4
Joyce’s Exiles and Shakespeare’s Tempest
GIUSEPPINA RESTIVO
Joyce’s mention of Shakespeare’s Othello in his notes to his one autobiographical play, Exiles, attracts attention not only to the author’s sounding of unexplored aspects of jealousy, but also to Shakespeare’s constant presence in Joyce’s mind. It suggests that Richard’s words in the third act of Exiles, “I am what I am” (250), following the plain statement “I did not make myself,” may well echo Iago’s famous “I am not what I am” (I, ii, 65), though with a vengeance. While Iago is proud of his ability to conceal his intentions, to deceive and use his “villainy,” Richard—who in a sense “conflates” Othello and Iago in himself—is, on the contrary, proud of his courage to expose his innermost drives, the ambiguous realities of his desires and emotions. But if Joyce had not mentioned Othello in his notes (written during the composition of Exiles and usually published along with it), the ironical Shakespearean echo in Richard’s words would hardly be detectable.
Shakespeare’s Tempest, in contrast, is not mentioned in the notes, and its context might at first sight seem distant from that of Exiles: but an evident quotation from Shakespeare’s third act appears shortly before the allusion to Iago’s words. It comes at a highly dramatic moment, the night after the protagonist Richard Rowan, a writer mirroring Joyce himself, has pushed his companion Bertha (evoking Nora Barnacle) to meet at night her wooer Robert Hand, a journalist and his best friend (recalling Roberto Prezioso, the editor of the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo). Richard has openly accused Robert of secret dealings (faithfully and constantly reported to him by Bertha), only to leave him alone with Bertha immediately after. In spite of his jealousy, Richard feels no right to detain Bertha from an experience she might value, or to demand from her a faith he has repeatedly betrayed, though not importantly, and constantly self-accusingly. Robert and Bertha must make their own choices. On the one hand, Richard is confident in her restraint; on the other, he ambiguously hopes she will betray him, “compensating” his unfaithfulness or ethical inferiority. At the same time his friend and admirer Beatrice, after an important nine-year intellectual relationship, has just admitted her attraction to him, to no avail, but adding to Bertha’s anxiety and to the complexities of the situation Bertha and Richard are living.
After such a testing night, Richard comes home from an early morning walk to the Dublin bay during which he has revolved in his mind the terms of his relations with Bertha, Robert, and Beatrice. On meeting Bertha at home, he suddenly quotes a line from The Tempest, which in the Jonathan Cape edition (republished by Granada in Panther Books) appears, with a slight adaptation, as “This isle is full of voices” (E 125).11 In the subsequent Penguin edition it more perfectly reports Shakespeare’s verse, “The isle is full of noises” (E 244), which is explicitly annotated as an evident quotation. Why this reference to The Tempest?
The original Shakespearean passage, contained in Caliban’s description of Prospero’s “magic island” to Stephano, reveals a strange context where sounds, music, and voices mix together with dreams:
CALIBAN: Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; 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 open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
In both versions of Exiles the quotation is evident, as in Shakespeare’s passage “noises” and “voices” are connected and even fused: but what relevance can this allusion have to Joyce’s themes in the play? What can Exiles and The Tempest have in common?
Joyce’s Exiles is obviously related to Othello by Richard’s jealousy: Joyce’s alter ego Richard both fears and seeks Bertha’s betrayal, and, though only psychologically, he kills his Bertha/Desdemona in the sense that, as he admits, he kills her innocence. But at the same time, in a less expected way, Richard/Joyce—anticipating Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, who mirrors himself in the intellectual Prince Hamlet—identifies with Shakespeare’s other distinguished intellectual prince, Prospero.
