduously implementing the colonialist frame,

the eight critics I study here effectively forestall any attempt to

answer it in terms of a full range of possibilities.  This happens

despite the ostensible variety of approaches they take to the play.



     Thomas Cartelli (1987)~, basing his account on the work of

African and Caribbean writers, takes the stance that Shakespeare is to

blame for the way in which British imperialists have justified

colonial oppression on the model of Caliban's apparent ineducability. 

Curt Breight (1990)~ holds that the play is innocent of this charge,

and is instead an expose of James I's rule, in which Prospero's disci-

plinary measures caricature the crown's terror tactics in such broad

strokes that a Jacobean audience could not miss them.  Exactly

reversing this position, Lori Leininger (1980)~ perceives that far

from exposing the injustices of the society in which it is embedded,

the play is guilty of trying to cover them up, although it fails to

handle all sorts of exasperating anomalies.  Expressing the same

dissatisfaction in more theoretical terms, Paul Brown (1985)~maintains that The Tempest actually "intervened" in "an ambivalent

and even contradictory contemporary discourse" of colonialism:

 

     This intervention takes the form of a powerful and pleasurable

     narrative which seeks at once to harmonize disjunction, to

     transcend irreconcilable contradictions and to mystify the

     political conditions which demand colonialist discourse.  Yet the

     narrative ultimately fails to deliver that containment and

     instead may be seen to foreground precisely those problems which

     it works to efface or overcome.~ 



The team of Francis Barker and Peter Hulme~ is more interested in

the contradictions in our own society:  "The onus on new readings,

especially radical readings aware of their own theoretical and

political positioning, should be to proceed by means of a critique of

the dominant readings of a text."~  Stephen Orgel (1987)~, in the

exhaustive Introduction to his splendid Oxford edition, avoids

theoretical terminology, but his treatment is patently a

deconstruction of the traditional idealist reading.  Eric Cheyfetz,~who approaches colonialism and The Tempest via the metaphor of

translation finds interesting parallels between Prospero as dictator

of an official language and the way in which official languages are

used in the conquest of native peoples.  Finally, Stephen Greenblatt

(1988) in his "Martial Law in the Land of Cokaigne"~ frames his

critique with his own theory of "salutary anxiety," derived from an

anecdote of Bishop Latimer, and showing that governors, Prospero being

a case in point, may raise the threat of imminent calamity in order to

win credit for averting it. 



     For some reason the great variety of theoretical underpinning in

this set of essays does not produce a corresponding variety of

interpretation.  All critiques proceed in much the same fashion to

dismantle a presumed "authorized version" of the play that idealizes

and romanticizes Prospero as a noble regenerator of fallen

humanity.~  Or to put it in the words of Barker and Hulme, "athwart

its alleged unity, the text is in fact marked and fissured by the

interplay of the discourses that constitute it."~  When we have

deconstructed the play, we find ourselves standing in the presence of

naked power.  It becomes evident, as one surveys these new historicist

interpretations, that the "fissures" most commonly detected tend to be

the same ones:



The storm: 

     All but one of these critics pick, as the opening fissure in the

romantic surface of the play the "refreshingly subversive"~ storm

scene with which the play begins, in which helpless, hapless nobles

must put up with the insults of desperate mariners trying to save the

ship.~  Right away power reveals itself in subversion.  The nearly

unanimous choice of this scene is symptomatic of the whole critical

approach.  By framing the scene as colonial discourse, these critics

foreclose the possibility that the storm (in nature and society)

represents and dramatizes, as in Lear,the social disorder that

ensues when a state is irresponsibly governed.  What does the title

signify?  It seems more likely here that The Tempest is here

participating in contemporary discourse on government, about which I

shall have more to say later. 



Prospero's self-contradictory and contradicted prologue (1.2)~     In his long exposition to Miranda, telling her who they are, how

they got here, and what they are doing now, Prospero, according to

these critics is at cross-purposes with himself.  While his anger at

the usurpers of his Dukedom seems to know no bounds, he at the same

time blames his overthrow on his inattention to duty, his having

retired from public affairs to study "liberal arts."~  Here we see

power at work, disguising its own motives and intentions, even from

itself.  Here contemporary discourse on anger could be relevant, but

the critical approach closes the door in advance on any non-political

explanation.   



     Further, by giving credit to "Providence Divine" (1.1.159) for

casting them upon the island, Prospero implies that he legitimately

rules the island by some sort of manifest destiny.~  But the ensuing

scenes with Ariel and Caliban make it clear that Caliban's mother once

owned the island and that Caliban inherits it from her.~  In short,

the official version, for Miranda's ears only, is wrong:  Prospero

rules not by manifest destiny but by force.~  Again the frame

marginalizes other options, for it is not a forgone conclusion that

Prospero's primary reason for taking charge of the island is to make

it his colony.   



     However, it turns out that Caliban has attempted to rape Miranda. 

Is he an innocent victim of colonial exploitation or a criminal

deservedly punished for a crime?  The question could be left open in

the name of that plurality of on which Orgel insists in his

introduction.  But the frame does not allow plurality, and the critics

here surveyed do their best to weaken the violence force of the rape. 

First, say they, Prospero brings up the matter of the rape to divert

attention from Caliban's rightful claim to the island; and second,

colonialists always excuse their barbarity by attributing sub-human

characteristics to the native population.  Read properly, this

business about rape is just another colonialist tactic, a tired excuse

for repressive violence.~      This rationalization is not very convincing in terms of the text

that it effaces, but which is nevertheless still there.  To establish

the rape  excuse theory, one must overturn three witnesses, including

the would-be rapist himself still lusting after the victim.  And if

Caliban and Ariel are opposites, as we are certainly invited to

suppose, the colonialist frame marginalizes this way of looking at the

play as well.



Prospero's outbursts:



     Barker and Hulme speak of "Prospero's well-known

irascibility."~  Chiefly noted are 



- his impatient asides to Miranda during his introductory speech;~ 



- his annoyance at Ariel's plea for freedom;~- his "hysterical" response to Caliban's claim of prior ownership;~- his irate chastisement of Ferdinand, his own choice for his

daughter's hand, on a trumped-up charge;~- his obvious joy at the suffering of his enemies;~- and certainly his exasperated realization, in the midst of the

masque celebrating the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda, that if he

doesn't act fast he may soon be murdered by Caliban's junta.~ 



     Prospero's frequent and "puzzling" losses of temper do indeed mar

the beautiful surface of a romantic Tempest.  But are they really

leaks in the play's romantic envelope which reveal the ugly

colonialism within, or do they better fit another paradigm.  Again the

frame cuts off speculation. 



