1. A
Lucia Folena
FEW NOTES ON THE
TEMPEST1
This
comedy—occasionally classified as a “romance” because of the “romantic” and deliberately
unrealistic elements it contains—2 is generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s last plays. As far as its
date is concerned, we know that it was performed before King James in 1611—having presumably been
written shortly before that—and again in 1613 as part of the entertainments for the marriage of the
king’s daughter Elizabeth to a foreign prince, the Elector Palatine. It has been observed that The
Tempest also has a number of features in common with some of Shakespeare’s major tragedies (without
of course sharing their “unhappy” endings), and in fact the analogy between some of its themes and
those of Macbeth, in particular, is considerable. Both plays deal with disloyalty, treason and usurpation
and address the issues of political legitimacy and the relation of nature to human authority. The main
difference in this regard consists in the fact that no bloodshed being involved in Antonio’s and Sebastian’s
treasons, they do not need to be punished with death, so that the play does not have to become a
tragedy. In fact the difference between comedy and tragedy—on the political level of the play—rests
merely on the difference between homicidal intention and actual homicide, since the two villains are
potential murderers and regicides. Twelve years earlier, in usurping the dukedom of Milan, they were
prevented from killing Prospero and Miranda as they had planned by their fear of the subjects’ reaction
(I.2.140-143).3 Now their attempt to assassinate Alonso and Gonzalo is thwarted by Prospero himself
through Ariel (II.1.202-328).
This potentially tragic component involves a further analogy with plays like Macbeth consisting in the
reflection on the relationship between the impersonal, extra-human forces of Fate or Fortune and
human decision and action. Prospero himself, who is to a large extent an incarnation of Destiny as far
as the other characters are concerned—he manipulates them, directing their lives and gestures like an
unseen stage director governing a company of actors unaware of his presence—acknowledges the weight
of this superior force, while at the same time stressing the importance for those involved to understand it
and learn to use it for the betterment of their existences:
By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune,
Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore; and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.
(I.2.178-184)
The term “tempest” in the play’s title may indeed not only allude to the sea storm which causes the
shipwreck but also indicate a “particularly significant moment in time” (offering opportunities that
Prospero must seize before it is too late). Etymologically “tempest” comes from the Latin word
tempestas(derived fromtempus), originally related to the notions of “period”, “epoch”, “moment”,
“circumstance”,4 then to the ideas of “weather” or “climate”, from which it also acquired the meaning of
“bad weather” or “stormy weather”, as well as the metaphorical one of “calamity” or “misfortune”.
Antonio and Sebastian, in the usurpation of Prospero’s dukedom as well as in the attempted murder of
Alonso, are also constantly on the lookout for “right times” and “good opportunities” (to commit their
crimes). Thus, from its very title (and once again not unlike Macbeth) The Tempest has a particularly
important link with time. The three- or four-hour span (between about 2 p.m. and about 6 p.m.)5 during
which the whole action of the comedy takes place is the final moment in an extension of twelve years (or
24, if one considers Caliban’s past) starting from the usurpation. It is the “future” in which a whole past
IT IS NECESSARY TO STRESS THAT THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY, AND THAT PREPARATION FOR THE EXAM MUST
BE BASED ON THE READING OF THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TEXT AND OF A GOOD INTRODUCTION.
1
Traditionally, the term “comedy” has two meanings: it may be applied limitedly to plays aimed at making the
audience laugh (i.e., funny, sometimes farcical, dramatic works with comic or ridiculous characters and situations); or
it may be used to refer, more in general, to plays with happy endings aimed at creating a sense of tranquillity and
peace in their spectators. It is obvious that The Tempest does not fit the first definition (while having every feature of
the second), and it is for this reason that the label of “romance” has been employed in its place by some critics who
support a restrictive view of the genre of comedy. Together with The Tempest, those critics group three other
Shakespearean plays dating from the final phase of his dramatic production (ca. 1608-1611) under the heading of
“romances”—Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. In connection with Shakespearean drama “romance”
indicates, along with the presence of unrealistic elements, characters or locations, the recurrence of features such as
the “romantic” incident of lost children (believed dead by those who love then, but recovered at the end of the play,
like Ferdinand here); the beautiful, “romantic”, natural settings (mountains or sea); and the composed beauty and
serenity of the plays themselves, which aim at making their audiences smile with pleasure or emotion rather than
laugh loudly. As a general rule, it is essential to distinguish between the narrative genre called “romance” (which is
diegetic, because it “tells a story”), and this kind of “romance”, a theatrical sub-category of comedy (which, like all
drama, is not diegetic but mimetic, since, instead of “telling” a story, it “presents” it through dialogue and action,
giving spectators or readers the impression it is happening before their eyes).
