Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory

Jyotsna G. Singh

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781408185261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire de Shakespeare

Now available in paperback, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory is an up-to-date guide to contemporary debates in postcolonial studies and how these shape our understanding of Shakespeare's politics and poetics. Taking a historical perspective, it covers early modern discourses of colonialism, 'race', gender and globalization, through to contemporary intercultural appropriations and global adaptations of Shakespeare. Showing how the dialogue between Shakespeare criticism and postcolonial studies has evolved, this book offers a critical vocabulary that connects contemporary and early modern cultural struggles. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory also provides guides to further reading and online resources which make this an essential resource for students and scholars of Shakespeare.

PART ONE

Shakespeare and Early Colonial History

CALIBAN

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Wehich first was mine own king;

– The Tempest (1.2.342–43)

1

Historical Contexts 1

Shakespeare and the Colonial Imaginary

Colonial Encounters

The postcolonial terrain mapped in Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory offers many byways and vistas for exploration, as I outline in the Introduction. My aim in the following chapters is to remain attentive to constantly changing scenes of diverse and contrasting aesthetic and political modalities in Shakespeare’s plays, their contextual archaeologies, and varying reception histories. I begin Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory by acknowledging the problematic or even futile task of locating any originary moment of colonialism. Historians typically agree that English (and European) imperial power was only consolidated in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. But from a postcolonial perspective, the cultural and literary texts and events representing interactions with non-Europeans from the early sixteenth century onwards also bear the marks of a ‘colonizing imagination’. Thus, we can find a diverse body of works – plays, travel narratives, and entertainments, among others – representing the cultural and affective milieu of England’s global expansion in commercial, cultural, and religious dimensions. I am interested in these creative and imaginative processes, particularly in how they evoke an emergent colonial imaginary constituting distinct values, institutions, laws, and symbols. Drawing on this historical overview, I want to recapitulate and reappraise the relevance of The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello – the most common choices for postcolonial interpretation – in engaging with England’s expansionist role, and especially as these plays relate to early modern travel narratives, a popular genre of the developing print culture. Key critical responses to these works in terms of their colonial contexts tell a clear story of the evolution of postcolonial Shakespeare studies, as well as of its intellectual and political stakes.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first performed in 1611, has a complicated and varied reception history. But from the 1960s onwards, the colonial implications of the play became increasingly evident to generations of readers and viewers.¹ Following these interventions into earlier, (at least overtly) mostly apolitical, ‘universal’ readings of the play, as Peter Hulme (1986) suggests, the play is now considered by many as ‘emblematic of the founding years of England’s colonialism’ (90). Moving onwards from the 1960s we can map evolving critical and literary representations of links between The Tempest, the New World ventures, Mediterranean/North African histories and geographies, and England’s colonizing forays into border territories, such as Ireland. This critical turn led scholars to consider the broader implications of this play for a full understanding of the ‘complex requirements of British colonialism in its initial phase’ (Brown 1985: 48). Furthermore, this analogy can also apply to other similarly themed literary works of the early modern period, some examples being Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Titus Andronicus, the ‘Turk’ plays such as The Renegado by Philip Massinger, The Battle of Alcazar by George Peele, and Tamburlaine, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, among numerous others. Thematic resonances do not imply a strict empirical congruence among these texts and/or other non-European historical contexts. Instead, I believe, a more productive approach would be to explore the ways in which these works are imbricated in early modern ideological struggles about race, nation, religion, sexuality, and identity – especially as they play out in incipient colonial writings such as travel narratives.

What we find in both dramatic and cultural texts such as travel accounts is not a distinct ideological agenda of England’s imperial role. We can nonetheless discern an early modern colonizing imagination at work – one that is global in scope, permeating tropes, fantasies, rhetorical structures, and visual images – often defining cultural ‘others’ in terms of binaries: civilization versus barbarism, white versus black, pious restraint versus uncontrolled eroticism, Christianity (the true religion) versus (blasphemous) Islam, among numerous others (Kamps and Singh, 2001: 2–3). Such stark frames of reference later justify and consolidate full-blown colonialism, and continue to animate productions of ‘otherness’ even today. As a familiar analogy, at the centre of these imaginings is the recurrent and ubiquitous trope of the early colonial encounter, which is also the pivot on which the plot of The Tempest rests.