     However, close on the point where Prospero's rage peaks (4.1.145)

comes Prospero's renunciation of vengeance and his abjuration of

magic, acts which introduce real problems for the colonialist

hypothesis, for if we accept this reversal at face value, he

repudiates his whole career as a despot.  Again, instead of leaving us

in a state of negative capability, the frame requires an elaborate

exercise in looking the other way.  In so doing the colonialist

critics simply erase the climax of the play. 



     For Paul Brown, after the masque, after the trivialization by

ridicule of Caliban's rebellion, after the celebration of upper-class

solidarity in the wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero's project

is finished; he has "euphemized" his own power politics so well that

he has virtually nullified himself, and now has nothing to do but go

home and wait for death.  "The completion of the colonialist project

signals the banishment of its supreme exponent even as his triumph is

declared."~  Curt Breight, using the analogy of Prospero's scare

tactics to James I's technique of death sentences and reprieves, sees

Prospero's reformation in almost exactly the same way, as a further

exercise of power.~  Stephen Orgel argues that the ending in recon-

ciliation and renunciation is a total sham.  The evil brother has not

repented; Prospero may not ultimately keep his promise to break his

wand; he has not given up a daughter, but won a throne:  in returning

to Milan he will reach all the goals that his magic was meant to

achieve.  In the end we witness, not the renunciation of magic, but

magic's "triumph."~  Nor are Thomas Cartelli and Lori Leininger

fooled by the ending, a vain attempt to hide an outrage that refuses

to be hid.~  Francis Barker and Peter Hulme allow some ambivalence,

but "the lengths [they say] to which the play has to go to achieve a

legitimate ending may . . .  be read as the quelling of a fundamental

disquiet concerning its own functions within the projects of

colonialist discourse.~  It's just a coverup after all, and the play

is an egregious hypocrite.  Here the application of the colonialist

frame requires the "refutation of the ending."~ 





     It is not just the climax that has been effaced,~ but with it

an extensive field of early modern European discourse on which it

draws and to which it reports.  Prospero's change of heart occurs just

after Caliban and his fellow-mutineers have been punished for their

assault on his life.  Ariel is reporting the status of his chastening

of the upper-class conspirators.



                     Your charm so strongly works 'em 

          That if you now beheld them, your affections

          Would become tender.

          <Pros.>         Dost thou think so, spirit?

          <Ari.> Mine would, sir, were I human.

          <Pros.>               And mine shall.

          Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling,

          Of their afflictions, and shall not myself 

          One of their kind, that relish all as sharply

          Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?

          Though with their high wrongs I am strook to th'quick,

          Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury

          Do I take part. The rarer action is

          In virtue than in vengeance. (5.1.17-28)              

      

      Some years ago Eleanor Prosser~ traced this passage to John

Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay On Cruelty.  Florio's

language is indeed close (I have emphasized the words that both he and

Shakespeare use):



     He that through a naturall facilitie and genuine mildnesse should

     neglect or contemne injuries received, should no doubt performs a

     rare action, and worthy commendation:  but he who being toucht

     and stung to the quicke with any wrong or offence received,

     should arme himselfe with reason against this furiously blind

     desire of revenge, and in the end after a great conflict yeeld

     himselfe master over it, should doubtlesse doe much more.  The

     first should doe well, the other vertuously:  the one action

     might be termed Goodnesse, the other Vertue.  For it seemeth

     that the very name of Vertue presupposeth difficultie, and

     inferreth resistance, and cannot well exercise itselfe without an

     enemy.~Long before Florio had Englished these words (1603), Thomas Elyot had

expressed very much the same sentiment in his handbook for gentlemen,

named The Governour (1531), under the heading "Of Pacience in

sustayninge wronges and rebukes:"



     Unto hym that is valyaunt of courage, it is a great payne and

     difficultie to sustayne Iniurie, and nat to be forthwith

     reuenged.  And yet often tymes is accounted more valyauntnesse in

     the sufferaunce than in hasty reuengynge.~In awarding points for degree of difficulty, Elyot manages to

anticipate Montaigne.  King James I, in his letter of advice to his

son (1603)--citing Cicero's advice to his son (De Officiis),

Seneca's essay on clemency, the Aeneid, and Aristotle's Ethics-- 

counsels the apparent future king to



     Embrace trew magnanimitie, not in beeing vindictiue, which the

     corrupted Judgements of the world thinke to be trew Magnanimitie,

     but by the contrarie, in thinking your offendour not worthie of

     your wrath, empyring ouer your owne passion, and triumphing in

     the commaunding your selfe to forgiue.~In his Characters of the Virtues and Vices (1608) Joseph Hall, later

Bishop, counsels likewise:



     The Patient Man finds that victory consists in yielding.  He is

     above nature, while he seems below himself.  The vilest creature

     knows how to turn again, but to command himself not to resist,

     being urged, is more than heroical.~These echoes suggest a common origin, and, of course, they have one: 

in the writings of the Roman moralists: 



     [Do not] listen to those who think that one should indulge in

     violent anger against one's political enemies and imagine that

     such is the attitude of a great-spirited, brave man.  For nothing

     is more commendable, nothing more becoming in a preeminently

     great man than courtesy and forbearance. (Cicero, De

     Officiis)~     Revenge is the confession of a hurt; no mind is truly great that

     bends before injury. . . .  There is no surer proof of greatness

     than to be in a state where nothing can possibly happen to

     disturb you. . . .  The lofty mind is always calm, at rest in a

     quiet haven; crushing down all that engenders anger, it is re-

     strained, commands respect, and is properly ordered. (Seneca,

     Moral Essays)~     Editors of The Tempest are puzzled by the fact that "virtue"

and "vengeance" don't seem to be correlatives.~  In Roman discourse

of morality they are.  



