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Caliban and the fen demons of Lincolnshire: the Englishness of Shakespeare's Tempest

2012; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450918.2012.705882

1745-0926

Todd Andrew Borlik,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

Abstract Since Edmond Malone first scented the presence of the Bermuda pamphlets wafting from its pages back in 1808, The Tempest has been increasingly framed as a play about the European encounter with the "New World." With the advent of post-colonial theory it has become a critical commonplace to regard Caliban's enslavement as a prescient exposé of the "victimization of Third World peoples." Yet Jerry Brotton raises a significant caveat when he claims such readings have spawned a "geographically restrictive view of the play" and exaggerated the scale of English settlement in early seventeenth-century America. Colonialism, however, is not exclusively une entreprise d'outre-mer. A colonial dynamic can also arise within a nation-state when the centre invades the periphery, or an urban elite seizes the communal wilds of the rural poor. If Shakespeare cast one eye across the Atlantic when he drew his servant monster, his gaze also encompassed creatures much closer to home. Specifically, I will argue that the chimera known as Caliban is in part inspired by legends of Lincolnshire fen spirits, and that his plight comments on the displacement of local inhabitants by land reclamation projects. To buttress this argument, the article proposes that Shakespeare drew upon a lost play based on the life of Anglo-Saxon hermit and fen-dweller St Guthlac when writing The Tempest. In this hagiography, a learned hermit travels to a remote island surrounded by fens where he is tormented by misshapen demons and confronted by a murderous servant, but overcomes them with the aid of his supernatural powers. Recovering this lost source will further clarify how The Tempest participates in early modern debates over colonization and religion, as well as the destruction of local wetland ecologies. In the process, the article stakes out a via media for an early modern ecocriticism, balancing its presentist agenda with due attention to the environmental matrix of Shakespeare's England. Keywords: The TempestEcocriticismFensSt GuthlacSaint's PlayPost-Colonialism Acknowledgements This essay benefited greatly from the cogent feedback I received on an early draft from two anonymous reviewers. Notes 1. For some landmark works on The Tempest and colonialism, see Octave Mannoni, Leo Marx (34–72), Leslie Fielder (230–240), Stephen Greenblatt (16–39), Paul Brown, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, John Gillies, and Alden and Virginia Vaughan. More recent perspectives can be found in the collection edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman – particularly the essays by Vaughan, Gillies, and Patricia Seed. On the appropriation of The Tempest by modern Anglophone and Francophone authors, see Rob Nixon, Vaughan and Vaughan (144–71), Chantal Zabus (1–101), and Jonathan Goldberg. 2. Brotton seizes on the allusions to The Aeneid to recover The Tempest's literal Mediterranean context. He reiterates his argument (with a glance at Renaissance tapestries) in The Tempest and Its Travels, and is seconded by Andrew C. Hess. David Scott Kastan also views the post-colonial interpretation as overblown and highlights the "European courtly context" (183–197). 3. My approach is informed by Richard Helgerson's astute reading of Drayton's Poly-Olbion. 4. On the "infracontexts" of The Tempest, see Barbara Mowatt. 5. The case against Balfour has been outlined by Neil Philips (156). But a research project is currently underway to defend Balfour's veracity. The author, Maureen James, has done extensive research on Lincolnshire folklore at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language at the University of Sheffield and the Institute for Folklore and Dialect Studies at the University of Leeds. See her website, "Research to Date: Telling History." Web. 2011. 6. The word "Tiddy" is a dialect word that means "tiny." This fits with the elderly woman later describing the bogey as the size of a three-year-old. The first recorded usage of "tiddy" in the OED dates from 1781, although it is conceivably much older. While the shape-shifting Ariel can squeeze inside a cowslip's bell, there is no corresponding evidence to indicate that Caliban is likewise diminutive. The text never suggests that Caliban has long white hair or an unkempt beard. Nor does "grandfatherly" seem a fit adjective for Shakespeare's cantankerous servant monster. Nevertheless, due to the ambiguous or conflicting nature of the descriptions we receive about Caliban, the objections listed above are far from definitive. It is possible to imagine Caliban as small in stature, as Brinsley Nicholson did over a century ago. In 1821 Malone reported the stage tradition that Caliban "is usually represented with long shaggy hair" (15: 13), a tradition that survived into the twentieth century: see, for instance, the portraits of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as a Neanderthal-like Caliban in his celebrated 1904 production. Tiddy Mun reportedly wears a gray gown, while Shakespeare dresses Caliban in a "gaberdine" (2.2.38), a kind of loose overcoat. Tiddy Mun walks slowly, as does the otiose Caliban whom the impatient Prospero calls a "tortoise" (1.2.318). Prior to learning English, Caliban can only "gabble" like a beast; Tiddy Mun is nameless and his voice is conflated with the inhuman soundscape of the swamp. In Waterland, Graham Swift describes the stagnant pool in the enclosures as exuding "a smell which is half man and half fish" (4), and a lifelong inhabitant of the fens as stinking of "fish slime, mud and peat smoke" (11). A similar ichthyoid odour clings to Caliban (2.1.25). 