The quotation from The Tempest is not cursory. Its memory is more deeply embedded than it might at first sight seem in the Joycean setting of tormented couple relationships, apparently distant from the story of wifeless Prospero, concerned mainly with his daughter Miranda’s happy marriage and a redressing of his loss of the Milan dukedom. Comparable aspects in the two plays are mostly linked to an overlapping of Richard with Prospero. Five main correspondences are detectable and will be analyzed: like Prospero on his island, Richard is an exile from a usurped country in need of him; at the same time he is, like Prospero, a distinguished intellectual; like Prospero, he is also gifted with a peculiarly strong psychic mind-power over those who deal with him. Moreover, both male protagonists are proud educators who try to use their intellectual superiority to correct/influence human behavior and the course of history. Both act as all-knowing directors on stage, controlling all characters, but their anxiety for control contrasts with a corresponding anthropological anxiety for freedom from all constraints. To this multiple set of correspondences based on Richard’s identification with Prospero as an intellectual, a possible tempting Irish quality of Shakespeare’s Tempest in Joyce’s eyes can be added, which seems to have also stimulated Joyce’s quotation, implying a parallel link with Caliban as well.
The aspects connecting Prospero and Richard (whose names might share a similar allusion to “prosperity” or to “richness”) extend the impact of The Tempest on Joyce’s Exiles well beyond the space of an occasional quotation. It runs throughout the text, in a continuous indirect comparison, adding to the long underscored complexities of the play, only partly revealed in Joyce’s own notes. Delving into this connection can cast new light on both Exiles and Joyce’s creative process.
The Exiled Intellectual or the Anxiety of Reshaping
Shakespeare’s Prospero is both a prince and a scholar of renown, the proud representative of a flourishing Signoria of the Italian Renaissance, who for his studies’ sake entrusted his brother Antonio with the actual government of his dukedom of Milan, as he explains when revealing his true identity to Miranda:
my state, as at that time
Through all the signories it was the first
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.
(I, iii, 70–78)
To him his books have always been more important than his dukedom. Not only does he own that “Me, poor man, my library was dukedom large enough” (I, ii, 109–10), while describing himself as “neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated to closeness and the bettering of my mind” (I, ii, 89–90), but he also continues to obstinately describe his books as “volumes that I prize above my dukedom” (I, ii, 167–68), although this choice has cost him his dukedom, usurped by his brother, and has forced him into a twelve-year-long exile with Miranda on a desert island. Here his magician’s powers and books have allowed them to survive and to go back to Milan to redress history.
In Exiles Richard Rowan is not, like Prospero, a magician with power over spirits, nor has he lost a dukedom: but he is a daring intellectual, who has lived a self-imposed exile in Italy and has just come back to Dublin and to Ireland, long usurped by the English. He appears constantly concerned with his writing, attached to his books and his study, where he works and even often sleeps. As in Prospero’s case, it is his absorbing intellectual quality that has led to his exile; he is not the victim of a usurping brother, but has departed to serve his own intellectual needs, which were suffocated in contemporary Ireland, culturally constrained by its strict Catholic bigotry and Gaelic nationalism.
Forced to take sides as either an Irish propagandist or a “West Briton” (as Gabriel Conroy is labeled by his university colleague Miss Ivors in The Dead), Joyce, or his counterfigure Richard, felt the necessity to leave Ireland for a European life abroad, to avoid accepting restricted ideological patterns that would have prevented his far-ranging human exploration to express a new “summa anthropologica.” The intellectual self-exile chosen by Richard/Joyce is described in Robert’s article “A Distinguished Irishman.” Here the journalist distinguishes between the economic exile, in search of bread, and the spiritual exile, like himself, seeking a not less necessary “food of the spirit.” A similar need for “spiritual food” has cost Prospero his forced exile.
If Richard repeats some of Prospero’s fundamental predicaments, the implied value systems differ, as do the time and space in which the Shakespearean intellectual and his Joycean counterpart are set. Moreover, while Prospero is, throughout The Tempest, still in exile, although deviating the course of history with his magical powers, in Exiles Richard is already back in Dublin, where he hopes he can contribute to Irish intellectual life and obtain the university post Robert is trying to set up for him. As the title Exiles implies, the experience of being exiled is in Joyce’s play both a real exclusion from his mother country and a persistent psychic condition, investing all characters at different levels, exiled even from themselves, while trying to get free from the fetters of customary behavior and pretenses.