     

     The idea that Shakespeare is the universal man, tied to no time

or place, dies very hard, so hard that even the scholars most

dedicated to rehistoricizing him cannot seem to break themselves of

the habit of thinking of him as one of us, seeing his times through

our eyes.  Between us and Shakespeare lie the development of

capitalist society, and the French, Romantic, and industrial

revolutions.  But we read Shakespeare almost as if nothing had

happened.  Should we not, in order to understand him, his audience,

and, by virtue of the uncompromising law of believability, his charac-

ters, become familiar with the "ethic" that preceded The Protestant

Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism?  What notions of good and bad

governed early modern decision-making?  Social historians generally

agree that they were quite different from ours.  According to Karl

Marx,



     The Bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an

     end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.  It has

     pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to

     his 'natural superiors,' and left remaining no other nexus

     between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash

     payment.  It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious

     fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,

     in the icy water of egotistical calculation.  It has resolved

     personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the

     numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that

     single unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. (Communist

     Manifesto)~In his fact-filled study, The World We Have Lost (1965), Peter

Laslett quotes this passage as the "words [of] the most penetrating of

all observers of the world we have lost."~     The great Max Weber expands on Marx's "icy water of egotistical

calculation" in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

but has more to say about the ethic that comes before in his Essays

in Sociology:



     The ancient economic ethic of neighborliness [was fostered] by

     the guild, or the partners in seafaring, hunting and warring

     expeditions.   These communities have known two elemental

     principles:  first, the dualism of in-group and out-group

     morality; second, for in-group morality, simple reciprocity:  'As

     you do unto me I shall do unto you.'  From these principles the

     following [consequences] have resulted for economic life:  for

     in-group morality the principled obligation to give brotherly

     support in distress has existed.  The wealthy and the noble were

     obliged to loan, free of charge, goods for the use of the

     propertyless, to give credit free of interest, and to extend

     liberal hospitality and support.  Men were obliged to render

     services upon request of their neighbors, and likewise, on the

     lord's estate, without compensation other than mere sustenance. 

     All this followed the principle:  your want of today may be mine

     tomorrow.  This principle was not, of course, rationally weighed,

     but it played its part in sentiment.  Accordingly, higgling in

     exchange and loan situations, as well as permanent enslavement

     resulting, for instance, from debts, were confined to outgroup

     morality and applied only to outsiders.~     For Jurgen Habermas, Marx's "egotistical calculation", stripped

of its emotive ramifications, becomes the "purposive-rational"

behavior of modern western man, in which right action is whatever

makes sense given the goal, as opposed to "symbolic interaction," in

which right action is that which coincides with mutually-understood

social norms, in default of any ultimate goal.~  Today a "rational

choice model" governs the research of most political scientists,

though it is now strenuously challenged (see, for instance, Sven

Longstreth, Frank Steinmo and Kathleen Thelen, Structuring Politics: 

Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ch. 1).~  For

Shakespeare's society, if we are to take the advice of the social

historians, a "symbolic interaction model" would produce a better fit. 





     Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation holds that although

"purposive-rational" ethics go hand in hand with industrialization, no

truly purposive-rational society has ever existed, unless for a short

time in the "satanic mills" of Dickens's England, when some amount of

starvation was rationalized as necessary to labor's becoming a

commodity in fact.  Before and since, though they have tolerated a

high degree of rationality in human relations, "free market" societies

have simply refused to tolerate starvation.  In 1944 Polanyi wrote



     The outstanding discovery of recent historical and

     anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is

     submerged in his social relationships.  He does not act so as to

     safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material

     goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social

     claims, his social assets.  He values material goods only in so

     far as they serve this end.~Or, as Shakespeare put the case, out of the mouth of Iago into the ear

of Othello:  



          Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;

          'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

          But he that filches from me my good name

          Robs me of that which not enriches him,

          And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.155-161)



Or again, from the mouth of Cassio:  "O, I have lost my reputation! I

have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial"

(2.3.262-265). 



     The "norms" of which these social scientists speak are of course

a prominent feature of those "primitive" societies that captivate the

anthropologists:  for example, Marcel Mauss in his classic The Gift:

Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, introduced by

E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1954);~ and Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age

Economics, his amazing account of the idyllic life of actual hunters

and gatherers.~  In The Gift:  Imagination and the Erotic Life of

Property, Lewis Hyde has explored the function of these same stone

age economics in the production of art.~  The Romans apparently

remembered or observed or retained vestiges of this pre-agricultural

age, and admired it, as Seneca testifies in quoting Virgil's

Georgics:



          No ploughman tilled the soil, nor was it right

          To portion off or bound one's property.

          Men shared their gains, and earth more freely gave

          Her riches to her sons who sought them not.



     What race of men [comments Seneca] was ever more blest than that

     race?  They enjoyed all nature in partnership.  Nature sufficed

     for them . . . and this her gift consisted of the assured

     possession by each man of the common resources.~      When we study Kwakiutl society, we try to find out what the

Kwakiutls think they are doing before we decide what we think they

are doing.  If it were known that every Kwakiutl had access to a book

of rules for righteous living, we would certainly consult this book

before presuming to explain Kwakiutl behavior.   Closer to home,

before we declare the Jacobean position on colonialism, shouldn't we

know what ethical tools the Jacobeans brought to the task of judging

it?  For Shakespeare's society hundreds of moral rule books are

available, but they are almost never consulted.  The result, to use

Habermas's terms, is that we're trying to impose a "purposive-

rational" model on a society controlled by "symbolic interaction",

about as sensible a procedure as using the Boy Scout's Law to explain

the Kwakiutls.  



     Considering our manifest need for cultural material pertaining to

Shakespeare's work, it is difficult to imagine how we can have

overlooked the ocean of early modern ethical discourse opened to us in

Ruth Kelso's monumental bibliography of Renaissance books pertaining

to the Doctrine of the English Gentleman (1929) and The Doctrine

for the Lady (1956).~  These works comprise almost 1500 titles,

about one-third in English.  And Professor Kelso does not include

classical moralists in their own or modern languages, which would more

than double that number.  In her second book she summarizes her

findings as follows:  "the bulk of all that these treatises contain is

made up of commonplaces, culled mostly from the ancients, whose names

besprinkle the pages of all writers. . . .  There is plenty of

evidence that these same commonplaces were not of mere academic

interest, for the letters, speeches, and fiction of the time are full

of the same ideas and rules for conduct."~  The famous "humanists"

who populated Renaissance universities made their livings by teaching

grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy.~  Since

both rhetoric and history were given strong moral emphasis, it may be

said that the universities were to a great extent schools of virtue. 

At Oxford and Cambridge, undergraduates may still "read" moral

philosophy for the B.A. degree.  



     Perhaps we have slighted Renaissance morality because we're

following a false scent.  Although a great many classical writers were

re-discovered and re-born during the Renaissance, there was no re-

naissance of moral philosophers, because they never died, and couldn't

be reborn.  They simply weren't what happened, and therefore they do

not figure in our history of the Renaissance.~  So, for example,

Kerrigan and Braden's Idea of the Renaissance (1989) abandons the

period's enormous investment in morality in order to pursue a vision

of personal, political, and philosophical development leading to

democratic (bourgeois) individualism and Kantian idealism.~ 

Similarly, in a chapter of his book on the Senecan tradition actually

entitled "Stoicism in the Renaissance," Braden omits any mention of

Stoicism's domination of school and college education and the self-

improvement market.~  In such ways the vast ocean of moral discourse

on which Shakespeare's plays float has been drained out of the past by

the whig view of history and the idea of progress.