3
References are to The Tempest, ed. and It. trans. P. Bertinetti, Torino, Einaudi, 2012.
4
Consider also the derived adjective tempestivus or its Italian descendant tempestivo, “timely”, “well-timed”,
“opportune”, “quick in taking advantage of occasions”, etc.
5
See I.2.239-241 and V.1.3-5.
1
2
and its errors are resolved and redeemed, as in a miniature Judgment-day of which Prospero is both an
actor and the divinity who assigns rewards and (might inflict) punishments, who absolves and condemns
(morally). The exceptionally strict observance of the three pseudo-Aristotelian unities of action, space
and time—and especially of the two latter—in the play may be related to this.6 The characters are taken
out of their habitual settings—the courts and cities of Milan and Naples, the civilized world—and
transferred to an “outside” where their customary masks of dignity and honour fall and they appear
“naked”, revealing the “real” natures hidden under the coverings of social superiority and gentility; this
takes place during an afternoon which is also placed, as the “fatal” moment in each of their existences,
“outside” the normal course of time.
In the application of the “Aristotelian” unities one may also see a further proof of the strong
metatheatrical component characteristic of the play.
Prospero is the “god” of the enchanted and
enclosed space of “otherness” represented by the island, but he is, first and foremost, the “stagedirector” (as well as the author of the “play”), demiurgically intent on manoeuvring his actors so that the
events represented depend entirely on him and on the instructions he gives to Ariel and the other spirits.
On this level, the island itself, in its well-delimited extension containing a plurality of sceneries and scenic
possibilities, is a perfect stage, and the time of the comedy’s action corresponds roughly to the time of a
theatrical performance in Shakespeare’s time. The more the play approaches its end, the more the
metatheatrical element becomes visible. Prospero himself changes costumes like an actor playing
different parts as he passes from one of his roles to another—from magician to father7 or from magician
to duke (V.1.83-87 and stage directions). And the snare he sets for Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo in
IV.1.186-187, 193 and stage direction) has to do precisely with stage costumes, “trumpery” or “glittering
apparel” which the two newcomers start trying on as soon as they notice it, abandoning their plan to
murder Prospero and invest the butler with “real” kingship over the island. Much to Caliban’s dismay,
they seem to prefer playing the king and his courtier as in a performance or a Carnival entertainment to
actually being such figures (IV.1.222-230).The scene with the banquet and the harpy enacted by the
spirits before Alonso and his court in III.3 18-82 is already in itself an example of play-within-the-play (a
“living drollery”, a comic show, in Sebastian’s words in l. 21), but the following act contains an even more
evident case of play-within-the-play in the masque of the three goddesses offered by Prospero to
Ferdinand and Miranda in celebration of their betrothal. Once again, here Prospero appears as the allpowerful stage-director on whose will and decisions the whole performance depends, so much so that
when he decides that something more important needs to be done at that moment, the whole show
vanishes immediately (IV.1, stage direction after l. 138). His explanation to Ferdinand is particularly
significant, in that it broadens the metatheatrical element into a version of the theatrum mundi
metaphor:8
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
(IV.1.148-156)
He goes on to represent life by means of another metaphor which was becoming extremely popular in the
early 17th century—that of dreamwork:9
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(IV.1.156-158)
Human life, essentially, is illusion and appearance deprived of any substance; nothing in the “real” world
has a more concrete existence than a dream or a theatrical production.