But the intellectual’s exile condition common to Prospero and Richard is completed with other coincidences cumulating on more levels. Prospero’s role as a magician, by whose intellect history can be regenerated, is based on the extraordinary power of his mind. In fact Prospero seems to operate on a psychic “hypnotic” basis. The storm he raises in the opening scene, to have his enemies’ ship stranded on his island so he can force them to repent for their past ill-doings, is revealed as purely mental. His powerful magic leaves no physical mark, neither on the ship—which had apparently split on the coasts of the island, but has remained intact—nor on its passengers and crew, all unscathed, the former still perfect in the ceremonial clothes they had been wearing at a state marriage in Tunis, whence they were voyaging back to Naples. Similarly, Caliban’s punishments for his insubordinations, though perceived physically, show no physical evidence, and the same can be said of the collective punishment Prospero inflicts on his gathered enemies, inducing anguish in them as if they were mad. Prospero’s corrections seem communicated and experienced only mentally, though extended by the action of the spirits he can conjure. Ariel’s help and ubiquitous presence effectively implement Prospero’s pervasive control on the island.
Correspondingly, Joyce’s Richard, while not a magician or spirit conjurer, constantly exerts a similar controlling mental influence on all characters related to him. His mind is shown to direct all those around him, or to act as an effective barrier, which exalts his intellectual responsibility, allowing him a unique role, evident throughout the play in everybody’s dependence on him and mentioned in some exchanges. In the second act, referring to Bertha, even his rival Robert owns, “You are so strong that you attract me even through her.” To Richard’s retort, “I am weak,” Robert answers, “You are the incarnation of strength” (E 189), adding, after Richard’s new protests on his hands being weaker than Robert’s, that Richard’s strength is of another kind. In his own notes to the play, Joyce defines Richard’s influence on Bertha as a “mystical” or “spiritual fact,” but a real defense that Robert must admit (E 345).
As an exile and a distinguished intellectual with unusual mind power, Richard shares important traits with Prospero, the concomitance of which confirms the extended memory of The Tempest in Joyce’s play, surfacing in the explicit quotation but “spreading” throughout the play: the more so as the aims of the two exiled intellectuals’ mind power are in a sense analogous.
The cluster of aspects related to the protagonist’s mind power in Exiles leads to an ethical reshaping that repeats Prospero’s anxious efforts to use his intellectual force to redirect human behavior and correct history, though with no illusion as to easy conversions. In The Tempest, while Alonso, the king of Naples, repents, Antonio and Sebastian, the main villains, are forced to give in but appear impervious to Prospero’s psychic reshaping. As for Richard’s mind power, it promotes a parallel psychic experimentation, since Exiles is engaged in an anthropological exploration of new types of relationships, in couples or between friends, that can allow more emotional freedom, less psychological constraint, and a deeper analysis of motivations.
This search, shared by Richard and Robert in their youth, must be pursued against social ties and expectations, but ironically opens to the risks of self-delusion, of an assumed ethical superiority hiding base compromises and uncertainties. Richard finds both noble and ignoble truths in his mind for ambiguously pushing Bertha not to reject Robert’s wooing, leading him on to expose himself further.
The sexual complexities of this choice (both hetero- and homosexual, as Robert is attracted by both Bertha and Richard, whom he could in a sense reach through the mediation of Bertha’s body) find no reference in Shakespeare’s Prospero. Yet Miranda’s father is no less ethically polemical toward the society to which he refers.
If his brother’s Machiavellian betrayal has been traumatic, Alonso’s logic of dynastic marriage, evident in his daughter Claribel’s political union with the king of Tunis, is reversed by Prospero, who allows his daughter’s and Ferdinand’s free choice. This connects with a set of values expressed in the marriage masque he offers the couple.
The masque is not just an elegant spectacle but an ideological manifesto, rejecting the Mars/Venus logic for the couple (Venus and Cupid must be absent) while offering a country background instead of court uses and customs, seen as ethically dangerous and in fact already objected to in Prospero’s evaluation of Miranda’s better education far away from any court.
This leads to exploration of a further common theme, education, so important in both Exiles and The Tempest, though in Joyce obviously updated, not without risks, to the complexities of twentieth-century culture and expectations, and at the same time rooted in the author’s personal experience, to him the source of real art.