Some nuance and qualification are needed here. While recognizing the long, retrospective reach of this colonial imaginary – whether we consider the period between the sixteenth century and late eighteenth century as early colonial or proto-colonial – the literary and cultural productions of this period, in the genres listed above, do not offer unified expressions of cultural dominance or Eurocentric attitudes.² In fact, critics are not entirely wrong, especially those covering the West and Islam, when they express scepticism about the parameters of English power and dominance over the newly ‘discovered’ lands; some also consider Edward Said’s definition of ‘Orientalism’ as a colonial discourse to be somewhat irrelevant in this early modern period.³ I would argue, however, that it is not unreasonable to apply Said’s argument to the early modern period, though with some qualification perhaps, given that the material impact of Western power over the East was limited or minimal at that time. And here I would particularly like to push back at those critics who, in questioning the relevance of Said’s ideas to the early modern period (prior to the eighteenth century), tend to flatten and simplify the premises of Orientalism, especially its emphasis on the systemic power of representational practices. In fact, some do acknowledge, as Jonathan Burton states, that the ‘representative practices of high imperialism [can] be sometimes found germinating in earlier periods’.⁴ In sum, the key task before us, I believe, is how to map early English (European) expansion – its colonial imaginings – though its emergent stages. Orientalism provides a useful critical vocabulary for doing so (as I discuss further in Chapter 3).

Overall, in this volume, I remain cognisant of the fact that cross-cultural encounters, exchanges, and power struggles were (and are) often uneven and hybrid – and that the tropes of ‘otherness’ have neither been uniform nor consistent. The complexities of these interactions are certainly evident in Shakespeare’s plays and their critical reception, as well as in other cultural works that engage with colonial themes, as I demonstrate. What they reveal and illuminate are not so much the ideological agendas of the particular works, as the psychic and epistemological struggles shaping English (and European) engagements with non-European ‘others’.⁵ Working within the historical, conceptual frame outlined above, the postcolonial approach I take in this chapter investigates how the selected Shakespeare plays listed above relate to early English colonial (or proto-colonial) endeavours, represented in cross-cultural encounters between non-Western peoples and races and English travellers – explorers, merchants, Chaplains, official emissaries, and others.

It is generally accepted that The Tempest is the primary text on which postcolonial Shakespeare studies took root. When Anglo-American scholars from the early 1980s onwards began to emphasize a relationship between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its colonial contexts – from the New World Bermuda pamphlets about an English shipwreck in the Caribbean, to Caliban’s anagrammatic transformation from Columbus’ ‘cannibal’, and further, to Britain’s internal hegemony over the Welsh and Irish – they, quite strikingly, signalled a postcolonial ‘turn’ and, in effect, a critical paradigm shift by inserting the play within early English colonial history and its imperial imaginings. The decolonization movements in former European empires earlier, through the 1960s and 1970s, had already exposed the play’s allegorical identifications with European colonialism in the cultural works of Aimé Césaire, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, among others (see Chapter 3). But postcolonial Shakespeare criticism of The Tempest in the Anglo-American contexts more radically accelerated these reappraisals of the play, from the 1980s onwards, when colonialism was no longer a subject ‘off-limits’ within the field of literary studies (Said 1979: 1–5). This new awareness led critics to explore how the West imagined the genesis, growth, and subsequent effects of its colonial empires

Once these were acknowledged, Shakespeare’s The Tempest provided a fertile ground for tracking an emerging British colonialist discourse in the early modern period, encompassing the ‘core’, the ‘semiperiphery’, and the ‘periphery’ of Britain’s domination. Such a discourse was eloquently articulated by Paul Brown in his ground-breaking essay, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’ (1985):

A brief survey of British colonial operations will help us to establish a network of relations or discursive matrix within and against which an analysis of The Tempest becomes possible. (51; emphasis in original)

In explaining his formulation, Brown provides some historical context:

Geographically, the discourse operated upon the various domains of British world influence, which may be discerned roughly in the terms of Immanuel Wallerstein, as the ‘core’, ‘semiperiphery’ and ‘periphery’. Colonialism therefore comprises the expansion of royal hegemony in the English-Welsh mainland (the internal colonialism of the core), the extension of British influence in the semiperiphery of Ireland, and the diffuse range of British interests in the extreme periphery of the New World. (51–52)

Further, drawing on Edward Said’s concept of an orientalist discourse, Brown offers a discursive template, which, as he argues, structures Prospero’s seeming benevolent domination on the island. ‘Colonial discourse voices a demand for both order and disorder, producing a disruptive other in order to assert this superiority of the colonizer’ (58). And Prospero’s power drives, according to Brown, are structured similarly:

From Prospero’s initial appearance it becomes clear that disruption was produced to create a series of problems precisely in order to effect their resolution … [In this process] Prospero interpellates the various listeners – calls to them, as it were, and invites them to recognize themselves as subjects of his discourse … Thus for Miranda he is a strong father who educates and protects her; for Ariel he is rescuer and taskmaster; for Caliban he is a colonizer whose refused offer of civilization forces him to strict discipline [and enslavement]. (58–59)

Prospero’s colonizing activities are validated by his naturalized patriarchal authority, central to which is the control over Miranda’s sexuality. According to Kim Hall (1995), ‘the pressures of imperialism insist on the control and regulation of female sexuality, particularly when concerns over paternity are complicated by problems of racial and cultural purity’ (148). At issue, then, is Prospero’s justification of his colonizing activities and arbitrary rule, including sexual control, over the island’s inhabitants. According to Prospero, Caliban’s mother was the ‘damned witch Sycorax’, who ‘For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing, from Algiers … was banished’ (1.2.264–66).⁶ She was the ‘blue-eyed hag’ ‘hither brought with child’, whose enslavement he justifies (1.2.269). Caliban, in turn, responds to Prospero’s history by claiming the island as his own legitimate inheritance:

CALIBAN

This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,

Which thou tak’st from me …

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me,

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o’th’ island. (1.2.333–44)

Prospero’s earlier occlusion of the history of his arrival, narrated here by Caliban, as well as his usurpation of the island, also figure prominently in other early postcolonial readings, such as the influential essay by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish”: the Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’ (1985). They demonstrate that Prospero’s denial of his ‘dispossession [of Caliban], with retrospective justification for it, is the characteristic trope by which European colonial regimes articulated their authority over land to which they could have no conceivable legitimate claim’ (Barker and Hulme 1985: 200). The success of this trope, of course, depends on our (audiences’ and scholars’) ‘uncritical willingness to identify Prospero’s voice as a direct and reliable authorial statement’, which underpins interpretations of ‘European and North American critics, who have tended to listen exclusively to Prospero’s voice: after all he speaks their language’ (Barker and Hulme 1985: 199, 204; emphasis mine). Here I primarily draw on the scholarship by Paul Brown, Peter Hulme, and Francis Barker, as a few key examples of the workings of colonial discourse in the play, though also recognizing the important contributions of Stephen Greenblatt and the new historicist movement in re-contextualizing Caliban and Prospero’s story within the history and ideology of European conquests in the ‘New World,’ most notably in ‘Learning to Curse’.⁷ Thus, one can see how postcoloniality in the 1980s marked the pivotal moment when Prospero’s audiences – and readers of Shakespeare – became more transnational, transcultural, as well as multilingual, and in effect, they stopped listening uncritically to Prospero, and instead, began to challenge the legitimacy of his colonizing activities. Those critics who, like Brown, Hulme, Greenblatt, and others were attentive to Caliban’s claims and his efforts at resistance were closely reading the poetic language afforded to Caliban in Shakespeare’s play, rather than simply accepting Prospero’s justifications for his magically induced plots in his role as a surrogate playwright.

It is worth taking pause here, as Charles Frey reminds us in his article, ‘The Tempest and the New World’ (1979), that even prior to these postcolonial interventions in the 1980s – since the eighteenth century at least – critics have been asking: ‘What has The Tempest, if anything, to do with the New World?’ (29). In 1808, for instance, Edmond Malone first argued that Shakespeare derived the title and some of the play’s incidents from the Bermuda materials. Answers have been varied as were the points of view of the critics, and Frey cites from both those who sought to discredit New World sources for the Caliban–Prospero relationship as well as those scholars who emphasized the historical links between the New World materials and the play-text.⁸ Overall, however, Frey’s essay (like many of the critics he cites) is still invested more within a formalist approach rather than an historical one, as he sees the play’s meaning in a ‘linguistic and narrative force-field’ rather than a single history, though he does concede its form to be a ‘peculiar merger of history and romance’ (33, 41). Strong formalist strains, as in Frey’s reading, persisted in approaches to the play. Even after the legacy of decolonization, Western critics often saw the play generically, ‘as a pastoral tragi-comedy, [romance], with the themes of nature and art at its center, fully and confidently Mediterranean, as its title would suggest, a play moving majestically to its reconciliatory climax with hardly a ripple to disturb its surface’ (Hulme 1986: 105). It is also important to remember here that critics such as Brown and Hulme also recognize other contextual geographies underpinning the play, such as references to Caliban’s ‘African’ pedigree, which makes him distinctly Mediterranean, within the framework of ‘dual topographies’, and on which I elaborate in the next section.

Animating many standard Western readings, we can recognize a reconciliatory t...