The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Take Gonzalo’s speech about his commonwealth in II i. We know that it is taken, almost word for word, from Montaigne, and Shakespeare’s more hard-headed attitudes, and the context of the play itself, would seem to refute Gonzalo’s breathless idealism. But is that really so? Here is Gonzalo’s vision of the just society, the good life:

  … no kind of traffic

  Would I admit: no name of magistrate;

  Letters should not be known; riches, poverty

  And use of service, none; contract, succession

  Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

  No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

  No occupation; all men idle, all;

  And women too, but innocent and pure: …

  All things in common Nature should produce

  Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,

  Sword, pike, knife, gun or need of any engine,

  Would I not have; but Nature should bring forth,

  Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance

  To feed my innocent people.

  II i 144–160

  It is, of course, a marvellously attractive picture, and one that has haunted men as a possibility, as an alternative, from Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue about the return of the Golden Age, through the Levellers and early Communists down to our own hippy communes. No commercialism, no class distinctions, no use of other people’s labour – you will see how that is connected with the last idea we were looking at and Prospero’s rights over Caliban and Ariel. No inherited wealth. All property in common, no monopolies over the essentials of life; no violence, no politicking, every man free to do his own thing. It’s a marvellous dream and it needs to be stated here against the whole world of imposed order and authority that is another aspect of the play’s action. Like Caliban’s denunciation of Prospero it stands. It is not ‘placed’ by the mean interjections of Antonio and Sebastian or by Gonzalo’s failure to locate Tunis and his rather prissy euphemism about ‘widow Dido’. What does question it is Gonzalo’s own admission that it will exist only if people are all ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’. And as the little community on the island itself shows, this is, regrettably, not so. He is barely finished speaking before treachery, violence and ambition for ascendancy are revealed in the scene Shakespeare contrives between Sebastian and Antonio, and of course the point is made elsewhere when we see Stephano, in a low parody of the two courtiers, setting up as ruler over his fellow servant.

  The question that is being raised here is why the state and all its paraphernalia of authority might be necessary – but also how it comes into existence, and through all this, Gonzalo’s vision stands as an alternative. The political point turns on the moral question of man’s nature and the limitations it might put upon his possibilities. Antonio and Sebastian can be cynical about these possibilities, but Shakespeare, one wants to assert, is not. Only hard-headedly realistic, and he lets the cynical view be stated to show the difference.

  Shakespeare asks us to observe man, in his play, not without idealism but without illusions. Man is man. There are no gods among us, though the naïve are always eager to find one (that is, a superior being they can adore). Caliban makes that mistake with Stephano, though he does at last come to realise it:

  What a thrice-double ass

  Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,

  And worship this dull fool!

  V i 295–7

  But Ferdinand does much the same thing with Miranda:

  Most sure the goddess

  On whom these airs attend! Vouchsafe my prayer

  May know if you remain upon this island;

  I ii 424–6

  And one of the most moving things in the play is his reassessment of all this, and his real discovery of her, when, in Act V, to his father’s question:

  Is she the goddess that hath sever’d us

  And brought us thus together?

  V i 188–9

  Ferdinand replies:

  Sir, she is mortal;

  But by immortal Providence she’s mine.

  V i 188–9

  Miranda has in the same way taken Ferdinand for something more than human:

  I might call him

  A thing divine; for nothing natural

  I ever saw so noble.

  I ii 420–2

  And when Prospero, in a strange echo of Caliban’s accusation to him, accuses Ferdinand of having come to usurp the isle, Ferdinand’s denial: ‘No, as I am a man!’, and Miranda’s ‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple’, immediately raises the question that is to be put most clearly in Act V, the question we have already discovered in Gonzalo’s commonwealth speech and which the play comes back to at every point. Just what is man? How can we reconcile the presence of evil in him with the presence of nobility?

  O wonder!

  How many goodly creatures are there here!

  How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

  That has such people in’t.

  V i 181–4

  Miranda is of course facing a mixed bag of humanity that includes the men who drove her father out and tried to kill them both, as well as the old councillor whose compassion and charity saved them, and the usual timeserving courtiers who blow with the wind – a not unrepresentative group of us all, we might think. Her affirmation of faith in mankind is only partly modified by ‘dramatic irony’. Prospero’s ‘Tis new to thee’ points to her lack of experience, but it alerts us as well to his own weary disillusion. Her affirmation stands. And the phrase she chooses, ‘O brave new world’, looks in two opposite directions in a marvellous and typically Shakespearean way.

  To Miranda that ‘brave new world’ is the ordinary world we all know. It is us and Shakespeare’s contemporary audience. But to them it must also have suggested the New World of the Americas, the lands beyond the sea and the miraculous presence of people out there beyond the known world whose existence was to them what the discovery of men on other planets would be to us. What were the men of the New World like? Were they innocent unfallen Adams or men like other men? That is one of the questions the play takes up through the character of Caliban, who is surely the most interesting and original creation of the play, the character who makes the largest demands on Shakespeare’s imagination and on ours.