     We may also be victims of a mis-definition of Stoicism leading to

the mistaken notion that Shakespeare rejected the whole system.  If

Stoicism is defined simply as lack of feeling, as we tend to do,~then Shakespeare is obviously not a Stoic.  But Stoics have lots to

say about responsibility, reciprocity, courage, integrity, reputation,

fortune, love, duty, death, education, government, and many other

categories of life.  They cannot be reduced to their position on

passion.  And because Stoic discourse only makes explicit for

Shakespeare's generation a pre-capitalist ethical scheme whose origins

are the tribal experience, antiquity, Christianity, chivalry, the

Roman occupation itself, and school and university education, they

only reinforce habits that already make up the fabric of society. 

Although his status as an intellectual requires him to show

familiarity with their discourses, the Stoics do not really

"influence" Shakespeare.  They are already an integral part of his

reality and of the test of probability that his characters must pass.



     Fortunately for us Professor Kelso's list of those ancients most

commonly cited in conduct books is very short, consisting solely of

Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca.~  Since only scholars commonly

read Greek, that leaves Cicero and Seneca in command of the greater

part of the reading public.  Apparently the principal conduits of

classical moral thought in Shakespeare's time were Cicero's De

Officiis and Seneca's Essays and Epistles, in particular his De

Beneficiis, a comprehensive philosophical investigation of every

possible ramification of gift exchange (translated into English in

1578). 



     De Officiis was the first classical text ever printed.

(1465)~  The British Museum Catalogue lists 11 printed editions of

it before 1600--8 interlinear trots, 1 English without Latin, and 2 in

Latin.  18 more editions were published before 1700.  For comparison,

the BMC lists no edition of any dialogue of Plato in any language

printed in England before 1600, and only one edition of Aristotle's

Ethics, a translation into English of Brunetto Latini's compendium

of its "preceptes of good behauour and perfighte honestie."  Sir

Thomas Elyot, in his famous Governour (1531), a standard work on the

training of gentlemen, lists three essential texts:  Plato's works,

Aristotle's Ethics, and De Officiis.  "Those three bokes," Elyot

says, "be almost sufficient to make a perfecte and excellent gover-

nour".~  In The Complete Gentleman (1622), Henry Peacham implies

that De Officiis is a standard beginning Latin text, along with

Aesop's Fables for beginning Greek.~  In the preface to his

translation of 1681 Sir Roger L'Estrange calls it "the commonest

school book that we have," and goes on to observe, "as it is the best

of books, so it is applied to the best of purposes, that is to say, to

training up of youth in the study and exercise of virtue."   King

James I's own de officiis, Basilikon Doron, in which he tells his

son Prince Henry his duties as man and ruler, refers him to Cicero 55

times, 16 of them to De Officiis.  



     "In the Renaissance no Latin author was more highly esteemed than

Seneca," said T. S. Eliot.~  Montaigne confesses that his oeuvre is

totally dependent on Seneca and Plutarch.~  Erasmus, Justus Lipsius,

and J. F. Gronovius published "famous editions" of Seneca's Essays

in the 16th and 17th centuries.~  The BMC shows that in 1547 the

first Senecan epistle was translated into English by R. Whyttynton,

Poet Laureate.  Arthur Golding translated his De Beneficiis in 1578,

quite soon enough for Shakespeare to have read it before writing The

Merchant, and in 1614 Thomas Lodge translated the complete moral

works.  Something called Seneca's Morals, probably a compendium of

excerpts, was published in English in 1607.  Then, in 1678, Sir Roger

L'Estrange published Seneca's Morals by Way of Abstract.  By 1793 it

had gone into 17 editions.  I found a copy (Cleveland: 1856) in my

mother-in-law's Illinois farmhouse.  



     If Ann Jennalie Cook is right, the field of discourse I have been

describing would have been a major means of communication between

Shakespeare and his audience, for her copious evidence shows that the

best educated and most well-read segment of society, and therefore the

most steeped in classical morality, composed the main body of his

audience.~  Some discourses dominate the way other discourses are

understood, as for instance, nowadays, feminist discourse.  Was not

Stoicism, in the comprehensive sense I argue for here, such a

discourse during the Renaissance?  



                    Discourse of Anger  



     If what I am proposing is true, it is no surprise that

Montaigne's essay on Cruelty, where Professor Prosser found the

passage on virtue and vengeance, is a remake of Seneca's treatise on

Anger.~  For Seneca, this passion is one of the two most destructive

that plague mankind.  (The other is Lust.) 



     Anger [he says] is temporary madness.  For it is equally devoid

     of self-control, forgetful of decency, unmindful of ties, persis-

     tent and diligent in whatever it begins, closed to reason and

     counsel, excited by trifling causes, unfit to discern the right

     and true.~If we identify Prospero as an exemplar of the Senecan angry man, his

behavior is easier to explain.  He joins a sizable list of Shakespea-

re's angry madmen, whose fury drives them down an irreversible course

to certain disaster, notably Lear, Hotspur, Coriolanus, Macbeth,

Othello, Timon.  Anger interrupts the tale of Prospero's deposition--

that he had himself to blame only adds fuel to the flame.  Anger

bridles at Ariel's recalcitrance.  Anger punishes Caliban's

insubordination with extreme cruelty.~  Anger makes him unable to

contain his hatred of Ferdinand, his chosen heir, because he is the

son of his mortal enemy.  And anger produces his evident glee at the

success of his punishments of the conspirators.  



     It is only an illusion of romantic critics that Prospero is in

control of his domain.  (In their adaptation of The Tempest for

Restoration audiences, Dryden and Davenant emphasize his bungling

incompetence.~  "A man cannot be called powerful--no, not even free

if he is the captive of his anger," says Seneca.~  Anger is in

charge, and Prospero dances to its tune.  No wonder he explodes into

the most remarkable rage in his daughter's memory when he remembers,

during the masque, that he is about to be murdered by Caliban and his

drunken crew.  We have been watching a slow burn.  When will he have

peace?  Seneca speaks to his predicament:



     Rage will sweep you hither and yon, this way and that, and your

     madness will be prolonged by new provocations that constantly

     arise.  Tell me, unhappy man, will you ever find time to love? 

     What precious time you are wasting upon an evil thing!  How much

     better would it be at this present moment to be gaining friends,

     reconciling enemies, serving the state, devoting effort to

     private affairs, than to be casting about to see what evil you

     can do to some man, what wound you may deal to his position, his

     estate, or his person. . . ~     When, prompted by his "nobler reason (5.1.26), he admits his

common humanity --admits "feeling [the same] passion as they"

(5.1.24)--the play is again speaking the language of Stoicism, for

following reason to such a conclusion is Seneca's recommended therapy

for anger.

