Shakespeare's Tempest and Capitalism

The Storm of History

Helen C. Scott, Helen Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317055952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

In this forceful study, Helen C. Scott situates The Tempest within Marxist analyses of the 'primitive accumulation' of capital, which she suggests help explain the play's continued and particular resonance. The 'storm' of the title refers both to Shakespeare's Tempest hurtling through time, and to Walter Benjamin's concept of history as a succession of violent catastrophes. Scott begins with an account of the global processes of dispossession—of the peasantry and indigenous populations—accompanying the emergence of capitalism, which generated new class relationships, new understandings of human subjectivity, and new forms of oppression around race, gender, and disability. Developing a detailed reading of the play at its moment of production in the business of theatre in 1611, Scott then moves gracefully through the global reception history, showing how its central thematic concerns and figurative patterns bespeak the upheavals and dispossessions of successive stages of capitalist development. Paying particular attention to moments of social crisis, and unearthing a radical political tradition, Scott follows the play from its hostile takeover in the Restoration, through its revival by the Romantics, and consolidation and contestation in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century transatlantic modernism generated an acutely dystopic Tempest, then during the global transformations of the 1960s postcolonial writers permanently associated it with decolonization. At century's end the play became a vehicle for exploring intersectional oppression, and the remarkable 'Sycorax school' featured iconoclastic readings by writers such as Abena Busia, May Joseph, and Sylvia Wynter. Turning to both popular culture and high-profile stage productions in the twenty-first century, Scott explores the ramifications and figurative potential of Shakespeare's Tempest for global social and ecological crises today. Sensitive to the play's original concerns and informed by recent scholarship on performance and reception history as well as disability studies, Scott's moving analysis impels readers towards a fresh understanding of sea-change and metamorphosis as potent symbols for the literal and figurative tempests of capitalism's old age now threatening 'the great globe itself.'

1 The storm of history

They’ll tell the clock to any business that/ We say befits the hour. Antonio II.i

The Tempest as monad

Walter Benjamin approaches Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as a portal into the poet’s age that simultaneously offers exceptional insights into Benjamin’s own current era: he saw it as a ‘constellation saturated with tensions … by which thinking is crystallized as a monad’ (Benjamin ‘Theses’ 95). The latent potential of the work can be accessed by the historical materialist who,

takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history … the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed. (Benjamin ‘Theses’ 95)

This is a distinctive departure both from the bourgeois notion of ‘timeless art’ floating above history and from the crude historicist view of literature as unwitting testimony for the ruling ideas of an epoch. While the artwork may condense dominant ideology, it may also expose underlying social contradictions, and even provide glimpses of the ‘revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (Benjamin ‘Theses’ 95). In his introduction to The Writer of Modern Life, a collection of Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, Michael W. Jennings explains what is distinctive about this method. For Benjamin,

The poet is … not a genius who ‘rises above’ his age and distills its essence for posterity. For Benjamin, the greatness of Baudelaire consists instead in his absolute susceptibility to the worst excrescences of modern life: Baudelaire was in possession not of genius, but of an extraordinarily ‘sensitive disposition’ that enabled him to perceive, through a painful empathy, the character of an age. (Jennings ‘Introduction’ 15)

There are inescapable parallels with Shakespeare, who is routinely understood both as an exceptional ‘genius’ for all times and also, conversely, as the scribe of the Renaissance. Benjamin’s model of historical materialism leads us to reject both paradigms, neither removing the artwork from the material confines of its age nor reducing it to a narrow record of homogeneous history: Shakespeare is not the mystical Bard, but a dramatist who is extraordinarily ‘sensitive’ to the age. In an earlier essay, Benjamin described the approach this way:

‘What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age, but to represent the age that perceives them—our age—in the age during which they arose. It is this that makes literature into an organon of history; and to achieve this, and not to reduce literature to the material of history, is the task of the literary historian.’ (Benjamin ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’ qtd. in Jennings, 24–5)

The concept of the ‘organon’ brings multiple meanings—a system of principles or rules, an instrument of learning, a sense organ, or a method for acquiring knowledge. To grasp The Tempest in this way is to apprehend its particular entanglements with the turbulent circumstances of a world that had lost all stability, as they are activated by subsequent moments of reception down to and including our own.