  It is easy to simplify what Shakespeare has actually presented in him. Critics often ask us to see the play as a grouping of characters round this central figure of the savage, and it is useful to take up the contrasts Shakespeare has provided – and sometimes the comparisons – between, say, Caliban and Miranda, Caliban and Ferdinand, Caliban and the degenerate nobles, Caliban and the other characters here who stand outside the charmed circle of privilege and birth, the lowlife Trinculo and Stephano.

  These contrasts are illuminating, and our judgement of Caliban changes with each of them – and our ideas of the other characters also change as we judge them against him. But that is not in the last resort what Caliban is there for. He has a life of his own in the play that is larger, and richer and more complex and challenging to us, than any part he might play in a formal scheme. Most of all we should not impose on him any role as ‘salvage man’ whose attributes we can adduce from elsewhere. If we know anything at all about Shakespeare it is that he is never dependent on conventional types or conventional attitudes. His Caliban is about as likely to resemble the stock savage as Shylock, for example, resembles the stock Jew.

  That Shakespeare was interested in the people of the new world we know from the play itself. Textual evidence shows that he had been reading Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’ and Trinculo refers to contemporary curiosity about Indians in general: ‘There’ (he means in England) ‘when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’. Shakespeare is teasing as well as amusing his audience when he introduces into his play a live Indian and then asks them to make a challenging reassessment of both Indians and themselves.

  That
suggests one way in which Caliban might question accepted notions of where Indians stand in the scheme of things. What about some of the other characteristics that are usually attributed to him? Let us admit that Caliban is surly, that he harbours murderous grudges against Prospero:

  Why, as I told thee, tis a custom with him

  I’ the afternoon to sleep: there thou mayst brain him,

  Having first seized on his books; or with a log

  Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake

  Or cut his wezand with a knife.

  III ii 85–89

  The brutality is obvious enough. No attempt is made to conceal or sentimentalise Caliban’s savagery – though it is in no way worse, we might think, than the civilised brutality of Sebastian and Antonio, and might even be more excusable; Caliban has been genuinely wronged. But what about some of the qualities that are supposed to flow from this: Caliban’s inability for example to function on any but the lowest level of sensuality and lust. What are we to make of these lines that come in the same speech as the lines I have just quoted?

  And that most deeply to consider is

  The beauty of his daughter; he himself

  Calls her a nonpareil: I never saw a woman

  But only Sycorax my dam and she;

  And she as far surpasseth Sycorax

  As great’st does least.

  III ii 96–101

  Now Shakespeare is most careful there. The word ‘nonpareil’ is attributed to Prospero, and Caliban takes it up in his admission that he has no grounds for comparison except the rather comic one, we might think, of Miranda and Sycorax. But isn’t there a real capacity for wonder in these lines that relates them immediately to the wonder of Ferdinand, and to Miranda herself when she encounters Ferdinand? Her only comparison was with her father and Caliban.

  It isn’t simply that a contrast is being established here that ‘places’ Caliban. Rather a series of comparisons is set up that relates all three, and shows them, within their different world selves, as alike. If anything, it establishes Caliban as a figure of real pathos. And this is not entirely destroyed when, with a reference back to his own ambitions, he brings Stephano into the field of view with:

  Ay, lord; she will become thy bed, I warrant,

  And bring thee forth brave brood.

  III ii 102–3

  Caliban’s responses veer sharply from what is fine to what is utterly crude, but what we need to have an ear for is the shift.

  His capacity to respond to the island’s music, for example, isn’t simply a reference to music’s capacity to ‘appeal to the beast that lacks reason’, as Frank Kermode would have us believe. It is the source for Caliban of a deeply felt vision of other possibilities, of an existence he has glimpsed but not yet fully comprehended:

  And sometimes voices

  That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

  The clouds methought would ope and show riches

  Ready to drop on me; that when I wak’d

  I cried to dream again.

  III ii 136–141

  Shakespeare allows Caliban access here to the full range of the play’s poetry, and it is surely no accident that the ‘clouds’, the ‘show’, the ‘sleep’ of his vision recur in Prospero’s famous speech in Act IV.

  And Caliban’s response to the island’s music makes a further point. It is the sense in which the island exists for him – and through him for us – as it does for no-one else in the play.

  Prospero of course has power over the island, the power of magic – white magic – attained through the highest exercise of the intellect. But Caliban’s possession derives from power of another sort altogether. He has mapped it all with his senses. It is his in a way that Prospero could barely conceive of, though Shakespeare does. Look again at Caliban’s denunciation in Act I, with its evocation of ‘all the qualities o’ th’ isle/The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile’, or the speech in Act III where, like the gullible and pathetically generous natives of so many unfortunate isles, he offers to share his gifts with the white colonist Stephano:

  I’ll show thee the best springs, I’ll pluck thee berries …

  I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow

  And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts;

  Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how

  To snare the nimble marmoset; I’ll bring thee

  To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee

  Young scammels from the rock.