 

     No man of sense will hate the erring; otherwise he will hate

     himself.  Let him reflect how many times he offends against

     morality, how many of his acts stand in need of pardon; then he

     will be angry with himself also.~ 

Whereas Seneca gloomily insists that we are all as bad as the worst,

Elyot trusts that we are all as good as the best:



     Of no better claye (as I mought frankely saye) is a gentilman

     made than a carter, and of libertie of wille as moche is gyuen of

     god to the poore herdeman, as to the great and mighty

     emperour.~But perhaps equating up is no different from equating down.  



     Observing that we do not get revenge on dumb animals who injure

us, Seneca wonders why we are so hard on our own species:



     For what difference does it make that [a man's] other qualities

     are unlike those of dumb animals if he resembles them in the one

     quality that excuses dumb animals for every misdeed - a mind that

     is all darkness?~That "darkness~ that fills the mind" torments Seneca--



     not so much the necessity of going astray, as the love of

     straying.  That you may not be angry with individuals, you must

     forgive mankind at large, you must grant indulgence to the human

     race.~From here it is an easy step to Prospero's final position with respect

to the "beast Caliban" (4.1.141), pp.  "This thing of darkness I ac-

knowledge mine"  (5.1.275)~, not so puzzling a remark in its moral

context as it is in the strictly-framed view of colonialist

critics.~                     Discourse of Freedom 



     At the climax of the play, then, Prospero wins freedom from the

darkness that fills his mind.  "Freedom" is another of The Tempest's

power words, so important that Shakespeare uses his dramatic medium's

points of strongest emphasis to call it to our attention.  Three acts

close on freedom, and the play ends with the word "free."   At the end

of act 1, Ariel asks for his freedom.  At the end of act 2, Caliban

runs offstage shouting "Freedom, high-day!"  Act 4 ends with Prospero

promising Ariel his freedom after one more task.  



     If freedom is mastery, act 3 also ends on freedom, when

Prospero's has his enemies where he wants them.  This is the same kind

of freedom that Caliban crowed about at the end of act 2.   But the

only true freedom in all these act endings is the one that the

audience may or may not give the actor of Prospero by applauding his

last line:  "As you from crimes would pardoned be/Let your indulgence

set me free."   



     Much of The Tempest is devoted the pursuit of freedom as power. 

At the end of act 2, this kind of freedom comes into vivid contrast

with an entirely different kind.  As act 2 closes, Caliban goes

offstage singing that he will no more "fetch in firing / At requiring

. . . .  Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom! freedom, high-day,

freedom!" (2.2.184-187}.   The very next scene opens, "Enter

Ferdinand bearing a log," introducing an entirely different attitude

toward fetching firing at requiring.  This juxtaposition highlights a

dialog between two senses of freedom that drives the play as a whole. 

Lets call them freedom of the soul and freedom of the body.



     Before the play starts, before Antonio usurped his dukedom,

Prospero sought freedom of the body from the cares of office and

retired to his chamber to study the "liberal arts" (1.2.73).  Again,

the context is Stoic.  Seneca opposed the study of "liberal arts,"

because their aim was to make money.  The one exception was philoso-

phy, which Prospero obviously hadn't studied.~  Cicero takes a

very dim view of reluctant administrators like Prospero, declaring

flatly:  "to be drawn by study away from active life is contrary to

moral duty."~  Following this emphasis on doing one's job, James I

warns his son and heir not to seek



     for knowledge nakedly, but that your principall ende be, to make

     you able thereby to vse your office; . . . not like these vaine

     Astrologians, that studie night and day on the course of the

     starres, onely that they may, for satisfying their curiositie,

     know their course."~  



Prospero's magic, be it black or white, is analogous to Gyges' ring,

but as Plato wrote his whole Republic to prove, Gyges' ring is a

snare and a delusion:  absolute power over one's fellow men is not the

route to freedom.  Cicero tells the whole story of Gyges in De

Officiis.~   



     Seneca thought that a man who avoided public service had "died

even before he was dead."~  The ancients and their Renaissance

popularizers agree that rulers have an especially strong obligation to

serve the public.  "The citizen who is patriotic, brave, and worthy of

a leading place in the state . . . will dedicate himself unreservedly

to his country, without aiming at influence or power for himself,"

says Cicero.~  In fact, Seneca agrees, "ruling [is] a service, not

an exercise of royalty."~  And moreover, "Instead of sacrificing the

state to themselves, [rulers] have sacrificed themselves to the

state."~  Elyot echoes these sentiments, saying "that auctorite,

beinge well and diligently used, is but a token of superioritie, but

in very dede it is a burden and losse of libertie."~  On this note

James I begins his advice to his son, reminding him "that being borne

to be a king, ye are rather borne to onus, th[a]n honos."~     As defined in Stoic discourse, freedom is a state of mind, not of

body.  As Ferdinand very significantly says, provided that we are

tuned in to this dialog, he is as happy to be a slave for Miranda's

sake "as bondage e'er of freedom" (3.1.89)  If it is the way to win

her, he accepts bondage to labor as eagerly as Prospero, Ariel, and

Caliban seek freedom from it.  Love, as defined so beautifully in this

scene, is mutual voluntary servitude, and voluntary servitude is the

only freedom The Tempest offers.  When Alonso and Prospero give each

other their children in the denouement, this ancient ritual of gift-

exchange signifies peace between them.  There are two ways of

establishing cooperation in society: enslavement (either to a master

or to the law, as in modern democratic societies); and reciprocal

exchange of benefits (gifts or services). 



     Starting from the Aristotelian premise that man is a social

animal, Cicero finds that the social bond is established by means of a

system of "mutual interchange of kind services; . . . [for] those

between whom they are interchanged are united by the ties of an

enduring intimacy."~  Hence



     we ought to follow Nature as our guide, to contribute to the

     general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and

     receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents

     to cement human society more closely together, man to man.~Seneca allegorizes the social cement in the process of answering some

questions about the Three Graces (Gratiae, as in "gratitude,"

"congratulate," "gratuity," "gracias," etc).  First, why are there

three of them? 



     Some would have it appear that there is one for bestowing a

     benefit, another for receiving it, and a third for returning it .