Education and Reinvention
Prospero’s pride in Miranda’s education is not to be undervalued, nor is Richard’s Pygmalion role with Bertha. Describing to Miranda his past as both Duke of Milan and scholar, Prospero states that on the island where they have been exiled for twelve years (but not deprived of volumes from his library that are so important for him) he has taken fond care of her education:
Here I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princes can that have more time
For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.
(I, ii, 172–74)
Why this polemical tone in Prospero’s words, not only extolling his educational work, the quality of his scholarship and dedication, both better than that of “tutors not so careful” to be found in courts, but actually disowning the court ambience as scarcely an appreciable educational context, where “vainer hours” can spoil a good education? Why, compared with courts, is their desert island to be preferred?
The Milan court appears, indeed, a dangerous place. Here Prospero’s brother Antonio, Miranda’s uncle—already favored by a more powerful role than allowed by his social position, thanks to Prospero’s trust in him for the government of the state—chose to betray both his brother and his country to gain the title of Duke of Milan. Making a political alliance with Alonso, he subjected free Milan to political dependence and to payment of tributes to Naples in order to obtain the aid necessary for a coup d’état and be accepted as the new duke, in spite of Prospero’s prestige and popular support. Nor had Antonio hesitated to virtually murder both his brother and niece: he had ordered them to be taken out to sea and abandoned to die there on “a rotten carcase of a butt, not rigged, / nor tackle, sail, nor mast” (I, ii, 146–47). Only Gonzalo’s help and Prospero’s own magical powers have allowed father and daughter to land on an island and survive. Machiavellian intrigues are the first trait characterizing the court, as Miranda appears to have already learned, though not yet aware of her father’s previous position in Milan. In fact, when taught about her past by Prospero, she marvels that Antonio did not have both her father and herself killed immediately on the night he took possession of Milan with the help of a Neapolitan army: she has learned her lessons of history well, and Prospero must explain that his people’s love for him had imposed on Antonio a more devious way of getting rid of them.
But it is interesting that while Antonio’s dealings with his brother are repeatedly defined as “unnatural,” some ethical relativism in state politics has indeed been taught to Miranda. In the chess game scene, she is ready to teach Ferdinand that a prince must take care of the better interests of his country:
Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess
MIRANDA: Sweet lord, you play me false.
FERDINAND: No, my dearest love,
I would not for the world.
MIRANDA: Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.
(V, i, 172–75)
If life at court must be political, it must not become inhuman as in some courts.
Polemical criticism of the court ambience appears then evident in the marriage masque: why should Prospero choose a humble country setting, fields with peasants or “sunburned sickle-men” (IV, i, 134), and nymphs or naiads rather than a refined spectacular court ceremony and a more elegant, refined court setting, possibly with a rich architectural background, like the Laurentian Library where Peter Greenaway chose to film Prospero’s Books, his version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, starring Gielgud as Prospero? In fact, Prospero is not only stigmatizing tragic court intrigues, after all not a daily practice, but criticizing the court life style itself and its “vain hours”: a criticism later corroborated by a rejection of easy sexual promiscuity, common in courts, and implicit in his recommendations to Prince Ferdinand not to have sexual intercourse with Miranda before marriage. If the recommendation in the context given is unrealistic, as has been noted, it is still important as an ideological stance, consistent with Prospero’s description of his education and his avoidance of the court ambience in the masque.
What Prospero is rejecting at several levels is an outlook on life connected to courts, which to him are not obvious seats of superior refinement, as might be expected—especially with reference to a Renaissance court of prestige like Milan. Rather an ethically negative model, court life is less desirable than the country lifestyle shown in the masque, so highly appreciated by Ferdinand, who comments “Let me live here ever, / So rare a wondered father and a wife / Makes this place paradise” (IV, i, 122–24).
These choices are no coincidence and are perfectly consistent if we admit that Prospero is taking a stance on a set of values at the core of his education, innovating as to common expectations and in line with Ferdinand’s choice of Miranda, who is apparently, when they first meet, a simple maid with no status, though with exceptional qualities and an exceptional education.