The play’s witting and unwitting testimony about this world is famously hard to pin down: it is polyvocal, both speaking with many voices and addressing diverse audiences; it is richly suggestive and multifaceted, both inviting and resisting neat allegorical interpretations. For these reasons, it has generated countless debates resting on either/or oppositions: emphasizing ‘old’ or ‘new’ worlds, colonial or class inequalities, conservative or radical politics.¹ Viewed through Benjaminian lenses, these questions are clearly inseparable and fluid: the play is ‘old world’ and ‘new world,’ embroiled in domestic class antagonisms and global relationships of colonization, and both endorses and challenges the social order. This habit of holding together seeming oppositions is embedded in the play’s very genre: neither and both comedy and tragedy and variously identified as ‘romance,’ ‘pastoral,’ and ‘tragi-comedy.’ The play is so compelling because it resides within these contradictions that have variously spoken to successive eras and continue in our own age.

The circumstances of late global capitalism activate, or germinate, the seeds of early capitalist development as they are embedded in the play. In recent decades, historians and critics have mined The Tempest for what it tells us about early capitalism, sometimes explicitly reading the Prospero/Caliban antagonism as that between capitalist and proletariat, and often concluding that the play is an endorsement of early capitalism.² The attempt to map contemporary political debates on to Shakespeare’s play inevitably raises the specter of presentism. To borrow and rephrase Lerone Bennett’s formulation, ‘most important, if hardest for us to understand, capitalism did not have the same meaning in 1611 that it has today.’ Now capitalism has spread across the entire globe, threatens to destroy the planet, and serves as a block on human progress. Then it was an emergent force, restricted to a limited geographic range, and represented progress relative to the stultifying feudal system. Nothing resembling the modern bourgeoisie or proletariat yet existed, and there was no global economy based on the profit system. The capitalists were the upstarts. And yet viewed with the weighty hindsight of intervening history, The Tempest contains within it those subsequent developments, and it becomes impossible to extract the future from the past.

The play-text thus cannot be removed from its formative conditions in emergent capitalism nor from their reverberations in contemporary global capitalism. One of the continuing constellations between then and now is the business of theater itself. Even while bardolatry presupposes an aesthetic realm of abstracted ‘human values’ beyond the material plane, today the Shakespeare industry is a colossal global commercial enterprise. For example, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s income for 2012–13 (just after the 100th anniversary of The Tempest), was £62.6m. Shakespeare’s drama was, of course, a commercial project at its beginning. Long before taking the form of books to be treasured at home or studied in classrooms, the plays existed as live performance, calculated to entertain and make money from a mass popular audience consisting of a broad cross section of London’s vibrant and mercurial society. Samuel Johnson acknowledged this in 1765 when he wrote rather dismissively in his preface: ‘It does not appear that Shakespeare … had any farther prospect than of present popularity and present profit’ (Johnson). The Tempest was likely designed to take advantage of the new stage technologies of the Blackfriars Theater, integrating plenty of music and scenes calling for special effects. Shakespeare’s drama literally addressed diverse audiences, which is the kernel of truth within the bland claim that the Bard included ‘something for everyone.’

These commercial preconditions do not, however, delimit the work’s political valence. The Tempest displays all the idiosyncrasies and imaginative leaps of a creative work, and the intense and allusive language of poetry. None of this can be forced into the mold of a single ideology or neatly diagramed on to historical developments.³ Rather than attempting to ideologically ‘fix’ the play-text, the following account strives instead to remain alert to the push and pull between then and now, the coexistence of contrary and antagonistic influences, and the play’s mercurial existence on the stage. The dialectical interplay of contradictory forces is itself both the lasting mark of the unsettled tensions of its moment of origin, and pivotal for understanding the subsequent history of reception and, in particular, its unique status in our present age. The normative integrative understanding of the play goes with the grain of its conservative plot, emphasizing the themes of forgiveness, redemption, and closure. But the disintegrative dynamics constantly interrupt this sentimental fairy tale: the violence of the era is writ large throughout the play, and discordant contradictions interfere with happy resolutions. The revolutionary aspirations of the age also leave their liberatory traces, in ways that are later both suppressed and released. The play grasps the unsettled hierarchies and sharp contradictions of this stage of the primitive accumulation of capital.