     . . .  Why do the sisters hand in hand dance in a ring which

     returns upon itself?  For the reason that a benefit passing in

     its course from hand to hand returns nevertheless to the giver;

     the beauty of the whole is destroyed if the course is anywhere

     broken, and it has most beauty if it is continuous and maintains

     an uninterrupted succession.  In the dance, nevertheless, an

     older sister has especial honor, as do those who earn benefits. 

     Their faces are cheerful, as are ordinarily the faces of those

     who bestow or receive benefits.  They are young because the

     memory of benefits ought not to grow old.  They are maidens

     because benefits are pure and undefiled and holy in the eyes of

     all; and it is fitting that there should be nothing to bind or

     restrict them, and so the maidens wear flowing robes, and these,

     too, are transparent because benefits desire to be seen.~For Elyot the virtue that cements us all together 



     is called humanitie whiche is a generall name to those vertues in

     whome seme to be a mutuall concorde and loue in the nature of

     man.  And all thoughe there be many of the said vertues, yet be

     there thre principall by whome humanitie is chiefly compact;

     beneuolence, benificence ["goode tournes"], and liberalitie. 



By virtue of this instinct human beings, while still inferior to God,

are superior to beasts.~     Essentially what happens in The Tempest is that Prospero tries

to gain freedom by maximizing his power--the Gyges ring method--but

eventually, perhaps prompted by Ferdinand and Miranda, he melts into a

generous paradigm.  He learns that a cruel master cannot ever have the

joy of a willing servant.  That discovery, I believe, induces

Prospero's change of heart, and that is what his epilogue is about: 

Prospero (duke/actor), having used magic/stagecraft to coerce his

subjects (audience/islanders/citizens of Milan) into obedience, now

breaks his magic wand/theatrical spell and frees his erstwhile slaves

(audience/islanders/citizens).  Essentially, he commits unilateral

disarmament.  Of such grand gestures, Seneca says, "To help, to be of

service . . . [to give] benefits, imitates the gods; he who seeks a

return [imitates] money-lenders."~  The anti-social Duke has come a

long way.



     A typical actor/audience relationship differs radically from the

duke/citizen relationship that has prevailed up to this point, for it

is a form of the reciprocal benefit system we have been discussing, in

which the actor gives entertainment and the audience returns applause. 

It is love, it is mutual satisfaction:  gratitude warms both sides of

the footlights.  Perhaps, if Prospero now alters radically his tactics

of rule and becomes a magnanimous and just ruler concerned only with

the welfare of the city entrusted to him, the people will be grateful,

and will serve him with all their hearts.  The moralists believe so. 

Tyranny never works, says Elyot, brandishing potent authorities



     For the beneuolente mynde of a gouernour nat onely byndeth the

     hartes of the people unto hym with the chayne of loue, more

     stronger than any materiall bondes, but also gardeth more

     saulfely his persone than any toure or garison.  The eloquent

     Tulli, saithe in his officis, A liberall harte is cause of

     beneuolence, although perchance that powar some tyme lackethe. 

     Contrary wise he saith, They that desire to be feared, nedes must

     they drede them, of whom they be feared.  Also Plini the yonger

     saith, He that is nat enuironed with charite, in vaine is he

     garded with terrour; sens armure with armure is stered.  Whiche

     is ratified by the mooste graue philosopher Seneke, in his boke

     of mercye that he wrate to Nero, where he saith, He is moche

     deceiued that thinketh a man to be suer, where nothynge from hym

     can be saulfe.  For [only] with mutuall assurance suertie is

     optained.~ 

But the final effect of a good deed cannot be assumed in advance, for

if it is calculated, then it isn't a good deed:  it's a deal.  It's

entirely up to the citizens of Milan, as it is to an audience at the

end of a play, whether to catcall/kill the actor/duke or applaud/serve

him and "with [their] indulgence [to] set [him] free"--by gratefully

applauding his willing service. 

     The colonialist approach perceives that Prospero's final gambit

fails.  After all Antonio and Sebastian do not burst into tears and

fall on their knees.~  But read in terms of the relevant field of

discourse, their inaction signifies no failure.  In Stoic terms,

Prospero is concerned with getting control over himself, not over his

enemies.  Stoicism also puts a different spin on the situation:  what

we have here is clemency, not forgiveness, and the point is to deprive

the injuror of any enjoyment from watching the injured one's anger and

chagrin.  On this point Elyot says



     The best waye to be aduenged is so to contemne Iniurie and

     rebuke, and lyue with suche honestie, that the doer shall at the

     laste be therof a shamed, or at the leste, lese [lose] the frute

     of his malyce, that is to say, shall nat reioyce and haue glorie

     of thy hyndraunce or domage [damage].~Hall's Characters (1608) focuses on the glory of imperturbability,

rather than on the repentance of the perturber:



     The Valiant Man['s] power is limited by his will, and he holds it

     the noblest revenge, that he might hurt and doth not.~    



Furthermore, when we reach the end of a Shakespearean comedy things

seldom are settled.  There is never any guarantee that the remedies

discovered in the green world will serve when the persons of the play

return to the real world.  The poet says goodbye and good luck.  He

has shown the audience what they are capable of (both good and evil). 

Now they're on their own.  Will gratitude for Prospero's new start

overcome the  years of his neglect?  The sulking characters remain to

keep this question on the table.



     But wait:  there's still that final note of despair.  When

Prospero tells us, in his epilogue that after his return to Milan his

"every third thought will be [his] grave."  Can we call this a happy

ending?  Their vision still hampered by their frame, the colonialist

critics who pick up on this talk of the grave think not.~  Again

Stoic discourse sheds a better light on the passage.   Cicero said "to

think as a philosopher is to learn to die."  Montaigne used this

sentence as the title of a long essay on death.~  Epictetus

exhorts, "Let death . . . be daily before your eyes . . . and you will

never think of anything mean."~  Montaigne would have us



     combat [death] with a resolute minde.  And being to take the

     greatest advantage she hath upon us from her, let us take a

     cleane contrary way from the common, let us remove her

     strangenesse from her, let us converse, frequent, and acquaint

     our selves with her, let us have nothing so much in minde as

     death, let us at all times and seasons, and in the ugliest manner

     that may be, yea with all faces shapen and represent the same

     unto our imagination.  At the stumbling of a horse, at the fall

     of a stone, at the least prick with a pinne, let us presently

     ruminate and say with our selves, what if it were death it selfe? 

     and thereupon let us take heart of grace, and call our wits

     together to confront her. . . .  The premeditation of death is a

     fore-thinking of libertie.~Again Montaigne sounds like Seneca, who is always advising that "the

soul must be hardened by long practice, so that it may learn to endure

the sight and the    approach of death."~  Indeed Seneca is

antiquity's expert on death, and one gathers that he conceives of a

man's life as a tale that has no meaning until it's over.  For a Duke,

one assumes, dying well would mean dying well-beloved.  Furthermore,

since death is one of those common denominators that level out the

distinction between the angry man and his victim, thinking on death

will ease Prospero's fury.~  "Nothing will give you so much help

toward moderation as the frequent thought that life is short and

uncertain here below; whatever you are doing, have regard to

death."~  Finally, one must come to terms with death in order to

achieve that precious freedom of the soul, because fear of death is

certainly the ultimate slavery.  "To think on death," counsels Seneca,

is to "think on freedom.  He who has learned to die has unlearned

slavery; he is above any external power, or, at any rate, he is beyond

it."~     These sentiments and those I have already quoted, I argue, tether

The Tempest to the discursive field of early modern ethical

discourse, to which the play reports back, in terms defined by that

field, a vivid illustration of what it means to be free.

