Shakespeare and the Masters Need to Civilize his Victims

             Edward Said quotes George Lamming describing Shakespeare's Caliban: "he is the excluded; that which is eternally below possibility... he is seen as an occasion, a state of existence which can be appropriated and exploited to the purposes of anothers own development", in short, Caliban is the European image of the 'tabula rasa' of the mindless Native American, the slave, the Carib Islander; the brute repulsive fish like animal of the new world, that needs Prospero, the knower,  the technological magician, prototype of the 'expert' professional, to exploit him for his own good: to teach him 'virtue', the morality of the masters, and the cruel benefits of civilization. The Empire of the Intellect needs victims to prove its own virtue and high mindedness.

             The Tempest first played in 1611. Scholars speculate that Shakespeare was using accounts of the settlements in Jamestown, Virginia or of an English shipwreck off Bermuda in 1609 as well as accounts of Magellan's voyage. Some have suggested that Shakespeare took both the ideal of a new world Commonwealth, suggested in the play. as well as the idea of Caliban from Montaigne, perhaps his essay "On Cannibals". Caliban may be an anagram for cannibal.[1]

            Shakespeare's Caliban represents the native American as an essentialized, primitive, animalistic  pre-Sambo like character who is stupid, rebellious and in need of control by his 'betters' through violence and relentless correction.  Shakespeare's view echos that of other Europeans eager to justify European righteousness and supremacy. Oviedo, a Conquistador involved in the original atrocities on Hispanola, wrote that the Indians are:

 naturally lazy and vicious, melancholic, cowardly and in general a lying shiftless people...They are idolatrous, libidinous and commit sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen idols and commit bestial obscenities. [Their] skulls are so thick and hard that the Spaniards had   to take care not to strike them on the head lest their swords be broken[2]

             Oviedo writes elsewhere that "God is going to destroy [the Indians] soon" and later, after all the Indians have been murdered or worked to death on Hispanola- "Satan has now been expelled from the Island...most of the Indians are dead...who can deny that the use of gunpowder against pagans is the burning of incense to Our Lord".  This is much the same attitude taken by Himmler about the Jews. He called the effort of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews, the "struggle of the plague bacillus against the healthy body" [3] The Jews are "the refuse of humanity, the carrion of our social life, bloodsuckers, exploiters- in short, Jews" [4] Himmler saw the Jews as polluters of the race, just as African slaves of North and South America were viewed by the upper classes and many of the lower white or Spanish classes. Yet Himmler saw himself and Hitler as the merciful benefactors of mankind, full of benevolence and "moral responsibility".. Even as recent an historian as U.B. Philips could write that the Negro was characterized by " a genius [that was] imitative...a courteous acceptance of subordination,...a readiness for loyalty of the feudal sort".[5] Phillips writes that slave Masters were "benevolent in intent and beneficial in effect" just as Nixon was "beneficial in intent" when he bombed Cambodia to save it for Freedom.[6] Writing in the early part of the 20th century Phillips is repeating white stereotypes of the Black man that go back to Shakespeare and before. He is also invoking the tendency of Europeans to use essentializations or Platonized stereotypes of Others, reducing them to a two dimensional image, while yet seeing themselves as "beneficent" agents who are morally responsible and who do no more than their duty as god fearing Christians and businessmen involved in the morally neutral activity of free trade. God was a white man, probably a white philosopher like Hegel himself, and as Hegel said, those who do not obey "gods plan" are "negative worthless existence".  Men of non-European races are "negative, worthless existence" . The Europeans did not enslave other Europeans, however they might work them to death; one had to be 'red' or 'black' to be a slave.

            Prospero, the 'Master', of Caliban,  full with the awareness of his own beneficence accepts the 'white man's burden' of instructing, torturing  and forcing work upon the rebellious Caliban until he submits. Shakespeare is writing a play that invokes an old pattern, still largely in existence now. The pattern defines how the European or American sees himself as the wise, civilized, burdened but superior being,  having to force work and submission on the lazy rebellious heathen for his or her own good. The executives and managers view workers and union members as greedy, lazy threats to their deserved profits. Welfare mothers must be forced to work or be turned out on the street. Prospero's 'magic' is a metaphor for Western man's self-satisfied and arrogant approval of our own wealth and technological wizardry. Such patronizing, neocolonial classism and racism is hidden behind the current term of "developing countries", for instance. Guatemala must become like America. The US will help them by exploiting them and paying off the military dictatorship that rules the country to be sure its people 'improve'.
           Shakespeare’s support for the notion of the “divine right of kings” is exampled in such plays as the Tempest, Measure for Measure and implicitly, Macbeth.  One cannot  blame Shakespeare too much for being a man of his times. But one wishes he had been less willing to curry the favor of such as Queen Elizabeth and King James, who very much favored the notion of the Divine Right of Kings, and even wrote a treatise on it called Basilikon Doron. Shakespeare’s beauty of language and profound understanding of human beings is nevertheless nested in notions that were fatal to native Americans and Africans. The arbitrary notion of the divine right of kings slowly changes into the willingness of corporations to exploit human labor mercilessly and ruin whole parts of earth’s biological communities.

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