spirit to command – they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
The Tempest (III.ii.81–9)
It seems that Stanley and the other early travellers arrived in Africa expecting to find superstitious and violent natives who demanded that they burn their ‘magic’ books, for this image of the ‘savage’ had resided at the heart of English culture for centuries.
We are unlikely ever to be able to sort the truth of these accounts from the fantasies derived from the books that the explorers carried with them. Yet the truth of these stories is very much secondary to the purpose Stanley and others evidently expected them to serve. Instead of being straightforward accounts of what had happened in Africa, these stories form a kind of argument for how the ‘Dark Continent’ and its peoples should be understood. If Shakespeare is the universal genius of man, and his worth is evident to all humans, then those who do not appreciate him are, by extrapolation, in some sense not human. This insidious logic was nothing new; indeed, much the same tactic had been employed in Shakespeare’s time to suggest that the inhabitants of the New World could not be human because they broke the deeply embedded European taboo of cannibalism.26 Shakespeare’s characters are themselves not immune to these chains of reasoning: it is constantly asked in The Tempest whether Caliban, whose name has not moved far from ‘Cannibal’, is fully human or not, and it is clear that the answer to this question will determine how he is treated by the European colonizers. When Prospero and Miranda call him a ‘slave’, they are not simply describing Caliban’s status as a captive but accusing him of a moral impoverishment which justifies the removal of his freedom and his rights. He was (Prospero claims) treated ‘with human kindness’, and Miranda ‘took pains to make [him] speak’; and yet despite his aptitude for language, his ungrateful assumption that he was their equal (and could thus look on Miranda with desire) proved that their ‘human kindness’ – that quality of empathy which is both the mark of the human and only granted to other humans – was misplaced.
But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confined into this rock,
Who hadst deserved more than a prison.
The Tempest (I.ii.357–61)
Caliban, according to this argument, should look upon his enslavement as an act of mercy, after his criminal lust for the colonizer’s daughter had earned him a worse fate. His savage hate of books – which Stanley echoed in his account of the Dark Continent – was an inescapable counterpart to this same unredeemable incivility.
This was, it must be said, a depressing place to start my quest to understand Shakespeare’s universal appeal – with that very universalism being used as a tool to exclude from the bounds of the human. But though attempts to define what it is to be human have often been used in this way – to lever one group of people apart from the rest and deprive them of the right to be human – this does not characterize all thinking on the subject. It doesn’t, in fact, even characterize all thinking on the subject in The Tempest. Indeed, Caliban’s second appearance in the play (II.ii) sets about parodying and upending the righteous judgements earlier levelled against him by Prospero and Miranda. The castaway Trinculo, coming upon a Caliban who is pretending to be dead, engages in an extended forensic analysis of the creature at his feet.
What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish. Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man, and his fins like arms. Warm, o’my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.
The Tempest (II.ii.24–34)
Trinculo’s speech moves from lampooning the kind of judgement that decides on the essence of a thing by a few trivial external features (Caliban is a fish because he smells like a fish, he is dead because he is lying down) to turning the judgement back upon Shakespeare’s audience. Trinculo’s daydream – in which he takes Caliban to England to exhibit him to paying crowds – is, of course, a direct reflection of The Tempest’s audience, who themselves have paid to see this ‘spectacle’ of Caliban. It is clear that exotic peoples are made ‘monsters’ in England because there’s money to be made from it – indeed, the word ‘monster’ means ‘something to be shown to a spectator’ – and this was as true in Stanley’s day as in Shakespeare’s. But it’s also clear that it is the leering crowd that is in danger of losing its humanity in this bargain: in paying to see the ‘strange beast’ of a showman’s exhibit ‘When they will not give a doit [a small coin] to relieve a lame beggar’, they reveal the loss of charity, of that ‘human kindness’ that makes them ‘human kind’. Throughout the play, as the presumption that the European spectator is the arbiter of humanity ebbs away, we are given hints of qualities which Caliban does exhibit, qualities Renaissance thought toyed with as central to human nature – laughter, the love of wine, a sense of the political, and the ability to appreciate natural beauty and music – and which are increasingly attractive versions of humanity when set against the duplicity of the European settlers.27
So even if Shakespeare had been introduced to Africa by the explorers as a token of difference, as a demonstration that the Dark Continent could not absorb his genius, that didn’t mean that everyone would be content to treat him in that way. Readers, in my experience, are unruly things, whose cooperation should not be counted on. I had generated a list of leads, of half-known stories and rumours, which gave reason to hope that Shakespeare’s career in East Africa would be a lot richer and more varied than this, and that he would soon be prised from the hands of his cultural guardians and turned over to real encounters with Africa and its peoples. With this in mind, I packed my copy of the Works in the leather shooting bag I’ve always used as a satchel – a habit of which Roosevelt would doubtless have approved – and set off to follow in the tracks of Burton, Stanley and the tribe of readers that sprang up in their wake.
* The few other writers whom Burton occasionally uses to flesh out his description of Africa – Marlowe, Byron – give us a sense of the rather macho flavour of his Shakespeare.
* Amusingly enough, the German expedition, purportedly also mounted to rescue Emin Pasha (though in reality using this as a cover to extend German influence in Uganda through secret negotiations with the Kabaka), was also suffering infinite delays, time which the expedition leader spent reading the works of Shakespeare and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, borrowed from the English mission in Kampala. See Carl Peters, New Light on Dark Africa: Being the Narrative of the German Emin Pasha Expedition (trans. H. W. Dulken, Ward, Lock, 1891), p. 429.
2
Shakespeare and the Slaveboy Printworks
Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.
He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.
His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal – only sensible in the duller parts.
Love’s Labor’s Lost (IV.ii.21–3)