7. For Caliban as Native American or African, see Note 1. On Caliban and exotic fauna and marine life, see Marina Warner and Edward M. Test. Meanwhile, David Baker, Barbara Fuchs, and Dympna Callaghan (97–138) all examine Caliban as a caricature of the wild Irish. 8. K.M. Briggs Faeries (54–55). In the chapter aptly entitled "Forgotten Gods and Nature Spirits," Briggs reprints and modernizes an excerpt from Balfour's Tiddy Mun story. 9. Kim Zarins places the scene alongside ancient legends representing the man on the moon as a rural labourer punished for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. 10. On the etymology and literary origins of Sycorax, see Stephen Orgel (19–20), and Warner (100–05). 11. The tale, or this particular telling of it, then, may not date from "the days of universal credulity" as Balfour supposes, but from intensified efforts to drain the fens in the early Stuart era. In one of the few scholarly studies on the legend, Darwin Horn interprets Tiddy Mun's curse as an etiological fable about the actual environmental damage inflicted by the draining. 12. When King James visited Stamford, Lincolnshire in 1603, he was greeted by a party of fenmen on stilts that to one observer "seemed like the Patagones" (Aitken 1:103–04). 13. Residents of the fens carried on a lucrative trade exporting sedge, willow, and osiers to market-towns throughout the East Midlands just as Caliban must "fetch in … wood" (1.2.314) for Prospero. In 1618 efforts to drain the fens would be opposed by the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, who feared that siphoning off the water would render the Cam and other shipping routes unnavigable during the summer (J.R. Ravensdale 31, 54–57). 14. On this textual crux, see the footnote in Kermode's Arden edition, 97. 15. Egan looks at strange weather and the harvesting of Irish timber (145–51); Estok examines the confluence of colonial and anthropocentric discourses (103–05). I briefly consider Caliban as a dispossessed fen-dweller (Borlik 4). 16. The notable exception to this neglect of the fens is Ken Hiltner (133–55). His account, however, focuses on the late seventeenth century and does not touch on Shakespeare. 17. The information in this paragraph is indebted to the following sources: H.C. Darby, Keith Lindley, John F. Richards (214–21), and Hiltner (131–55). The letter from Boston was included in Burleigh's collection of State Papers catalogued in the Bibliotheca manuscripta Lansdowniana, 2 vols. (London: 1807), 1:31. 18. The Italian fascists eventually drained the Pontine Marshes in 1934, although a small section was preserved and renamed Parco Nazionale del Circeo, after the Greek sorceress Circe. 19. John Dee, Questions and observations about draining and imbanking the Fens, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ashmolean MSS 242/45. Dee also authored a treatise entitled "The True Cause, and account (not vulgar) of Floods and Ebbs." See Peter French (32–33, 214). 20. Lynn Thorndike conducted the first serious investigation into the continuity between magic and science, although Paolo Rossi's book on Bacon remains a classic. The most thorough study of the subject in relation to The Tempest is by B.J. Sokol, who compares Prospero to Thomas Harriot and Cornelius Drebbel. See also W.C. Curry (148–55), C.J. Sisson, Orgel (20–23), and Denise Albanese (59–91). 21. See The Great Fen Project. Web. 12 October 2011. 22. One noteworthy exception is Latham (151–58). 23. Bertram Colgrave's bilingual edition is the standard scholarly text of Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac. I have chosen, however, to follow Clinton Albertson's translation of Colgrave's Latin text where it adheres more faithfully to the original (165–219). Unless otherwise noted, this edition will be hereafter cited in the text. 24. Michael Saenger, however, presents a strong case that Caliban's costume was recycled from a royal pageant on the Thames devised by Anthony Munday to celebrate Prince Henry's investiture. 25. "Monster," the word most often hurled at Caliban, is rather unhelpfully generic, and probably indicates some kind of physical deformity; the list of dramatis personae from the 1623 Folio tells us as much: "Caliban, a salvage and deformed slave." But apart from the "long nails" (2.2.160) Caliban himself mentions, the text remains ambiguous as to the abnormality that demarcates him as a subhuman "mooncalf" (2.2.128) and "abominable" (2.2.150). 26. William Strachey's attempt to discount the popular misconception that the tropical islands of the New World "can be no habitation for men, but are given over to devils and wicked spirits" may have reminded Shakespeare of similar legends about Crowland. Strachey's letter is reprinted in an appendix to the Arden edition (Kermode, 137). The story of Guthlac's enslaving demons, which Colgrave believes is based on "local tradition," is found in Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon. The Latin text was Englished by John of Trevisa in the late fourteenth century and printed in 1482 by William Caxton (Colgrave 22). 27. This addition to the story – found in a thirteenth-century manuscript at University Library, Cambridge – perhaps originates from the psalter displayed as one of Guthlac's relics at Crowland Abbey. Alternatively, it could be based on the episodes in Felix's life in which crows steal a parchment and drop it in the fens. On accretions to the Guthlac legend, see John Black. 