An outlook based on individual achievement, rather than inherited position and social privilege, here merges with the moral requirements advocated by what Lawrence Stone has described as “the Country ideology,” a current of thought critical of court customs and disseminated throughout Shakespeare’s plays,33 embraced in particular by Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, whose love marriage in 1598, below his social status and against the queen’s favor, had cost him a fortune and long exclusion from court and state careers.44
Stressing the moral superiority of the country as opposed to the court, the Country ideology linked virtue, honesty, the preferential or “elective couple,” with nationalism, individual liberty, Protestant or Puritan values, criticizing court and urban corruption and pointing to the country as both a physical and moral place. It developed a political program in favor of Parliament and against royal absolutism, shared with three further currents of thought identified by Stone: Puritanism, the Common Law and Skepticism, represented by Bacon’s philosophy. These ideologies were accompanied by a concomitant “educational revolution” that brought about the growth of a professional class, especially lawyers, and by a degree of social mobility, contributing to the development of what Stone calls the “rising gentry,” joined by some aristocrat allies like the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Southampton. At the same time the Country ideology went back to the Roman classics and to Virgil’s Georgics, sustained at the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, particularly the latter.55
The ideological nature of both the educational background and the “elective couple” choice in The Tempest may not have been easy to detect in Joyce’s time, as literary criticism was not inclined to stress it. Stone’s description of the ideological currents of thought in Shakespeare’s time was only to appear in 1972, to be more recently reconfirmed at the end of the twentieth century, after a highly controversial debate concerning the causes of the English Revolution of 1642 as long developing in political opposition since Elizabeth’s last years and Shakespeare’s age. But, at the same time, Joyce’s was a highly personal way of reading Shakespeare, independent of current criticism (most famously with Hamlet), while his own outlook on the couple’s emancipation from social constrictions could well be seen to connect with and “adjourn” the polemical stances of The Tempest. Joyce’s personal choice of a hotel maid as his life companion, below his social middle-class milieu, scandalously against all expectations in his family and among his friends (a “class transgression” repeated in Richard’s choices in Exiles) was in a sense similar to Southampton’s, while “prolonging” for his age the matrimonial, ethical, and educational polemics embedded in The Tempest. In any case, Prospero’s exalted educational role must have attracted Joyce’s attention, as he considered himself a young woman’s successful educator.
In Exiles, Richard’s role with Bertha as an educator is indeed repeatedly exalted by Robert: “She is yours, your work” (E 189), and again “You have made her all that she is. A strange and wonderful personality” (E 195). To Richard, self-accusingly complaining he has killed “the virginity of her soul,” Robert impatiently retorts, “Well lost! What would she be without you?”; and to Richard’s answer, “I tried to give her a new life,” he confirms, “And you have. A new and rich life” (E 196).
Both a proud Pygmalion and a self-ironic critic of the effects of his education, Richard is well aware that his experimental human outlook and innovative attempts carry emotional costs. He is convinced of the necessity of the responsibility he is assuming for a new morality and of the importance of his daring choices to be inherited by the younger generation, represented in the play by his eight-year-old son Archie. This inheritance, however, is openly discussed by Richard and Robert only in a fragment of dialogue now at Cornell (E 366), but excluded from the final text. Here the journalist and the writer speculate on Archie’s future “type of humanity,” uncertain whether he will choose Robert’s more careless forms of freedom or Richard’s more doubt-tormented way. Archie’s attitude is defined by Robert as “creedless, lawless, fearless”: a breaking away from the old bonds is seen as a necessary achievement that Richard and Robert are both pursuing.
Richard’s has been a lifelong battle against current bourgeois morality and sexuality, started in his youth with Robert, who speaks with some of the overtones of Nietzsche’s and D’Annunzio’s moral defiance of a youthful and passionate “battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world” (E 201). Richard, who has chosen to run away with Bertha and live with her and their son in what to his mother was a condition of sin and shame, but to him is a free union to be constantly reaccepted and not constrained by religion or a contract (just as Joyce had done with Nora Barnacle, whom he married much later, only for economic convenience), has now come to a more problematic awareness of a freedom difficult to define. “To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness” (E 265–66) is Richard’s declared choice with Bertha, but, taking a distance from his old friend Robert for a more solitary exploration, he has realized how difficult it is to live up to a fully consistent drive and consciousness. His search has led him to acknowledge inner ambiguities, to live the wounds of doubt and double attitudes, to disclose an inner landscape from which later on Joyce’s close friend Samuel Beckett, a generation younger, will in his turn make his own difficult start.