                            _______________



     The colonialist critics have laid to rest forever the idealist

interpretation of Prospero, and definitively located the mythos of

colonialism in his treatment of Caliban.  But it appears that we do

find, upon extending Professor Porter's critique of new historicism to

The Tempest, that the oversights she describes in the work of

Greenblatt and Mullaney do also occur in new historicist work on The

Tempest, that the play is too large to look at through the knothole

of colonialist discourse.  In so doing these critics unconsciously

silence other kinds of discourse that the play could clearly hear, and

overlooks the rhetorical strategy by which the play talks back to the

"horizonless field."  Certainly The Tempest hears and talks about

many other fields of discourse:  Arthurian legend, Jungian archetypes,

Freudian psychoses, regeneration rituals, vegetation cults, Plato's

three parts of the soul, good angels/bad angels, chess, Italy, drama

theory, Shakespeare's life, magic, the ethics of magic, and who knows

what else?  And discourse of colonialism does of course participate. 

But if we open the window far enough to include Stoicism, Prospero's

conquistadorial activities become a product of his anger, and his

colonizing becomes a category of tyranny, which by definition governs

by enslavement.  Since both anger and tyranny are bad, and their

consequences are bad, the play deplores colonization.  But The

Tempest's relation to colonialism is more complex than the view from

the colonialist critics' window.  





















  

NOTES



1. Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly

87 (1988): 743-86, esp. 750, 782.



2. In "Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tem-

pest", Meredith Anne Skura tests the claims of colonialist critics against an

exhaustive reconstitution of contemporary English discourse on the new

world.  She finds that records of British colonization were not available to

Shakespeare when he wrote The Tempest, at which time colonialist discourse

in England was still in its romantic phase.  She also contributes a most useful

comprehensive survey of extant literature on The Tempest. (Shakespeare

Quarterly 40 [Spring 1989], 42-69.)   However, the ugly practices of other

nations had been published abroad long before the writing of The Tempest,

and Montaigne protests against them in the very essay "Of Canniballes" to

which Shakespeare clearly refers in Gonzalo's speech at 2.1.143-160. (The

essays of Michael lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, World's classics edn.

[London: Frowde, 1904], 1: ch. 30.)



3. Similar doubts about Foucaldian methods have recently been voiced in other

quarters.  See essays in  The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York:

Routledge, 1989) by Frank Lentricchia: "Foucault's Legacy: a New Historicism?" 

231-242; by Gerald Graff: "Co-Optation," 168-181, esp. 172; and by Brook Thomas:

"New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics," 182-203, esp. 202.



4. Porter, 771.



5. Porter, 767.



6. Porter,770-1. 



7. Greenblatt, quoted in Porter, 747.



8. "Prospero in Africa:  The Tempest as Colonialist Text and Pretext," in

Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E.

Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York & London: Methuen, 1987), 95-115. 



9. "'Treason doth never Prosper':  The Tempest and the Discourse of

Treason," Shakespeare Quarterly 41(1990): 1-28.



10. "Cracking the Code of The Tempest," Shakespeare:  Contemporary Critical

Approaches, ed. Harry Garvin (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press,

1980), 121-131. 



11. "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse

of Colonialism," Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism,

ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1985), 48-71. 



12. Brown, 46.



13. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, "Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish:  The

Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest," Alternative Shakespeare, ed. John

Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985).



14. Barker and Hulme, 195.



15. Stephen Orgel, "Introduction," The Tempest, The Oxford Shakespeare

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1-87. 



16. Eric Cheyfetz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization

from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 



17. Stephen Greenblatt, "Martial Law in the Land of Cocaigne," Shakespearean

Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 129-98. 



18. They have been anticipated by at least two critics of the play who reject

the "authorized version" without the aid of theory.  As early as 1906 Lytton

Strachey objected to the received opinion that Prospero portrays a "spirit

of wise benevolence," perceiving instead



     an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years' monopoly of

     the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking. 

     These may have been the sentiments of Ariel, safe at the Bermoothes;

     but to state them is to risk at least ten years in the knotty entrails

     of an oak, and it is sufficient to point out that if Prospero is wise, he

     is also self-opinionated and sour, that his gravity is often another

     name for pedantic severity, and that there is no character in the play

     to whom, during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable. 

     (Books and Characters, English and French [New York: Harcourt Brace,

     1922], 68). 



Sixty-two years later John P. Cutts read Prospero as another Faustus,

manipulating people for his own enjoyment, an almost certain candidate for

damnation whose repentance likewise comes too late. (Rich and Strange:  A

Study of Shakespeare's Last Plays [Pullman: Washington State University

Press, 1968]). 



19. Barker and Hulme, 197.



20. Breight, 10.



21. Breight, 10, 18; Brown, 53; Barker and Hulme, 198; Cheyfetz, 27, 73;

Greenblatt, 156; Leininger, 122; Orgel, 4, 13. 



22. All citations of Shakespeare's plays are taken from the Riverside Shake-

speare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, 1974.



23. Brown, 59-60; Cheyfetz, p.76; Orgel, 8, 14, 15-6, 21, 52; Breight, 10, 14;

Greenblatt, 46, 142-3, 156, 160.



24. Orgel, 36, 47, 52; Brown, 59; Greenblatt, 147, 154; Breight, 10, 17, 23. 



25. Cartelli, 105; Barker, 195, 198-200, 202; Brown, 65; Cheyfetz, 72, 158;

Greenblatt, 157; Orgel, 24, 25ff, 36, 37.



26. Brown, 109.



27. Cartelli, 106, 107, 110; Brown, 61-2, 58; Breight, 10; Barker and Hulme, 199;

Cheyfetz, 161; Leininger, 125; Orgel, 41, 49. 