A world of conflict

The geographical coordinates of The Tempest are of great and varied significance, indicative both of the contemporaneous weight of Ottoman and Mediterranean power and of incipient Atlantic mercantile and colonial expansion. Created and performed initially in the volatile and fluid world of Renaissance London, the action takes place on an unnamed island somewhere between North Africa, whence King Alonso and his party are returning from Princess Claribel’s wedding to the King of Tunis, and their homes in Naples and Milan. Africa has further significance for the action: Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, who presided on the island in the play’s prehistory, had reportedly been banished from ‘Argier.’⁴ Elsewhere there are references to the Americas—‘Bermoothes,’ ‘Setebos,’ and ‘Indians’ are all mentioned—in addition to the broader recurring allusions to the Bermuda pamphlets and Montaigne. The play thus draws attention to global hot spots: part of the Ottoman Empire, Argiers and Tunis were important harbors on the area of the North African coast known as ‘Barbary,’ and would have been associated with the ‘Barbary pirates.’ Also known as the Ottoman corsairs, these were predominately Muslim privateers who operated from the coast of Africa, acting for powerful wealthy sponsors, and intercepted merchant vessels in the Mediterranean and further afield.⁵ Naples and Milan were powerful Renaissance City States, home to the first phase of capitalist development and still at the forefront of commercial and cultural development globally. And the ‘American’ references suggest the emergent phase of capitalist expansion in the New World. The ‘uninhabited island’ itself, which is, as many have pointed out, in fact inhabited by Caliban and Ariel and numerous spirits prior to Prospero’s arrival, had resonance for the doctrine of discovery, precursor of terra nullius, whereby European conquest of the Americas was justified on the grounds that the indigenous populations did not own the land, either because they were not Christian or because they lacked any legal rights of possession. On more than one occasion the play quotes Montaigne, who questioned the violent practices of New World colonization.

At the same time, the space is sufficiently flexible to allow for radically divergent imagined locations.⁶ The island is represented as both fertile and productive and a barren wilderness: when Gonzalo remarks ‘Here is every thing advantageous to life,’ Antonio quips ‘True, save means to live’ (II.i.50–1). Caliban, who has the best knowledge of the land, presents the most beautiful accounts of a physical environment that brings together both perspectives: ‘all the qualities o’ th’ isle,/The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile’ (I.ii.337). This flexibility is indicated in the geographical and creative diversity of stage settings and re-imaginings of the physical environment. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, for example, various high-profile productions and literary appropriations took place in or evoked locations in the Arctic North, Sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, Palestine, and Trinidad.⁷

Against this richly suggestive and mutable backdrop, the play foregrounds class conflict and places the master/slave relationship at the center of the action. The story begins with a storm and a shipwreck, both of which take on immense allegorical significance for social crisis and conflict in the reception history, as we shall see. Both labor and the material means by which to live are immediately highlighted, notably in the opening exchange between the mariners and the nobles, and in lines in the second scene. Prospero says of Caliban, ‘We cannot miss him. He does make our fire,/Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/That profit us.’ (I.ii.311–3); before his famous declaration of sovereignty, Caliban declares ‘I must eat my dinner’ (I.ii.330). Social upheaval is dramatized through a series of usurpations. The primary antagonism is between Prospero, the ‘rightful duke’ of Milan, and his usurping younger brother Antonio who cheated him out of his dukedom and sent him into exile. This relationship is mirrored in the antagonism between the King of Naples, who was complicit in Prospero’s ouster, and his ambitious younger brother Sebastian, who now contemplates fratricide in order to advance his position. Prospero brings his old enemies to the island—compelling his indentured servant Ariel to use magic to wreck their ship without seriously harming them—and the main business of the play is their punishment and Prospero’s retrieval of his dukedom. Courtly usurpation is again mirrored in the comic subplot in which the ‘salvage and deformed slave’ Caliban temporarily unites with two servants separated from the noble party—the butler Stephano and jester Trinculo (who mistakenly believe the king and nobles to be dead)—in a conspiracy against Prospero.

When considering the plot in outline form, it is hard to deny the judgment of many that The Tempest has a distinctly conservative affect: in the words of Christopher Morris, it launches a defense of ‘traditional society’ against ‘upstart parvenues’ (Morris 306–7). Over the course of the play, the original usurpation is reversed—Prospero not only regains the Dukedom of Milan but a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: a four-hundred-year culture war
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: primitive accumulation
• 1 The storm of history
• 2 Hostile takeover, consolidation, and destabilization
• 3 Crisis, war, revolution
• 4 Independence
• 5 Overproduction
• 6 Deregulation
• Afterword: state of emergency
• Bibliography
• Index