A similar torment of inner contradictions appears evident in Beckett’s analogous experiments in his first complete and autobiographical play, Eleutheria, which ironically describes young Victor/Beckett in Paris, desperately trying to find his full “freedom,” as suggested in the Greek title, by breaking away from all moral and emotional fetters tying him to family and friends, but ending in a helpless crisis. A comparison between the passages on moral freedom in Exiles and Beckett’s Eleutheria would confirm Beckett’s inheritance of Joyce’s difficult attempts at a moral reshaping of relationships.
But The Tempest is also characterized by three striking cries for freedom, verging on rebellion: the Boatswain’s against the authority of the king of Naples and the duke of Milan, aboard the ship in the first scene; Ariel’s insistent request for freedom from Prospero’s service; and Caliban’s intrigue with Stephano and Trinculo against Prospero’s rule of the island.66
A direct line seems to link Prospero to Richard, or Shakespeare to Joyce, in a similar effort to meet the taxing task of redefining changing moral adaptation, recasting aspects of that “invention of the human” for the western world, which in Harold Bloom’s words has been Shakespeare’s legacy, to be revisited by each generation and constantly sought or added to in all major literature. Yet, while as an intellectual Richard identifies with Prospero, the words he speaks are Caliban’s. Is there another parallel link connecting Joyce and Caliban?
The Irish Isle
The geographical identity of Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest is difficult to establish, as is Caliban’s nature and educability. Caliban speaks the best English in the play, which he has so well learned from Prospero and Miranda; he appreciates music, as a fine gentleman always does in Shakespeare’s canon, and has a poetic love for his island and its landscapes; and finally, he contradicts Prospero’s opinion of his “ineducability” (due to Caliban’s attempt to have sex with Miranda) by appearing ready to repent for scheming against Prospero’s life and to be “wise hereafter” “and seek for grace” (V, i, 294–95). By contrast, Antonio and Sebastian appear beyond redemption.
This of course contradicts Prospero’s repeated disparagement of Caliban as the son of the wicked witch Sycorax and the devil himself, and as such not receptive to the positive values of education. In fact, educators, even good ones, can be mistaken, as Shakespeare ironically shows in act 5, contrasting, within a few lines, Prospero’s disclaiming of Caliban and Caliban’s self-correction. Prospero’s mistake seems to confirm the necessity of avoiding excessive power in one man, even one of superior qualities like Prospero, who in the play had already wisely renounced his magician’s powers, breaking his magic staff and destroying his magic book after achieving his ethical aims and his political task of redressing history. Similarly, Richard, though in full control of the whole range of characters, humbly gives in, leaving others to their choices after he has used his mind power to question problems with them.
But there is more to Caliban’s role in The Tempest that may have attracted Joyce. Caliban is described by Prospero as “disproportioned in his manners as in his shape” (V, i, 290), yet his physical aspect remains undetermined, except for one surprising detail: he is “freckled” (I, ii, 283), which of course excludes the possibility of his being a black man, as some criticism, especially postcolonial, has tried to make him. Adding to this detail the one physical detail given for his mother Sycorax, described as “blue-eyed”77 (I, ii, 269), the combination of blue eyes and freckles in the mother/son genealogical line may suggest something very close to Joyce’s experience: a human physical typology, possibly associated with red hair, widespread among the Irish. This typology was also well known to at least some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, especially to Shakespeare’s patrons, the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Southampton, after their 1599 military expedition to Ireland to fight Tyrone’s rebellion. Ireland has indeed been the one case of colonization in Europe, and in Shakespeare’s England many considered the Irish as a subhuman “vile race,” just as a disappointed Prospero regarded Caliban.