Prospero’s function as demiurgic author, stage-director and chief actor in the play of the characters’ lives
makes him, as has been stressed recurrently by critics, a counterpart of Shakespeare himself, so that it is
very tempting to see his magic as analogous to the “magic” of the writer who can create entire worlds
out of his imagination, using his pen as the enchanter uses his magic wand. Thus, when he protagonist
abjures his art and announces his intention to “break [. . . his] staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the
From a restrictive interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics many influential Renaissance theorists derived the notion that
drama in general should always and invariably respect those three unities, avoiding shifts in time and space as well as
multiple plots—obviously an excessive constriction which was extremely hard to observe and did not necessarily
contribute in improving plays. The Tempest is the only Shakespearean example of almost perfect adherence to this
rule.
7
When he starts telling Miranda about the past, for example, he asks her to help him take his “magic garment” off
(I.2.23-24).
8
See similar metaphors, for instance, in the first book of T. More’s Utopia, in Ralegh’s “What Is Our Life?” and in
Spenser’s Sonnet 54.
9
The most obvious and best example of this metaphor is represented by Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es
sueño (1635); it is also interesting to remember that in 1633 Calderón had composed another play entitled El gran
teatro del mundo.
2
6
earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / [. . .] drown [. . . his magic] book” (V.1.54-57),
critics have recurrently referred this intention to Shakespeare and interpreted these lines as a declaration
of his decision to stop writing for the theatre, a decision which might be reiterated by the Epilogue where
Prospero transfers the magic power from himself to his spectators:
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please.
[. . .]
[. . .]
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(Epilogue, 4-20)
If this kind of magic—consisting in applause (the clapping of “good hands”) and positive comments on the
play (“gentle breath”)—can be delegated to a theatrical audience, then the entity to which it belongs
originally is not the magician Prospero, himself a “creature” like the other characters and the whole of the
imaginary world of The Tempest, but the actual “creator”—the playwright.
The father-daughter relationship is an important component of the play. Miranda is about fifteen
years old, and Prospero feels that the tempestas, the opportune time, has come for her to undergo a sort
of rite of passage (from childhood to adulthood), in which she is to acquire that essential part of her
identity represented by the knowledge of her past (a past she was unable to remember, being too little
when exiled from Milan), as a prelude to her impending encounter with Ferdinand and a precondition to
her falling in love with him. For in order to be able to “know” another person through love, one first
needs to know oneself, to have a stable and reasonably complete notion of one’s identity. That this is a
rite of passage, a crucial transition, is suggested by the fact that after the revelation Prospero puts her to
sleep (I.2.184-186); when she wakes up she will be a “new” person.
To her Prospero has been a father and a teacher, but also a “mother”. Her real mother presumably died
soon after her birth, as may be inferred from the fact that she remembers nothing about her, while she
vaguely recollects “four or five women once that tended” her (I.2.47). In fact Prospero, on the boat
taking the two of them to the island, symbolically re-enacted the labour and the childbirth:
[. . .] I have decked the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burden groaned, which raised in me
An undergoing stomach to bear up
Against what should ensue.
(I.2.155-158)
Thus Miranda has become entirely his daughter, as if he had generated her himself from his own womb
without any woman’s contribution. Besides establishing a parallel with Sycorax, who gave birth to
Caliban, twenty-four years earlier, immediately after being landed on the island,10 this re-creation of his
daughter enables Prospero to see her not only as his “girl” (l. 62) but as a product of his intellectual and
pedagogic powers. The way in which he has “formed” her is in fact twofold: he has brought her into
existence, but in all the ensuing years he has also educated her, shaping her heart and mind, filling the
latter with the knowledge generally reserved for sons rather than daughters—as is indicated by her skill
in playing chess, for example—and cultivating her reason. The lack of female role-models, together with
her never having received a woman’s teachings on the proper behaviour for a young lady, causes
Miranda to ignore all the refinements of the feminine art of coquetry and to be unaware of the subtleties
of roundabout seduction, so that in dealing with Ferdinand she is plain and straightforward in manifesting
her love:
Hence, bashful cunning,
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!