28. Barker and Hulme, 196.



29. Breight, 24; Brown, 60.



30. Brown, 60; Barker and Hulme, 199; Greenblatt, 160; Orgel, 15, 22; Cheyfetz,

159.



31. Barker and Hulme, 199; Cartelli, 106-7; Greenblatt, 157; Orgel, 23, 28.



32. Breight, 11; Greenblatt, 143, 144; Orgel, 28-9.



33. Breight, 18; Greenblatt, 143.



34. Breight, 11; Brown, 196; Barker and Hulme, 202; Cheyfetz, 77; Greenblatt, 144;

Orgel, 50. 



35. Brown, 67.



36. Breight,22-3.



37. Orgel, 54.



38. Cartelli, 116; Leininger, 127-30.



39. Barker and Hulme, 202.



40. The critical malpractice of "refuting the ending" was first identified by

Richard Levin in New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1979).  Edward Pechter finds the practice still prevalent in his "New

Historicism and Its Discontents," PMLA 102 (1987): 292-303, esp. 299.



41. The advocates of a benevolent magus also ignored Prospero's change of

heart, because it contradicted their hypothesis as well.   In their interpre-

tations D'Orsay Pearson ("'Unless I Be Reliev'd by Prayer': The Tempest in

Perspective," Shakespeare Studies 7 [1974], 253-82, esp. 273) and Joseph

Summers ("The Anger of Prospero," Dreams of Love and Power:  On Shake-

speare's Plays [Oxford: Clarendon, 1984]) restore the climax, Pearson having

Prospero recover from the sin of magic, and Summers, relying on intra-textual

evidence, having him recover from a seizure of anger, thus anticipating what

follows here.



42. Eleanor Prosser, "Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the Rarer Action,"

Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 261-64. 



43. Montaigne, 2:11.



44. Thomas Elyot, The Governour, Everyman edn. (London: Dent, 1907), 235.



45. James I, "Basilikon Doron," Political Works of James I, ed. C. E. McIlwain

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), 3-52, esp. 41.



46. Joseph Hall, "Characters of Virtues and Vices," Works, vol. vi, ed. Philip

Wynter (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 89-125, esp. 97.



47. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb edn.

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 89.



48. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, Loeb edn.

(London: W. Heinemann, 1928-1935), 1:268-9. 



49. In their glosses on the line both Frank Kermode (Arden edn. [London:

Methuen, 1958]) and Stephen Orgel (Oxford edn. [Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1987]) feel the need to explain (unconvincingly) why "vengeance" (5.1.28)

is not balanced by "forgiveness" or "pardon."  See also Prosser, 262.  



50. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Regnery, 1954), 12-13.



51. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Scribner, 1965), 17.



52. Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 329.



53. Jurgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society:  Student Protest, Science,

and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 91-93.



54. Sven Longstreth, Frank Steinmo, and Kathleen Thelen, Structuring

Politics:  Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992)



55. Karl Polan]yi, The Great Transformation [1944] (Boston: Beacon Press,

1957), 46



56. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic

Societies [1925], trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1954).



57. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago and New York: Aldine-

Atherton, 1972), 2-14



58. Lewis Hyde, The Gift:  Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New

York: Vintage Books, 1979).



59. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb

edn. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917-25), 2:423-4. 



60. Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth

Century (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1964); Doctrine for the lady of the

Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). 



61. Kelso, Lady, 322.



62. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael

Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 22. 



63. Kristeller, 25, 36-7, 128.



64. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).  



65. Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's

Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 



66. For a random example consider Marvin Vawter, "'Division 'tween Our Souls.': 

Shakespeare's Stoic Brutus," Shakespeare Studies (Columbia: University of

South Carolina Press, 1974), 173-195, esp. 173-79.  Or consider William R.

Elton's magnum opus, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington

Library, 1966), a book heavily documented by primary sources, in which Stoicism

stands for little else than hardness of heart.  Though Elton calls upon Cicero

many times, he pays no attention to De Officiis, his most important (and most

pragmatic) book. 



67. Lady, 311).



68. Cicero, xvii. 



69. Elyot, 47-8.



70. Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The

Art of Living in London [1622], ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1962), 29.



71. T. S. Eliot "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," Selected Essays

(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 107-120, esp. 52.



72. Montaigne, 1:161.



73. Seneca, Essays, 1:xv.



74. Ann Jennalie Cook, The privileged playgoers of Shakespeare's London,

1576-1642 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). 



75. Seneca, "De Ira," Essays, 1:107-355.



76. Seneca, Essays, 1:107.



77. Cf. Breight, 20-1, 24-6.



78. Cf. Matthew M. Wikander, "'The Duke My Father's Wrack': The Innocence of the

Restoration Tempest," Shakespeare Survey, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991), 91-98, esp. 91, 93, 95, 97.



79. Seneca, Essays, 1:263.



80. Seneca, Essays, 1:325.



81. Seneca, Essays, 1:143.



82. Elyot, 202.



83. Seneca, Essays, 1:323.



84.  The Latin word is "caligo," one meaning of which, according to the Oxford

Latin Dictionary is "moral and intellectual darkness."



85. Seneca, Essays, 1:185.



86. Lear's anger similarly subsides when he learns "to feel what wretches feel"

(3.4.34) and recognizes in Poor Tom a fellow human being. 



87. Brown, 68; Cartelli, 111; Greenblatt, 157; Orgel, 23; Leininger, 127.



88. Seneca, Epistles, 2:349.



89. Cicero, 6.



90. James I, 38-39.



91. Cicero, 305.



92. Seneca, Epistles, 3:5.



93. Cicero, 89.



94. Seneca, Epistles, 2:399.



95. Seneca, Epistles, 3:271.



96. Elyot, 140.



97. James I, 3.



98. Cicero, 59.



99. Cicero, 25.



100. Seneca, Essays, 3:13.



101. Elyot, 147. 



102. Seneca, Essays, 3:155.



103. Elyot, 155.



104. Greenblatt, 46; Breight, 13; Orgel, 51, 52, 55; Cheyfetz, 158.



105. Elyot, 236.



106. Hall, 96.



107. Breight, 20; Barker, 67; Brown, 68; Cheyfetz, 76; Orgel, 29.



108. Montaigne, 1: ch. xix. 



109. Epictetus, Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion and Frag-

ments, trans. George Long (London: George Bell, 1877), 387.



110. Montaigne, 1:80-1.



111. Seneca, Epistles, 2:251.



112. cf. Seneca, Essays, 1:353.



113. Seneca, Epistles, 3:319.



114. Seneca, Epistles, 1:191.  Montaigne thinks of the day of death as the only

day in our lives when "whatever the pot containeth must be shown." (1:71)