The colonial problem is evoked in The Tempest through the allusion to Bermuda, the island reached by Ariel in one of his errands for Prospero, but also the island made famous in 1610 (the year The Tempest was written) by William Strachey’s True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, a description of the shipwreck in Bermuda of the Sea Venture, part of a naval expedition financed by the Virginia Company to sustain the recently established English colony of Jamestown in Virginia. But in 1609 another colonial event was taking place: the Plantation of Ulster in Ireland, established under the king’s direct control.
James I, whose name was given to the Virginia colony established in 1607, was eager to colonize Ireland in a similar way with a number of Scottish Presbyterians and other religious dissenters, whose emigration to Ireland would have solved the old problem of disorder on the border between Scotland and England. In Ireland, lands were confiscated from the Irish, who were reduced to slavery just like Caliban.
In fact, Shakespeare’s allusion to colonialism in The Tempest may well be double, both in space and concept. Whereas in Bermuda or in Jamestown the colonial problem was not a problem of relationships with the colonized, but rather of the control of the English colonizers by their mother country (Bermuda was a desert island, and in Jamestown the main problem was the internal organization of the English colony under the appointed authorities), in Ireland the colonizers had enslaved the local population. If in The Tempest the boatswain’s rebellion in the opening sea storm scene can recall the rebellion of The Sea Venture colonizers against their authorities, Caliban’s subjugation and rebellion can rather suggest the Irish condition in the new Ulster Plantation.
The Irish connotation of The Tempest, generally ignored by criticism, may have appeared to Joyce in two ways: through his knowledge of Irish history and folklore, which he would later use so extensively in Finnegans Wake. In fact, if Caliban can well be a colonized Irishman, Ariel can well evoke Irish mythology in his connection with tree trunks (he has been freed from imprisonment in a cloven pine tree by Prospero) and with weather control (in the sea storm scene, raised by him on Prospero’s order). An Irish flavor in Shakespeare’s play may have stimulated Joyce.
In “Scylla and Charybdis” (U 196), Stephen mentions Caliban as “Patsy Caliban, our American cousin,” an obvious allusion to Irish immigration in America, proving that to Joyce Caliban had an Irish quality he himself shared. If as an intellectual Richard acts like a Prospero, at the same time as an Irishman he also identifies with Caliban. In fact, Richard/Joyce speaks some of Caliban’s words and, like him, a choice English acquired from strangers. Shakespeare’s isle seems to have turned into Joyce’s Irish island, full of noises and voices, waiting to be reshaped into his own creative “consciousness of his race”: as in Joyce’s program in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to flourish through a European or Western rethinking of modernity.
1. The 1921 Jonathan Cape edition of Exiles was republished in 1979 by Granada Publishing/Panther Books, the edition referred to here.
2. The Tempest edition used is The Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Orgel (Oxford University Press, 1987).
3. For its presence, for instance, in As You Like It, see my article “Country Time As She Likes It” (Restivo 2004). For its presence in The Merchant of Venice, see “Shylock and Equity in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice” (Restivo 2007).
4. See Akrigg (1968). An extended reading of The Tempest and its historical background in the light of the contemporary ideological debate, both cultural and political, in the sense here referred to, can be found in my article “The Tempest and History: Pre-enlightenment Outlooks” (Restivo 2010).
5. From Lawrence Stone’s perspective the Country ideology evolved into one of the prerequisites of the 1642 revolution, while in the eighteenth century it grew into a real party (Stone 1972).
6. As discussed at length in “The Tempest and History” (Restivo 2010).
7. Prospero’s description of Sycorax as the “blue-eyed hag” who “was hither brought with child” has embarrassed critics, who have tried to turn the blue eyes of the witch pregnant with Caliban into the supposed “blue eyelids” of a pregnant woman, as usually reported in the play’s editions. But the effort to erase this detail appears inconsistent with the straight formulation of the passage, clearly mentioning blue eyes and not eyelids, while it also ignores Caliban’s specific freckles (why should they be mentioned?) and pays no attention to the dramatic background of the 1609 Irish Plantation of Ulster.