28. Shakespeare may have become enamoured with the name Prospero while acting in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor (1598). Alternatively, he may also have stumbled across it in Thomas' History of Italy (1549), which features a Genoese Duke named Prospero Adorno. 29. For a good overview of the furore enkindled by White's essay, see Robin Atfield. 30. Colgrave is sceptical that a Celtic population still inhabited the fens in the eight century, but cites a number of scholars who do subscribe to this theory (1–2, 185–86). 31. See Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy (155–205). 32. Cotton appears to have bound Felix's Vita Guthlaci in a copy of Higden's Polychronicon, a work of interest to Protestant antiquarians. Camden also consulted Henry of Avranches' life of Guthlac in Cotton's manuscript Vitellius D. xiv (Summit 172–83). 33. The most thorough monograph on the subject is Gary Allen's Shakespeare and the Saint's Life Tradition, which looks primarily at Pericles, Measure for Measure, and As You Like It. There are a number of other scattered studies on medieval miracle play motifs in Renaissance drama: Howard Felperin reads Pericles as an homage to the genre, while Helen Wilcox does the same for All's Well that Ends Well. Others have argued that Elizabethan drama travesties the Catholic drama: Susan Snyder has interpreted Doctor Faustus as an "Inverted Saint's Life," and Albert Tricomi argues that Joan la Pucelle receives a similar treatment in 1 Henry VI. David Bevington remarks that the saint play left its fingerprints on Shakespeare's Pericles and The Winter's Tale but says nothing of The Tempest (663). 34. Emphasizing the context of the All Saints Day performance, John Bender reads The Tempest as a ritual drama marking the seasonal transition from fall to winter. King James' interest in the occult and the association between Hallowmas and spirits may have further prompted Shakespeare to include supernatural beings in the dramatis personae. The day after All Saints was All Souls Day, a holiday not only for remembering the dead but also – as Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard III – for clemency and forgiveness. These virtues are of course crucial to the resolution of The Tempest, which further suggests that Shakespeare wrote the play with the holiday performance in mind. 35. See also Richard Wilson's reading of The Tempest as a plea for religious tolerance in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot (206–29). 36. Only four saints' plays survived the fires of the Reformation: two from Digby and two from Cornwall. Yet there are documented records of over 20 more, and that number represents the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Of these 20 saint plays, 5 – St Laurence, St Susannah, St Clara, St James, and King Robert of Sicily – have a provenance in Lincolnshire; another devoted to St Thomas Beckett took place in nearby King's Lynn. Since E.K. Chambers compiled his Appendix W in The Medieval Stage it has been apparent that non-cyclical drama thrived in East Midlands (the epicentre of Guthlac's cult). Of the 127 medieval plays documented by Chambers, 48, or roughly 40%, originate in the four counties of East Anglia. That number has now doubled according to John C. Coldewey (189). 37. The information on the saint's life is indebted to Grantley, Wickham, Wasson, and Shell. 38. Although I stumbled across Sharpe's book after this essay was substantially completed, my research on the genealogy of the surname Cutlack strengthens his case. Sharpe never mentions parallels with The Tempest, which suggest that Shakespeare's rivalry with the Admiral's Men continued to simmer even near the end of his career. Henslowe's entry on Cutlack is reprinted in Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites, 203. 39. Roslyn Knutson, "Lost Plays Database." Web. 2011. 40. Although Knutson's website does not make the connection, there is in fact a record of a lost play based on Belinus and Brennus performed in 1610 (Harbage and Schoenbaum, 100–01). Given that Elizabethan dramatists placed little premium on historical accuracy, we cannot rule out the possibility that the legendary characters of Guthlac and Guicthlack could have been conflated. If so, the skimpy details of the saint's prior life as a youthful warrior may have been fleshed out with material from the life of the bellicose Danish king. 41. The spelling "Cutlake" occurs in John Bale's 1538 play The Three Laws and Robert Fabyon's 1533 Fabyon's cronycle. 42. On the Cutlack/Guthlac connection, see C.W. Bardsley (455–56) and Elizabeth McDougall. There is even a character from the Anglian fens named "Cutlack" in Graham Swift's novel Waterland (84). 43. Guilpin mentions Cutlack in the same line as St Dunstan, which furnishes another clue pointing to the eponymous character's identity as a saintly magician rather than a Danish conqueror. 44. In his 1821 Variorum edition of Shakespeare's works, Malone records a stage-tradition about Caliban's costume: "The dress worn by this character, which doubtless was originally prescribed by the poet himself, and has been continued, I believe, since his time, is a large bearskin, or the skin of some other animal" (15: 13). Where Malone gathered this bit of theatre-lore is unknown. The closure of the theatres during the Civil War makes the survival of original staging practices from Shakespeare's time unlikely. But Felix's statement that Guthlac "passed all the days of his solitary life clad in the garment of animal skins" (185) suggests there might be some truth to Malone's claim. If true, it would provide another visual cue linking Caliban to the saintly fen-dweller.