I am your wife if you will marry me;
If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow
You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant
Whether you will or no.
(III.1.81-86)
These words correspond perfectly to the typical language of courtly love, except that in a “normal”
situation, in the civilized world of the early 17 th century, one would have expected them (aside from the
reference to “wife” and “maid”) to have been spoken by a gentleman to the beloved lady rather than the
other way round. The relationship between Miranda and Ferdinand correspond in all to the principles of
Neoplatonic love (as expressed in Elizabethan sonnets)—it begins through the highest of the five senses,
sight, ennobles the souls of those who experience it and results in idealizing its object and placing it on a
pedestal:
The two situations are reversed mirror images of one another: the good magician is pitted against the bad witch,
the wonderful daughter against the execrable son, Algiers against Milan, female against male, etc. For the
circumstances of Caliban’s birth, see I.2.261-284.
3
10
I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.
[. . .]
FERDINAND
Most sure, the goddess
On whom these airs attend.
MIRANDA
(I.2.418-423; italics added)
The only difference from the tradition of Neoplatonic love consists precisely in the perfect symmetry
established here between the two young people, each of whom is simultaneously lover and beloved, lets
him/herself be idealized while at the same time idealizing the other.
A very visible feature of The Tempest is the absence of female characters, apart from Miranda. It
appears surprising that among the members of Alonso’s court, coming back from a wedding, a kind of
celebration in which women generally had an important part, there should be no ladies, nor even the
queen: One may imagine that she is dead, like the former duchess of Milan, but what about the
(hypothetical) present duchess, Antonio’s wife?11 And are all the other courtiers bachelors or widowers?
Even Sycorax died before Prospero reached the island, leaving Caliban alone. As for Miranda, she is not
(yet) a “complete” woman, since she lacks the experience of sexuality and motherhood.
The only
women, and mothers, represented in the play are the goddesses in the masque—supernatural female
figures, and, moreover, played by spirits which, differently from humans, are not gendered. In addition
to this, the goddess who represents the most powerful form of sexual energy, i.e., Venus, is also
proclaimed to be absent (with her son Cupid) from the imaginary space and time of the island (IV.1.87101). This absence is obviously connected with Prospero’s warning to Ferdinand against turning the
chaste Neoplatonic relationship between himself and Miranda into lust and seeking physical enjoyment
before the wedding ceremony is dutifully performed (IV.1.13-23). Sexuality is accepted only insofar as
it is institutionalized within marriage and aimed primarily at ensuring, through reproduction, the
continuity of dynasties.
The interdiction that Prospero places on sexual consummation receives the following answer from
Ferdinand:
As I hope
For quiet days, fair issue, and long life,
With such love as ’tis now, the murkiest den.
The most opportune place, the strong’st suggestion
Our worser genius can, shall never melt
Mine honour into lust
(IV.1.23-28)
The young prince is the quintessential product of the refinements of both aristocratic life and humanistic
education—he corresponds wholly to the traditional aristocratic idea that “noble birth” is linked with
“nobility” of soul and behaviour, while at the same time embodying the notion of human perfectibility
through “nurture”, which is typically humanistic. Implicit in his declaration here is the fact that he knows
how to use his reason—as the faculty enabling to distinguish good from evil and to behave accordingly—
in order to control and subdue his instincts. This sets him in direct antithesis with Caliban, who does not
possess that form of “reason” and is therefore not entirely “human”, but also with the villains, Antonio
and Sebastian, who betray their humanity by deliberately choosing what they know to be evil. This is
why they are regarded as “unnatural” by Prospero, who, like Thomas More, identifies human nature—the
quintessential principle which makes men and women different from all other living beings—with reason
(in the intellectual sense, but first and foremost in the moral one):
You, brother mine, that entertained ambition,
Expelled remorse and nature, whom with Sebastian
[. . .]
Would here have killed your king, I do forgive thee,
Unnatural though thou art.