  II ii 160 … 166–72

  It is only through Caliban that we get this sense of the richness of the island, its tumbling fecundity. His capacity to name things, and by naming evoke them, is a different sort of magic from Prospero’s but no less powerful and real. It might remind us of the extraordinary way our own indigenous people possess the land, through folk stories, taboos, song cycles, and have made it part of the very fabric of their living; or to leap elsewhere, we might think of Lévi-Strauss’ discovery that the way native people build up and preserve in their memory a knowledge of their environment is every bit as true, and scientific and useful, as our own. This Shakespeare seems to have discovered intuitively, through Caliban, and it not only challenges Prospero and his magic but questions the sort of assertions Prospero is making when he calls Caliban one ‘on whose nature / Nurture can never stick’.

  Caliban learns from experience what Prospero can never teach him from books. When he announces at the end of the play, ‘I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace,’ he is surely a character in process of discovering himself and his humanity. He is to be linked equally with all those others for whom Gonzalo speaks in his great summing-up of the play’s many discoveries:

  and all of us ourselves

  When no man was his own

  V i 212–13

  The questions are radical ones: radical in that they challenge some of our most deeply rooted notions about the play. Prospero’s centrality, it seems to me, has never been seriously challenged, and of course once we begin to question it, once we admit that Shakespeare may be questioning it, our whole assumption about the rightness of Prospero’s authority and the order he establishes is also in question – and with it most traditional readings of the play. Can we do this without doing violence to what Shakespeare intended?

  It has always surprised me that critics have been so willing to accept Prospero as the one and only central consciousness of the play. To do so is to put The Tempest in a unique category.

  One of the great tests that is put upon us by a Shakespeare play is the test of our capacity to let the play happen; to allow different aspects of the play’s world to reveal themselves, and challenge or modify one another, without our demanding a simple or single point of view. It is a passion for simplifying, for choosing one view at the expense of all others, that has bedevilled criticism of some of our greatest and most complex plays: Julius Caesar, the two parts of Henry IV, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet.

  The history plays offer us the clearest and most complex view of Shakespeare’s attitude to authority, order and the necessity of the law, and none better than the two Henry IV plays, whose action ranges from the court to the half-criminal lowlife of Eastcheap, but also takes in the small-town affairs of rural Gloucestershire. Essential to all this are the antics of that Lord of Misrule, the fat knight Falstaff. Shakespeare endows Falstaff with so much wit, so much life, that like Prince Hal we are immediately seduced; how could we fail to be charmed by a figure who creates around himself so much energy, so much delight in play; who stands in such contrast to the cold world of policy, and the institutionalised violence that, in the name of ‘honour’, creates his own kind of havoc to sustain it? Falstaff’s minor forms of criminality, we might think, are a more excusable, because personal and human form of disorder, than the large-scale rebellion of the nobles here, or the act of usurpation that has set Henry on his throne, and the spurious
arguments, another kind of untruth, that are brought forward to justify them. Falstaff speaks up for life and for the little man who cannot afford to be more than sometimes virtuous. But then there is that moment on the battlefield, where, after his very amusing rejection of ‘Honour’, he violates in the most shameful way the body of Hotspur and claims the ‘honour’ of having killed him. The truth is that however deeply Falstaff engages our sympathy as a loveable rogue, he is also a liar, a coward, and his treatment of Hotspur’s body is in every way inexcusable. His rejection then, at the end of the play, is, for an engaged and sympathetic audience, one of the most uncomfortable moments Shakespeare ever created – and it is the measure of his integrity that he does nothing to disguise the fact or make it easier. ‘Banish Plump Jack and banish the world’ is Falstaff’s justification of himself, and it stands. But Prince Hal’s earlier fierce assertion, ‘I do, I will,’ and his cold repetition of it now, ‘I know thee not, old man’ – as cruel and unacceptable a speech as we get in the plays from even the coldest ruler – also stands. This is Prince Hal acting as he must, like an upholder of order, a lord of rule. Law and order is all we have as a wall against what we are as humans: against criminal self-will, both of the political kind that expresses itself as ambition, oppression, rebellion, usurpation, and the more ordinary crimes of theft, bribery, exploitation practised by a Falstaff. There is no way out of this dilemma. Shakespeare speaks for both sides, and offers no happy resolution, but we miss the point badly if we see the banishment of Falstaff as Shakespeare’s acceptance of the rightness of authority. The regrettable necessity, perhaps. Rightness is another thing altogether.