(V.1.75-79; italics added)
Antonio’s and Sebastian’s sin against “reason” and “nature” implies that they have broken the code of
“truth” (as loyalty) on several levels by committing or attempting to commit violence on Prospero and
Alonso, thus betraying at the same time: ● their fellow human beings; ● their own kinsmen (in this case
their brothers); ● their lords and political superiors. Prospero’s forgiveness—granted despite the fact
that they do not seem to repent, differently from Alonso (V.1.118-119) and even from Caliban (V.1.295298)—is once again the fruit of an appropriate use of “reason” to control and repress the irrational
impulses suggested by the emotional part of human beings, which is made up of passions and instincts:
[. . .] if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
PROSPERO Doest thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROSPERO
And mine shall.
ARIEL
In I.2.438-39 we learn that Antonio has a son, who is supposed to be a member of the group and whom Ferdinand
believes to have been drowned with his father and the others. He appears nowhere else in the play.
4
11
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.
(V.1.18-28; italics added)
“Kindlier” (l. 24), comparative of the adverb “kindly”, derives from the adjective “kind”, which is in turn
etymologically related to the noun “kind” (i.e., ”type”, “sort”, “category”), which forms compounds like
“humankind” or “mankind”. Thus, along with the modern sense of “gentle”, “courteous”, “goodmannered”, the adjective “kind” here retains the traditional meaning of “corresponding to the behaviour
expected of a (good) member of humankind, a (fully) human being”. Such a human being, besides
letting him- or herself be governed by reason, must needs have strong feelings of solidarity and
compassion for his or her peers—feelings capable of checking all violent impulses.
As in Utopia, those people who are unable to control their instincts and emotions through reason and
are therefore led to commit violent crimes against fellow humans deserve to be punished with (a term of)
slavery. Despite the fact that Caliban certainly, on one level, embodies the “wild” native colonized by
the “civilized” European, his enslavement is not represented in historically realistic terms as an act of
arbitrary appropriation and brutality on Prospero’s part, but rather as the just retribution for his attempt
to rape Miranda (I.2.346-349). This obviously indicates a great difference from what happens in relation
to the issue of slavery in Robinson Crusoe (see Section 2 below). On the other hand the situation of Ariel
is comparable to that of Friday (though the former is a spirit), in that neither may be properly considered
a slave; both should be instead regarded as servants, since their subordination to their masters is
primarily due to their being indebted to them for their liberation from imprisonment or the danger of
death.
The
a wild man from an exotic country, resembling the wild men believed
to inhabit European forests in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(17th-century engraving)
outlook on human beings that emerges from The Tempest seems to establish a fundamental
distinction based on the following homology:
WILDNESS
:
CIVILIZATION
=
INSTINCT
:
REASON
When 16th- and 17th-century European explorers encountered New World natives, they often saw in
them—as is made manifest by their travel accounts as well as by drawings and engravings made by
contemporary artists—exotic but almost exact counterparts of the “Wild Men” who were believed to
inhabit Old World forests and wildernesses (see the illustration above). In those legendary Wild Men as
well as in the New World natives the “civilized” Europeans frequently identified surviving specimens of the
common wild past of humankind before organized societies with their institutions and rules had come
into being. Most philosophers and theologians still shared the traditional positive view of the original
state of humankind, a view based on the classical myth of the Golden Age12 or on the Christian account
of Adam’s and Eve’s perfect happiness in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. They saw the ensuing
history of men and women as an attempt to recover—through civilization—that primeval state of bliss.
12
For the Golden Age see the passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Appendix 1.
5
However, there was gradually beginning to develop, in the practice of exploration and colonization, the
“modern”, evolutionary and pre-anthropological, notion that the earliest condition of human beings in the
world was incomparably inferior to that reached by developed and advanced nations. Essentially, both
of these ideas are represented in The Tempest, which may therefore be seen as a sort of transitional text
placed at the crossroads between the traditional Christian-humanist perspective and the new
“anthropological” one, which was to become dominant later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Gonzalo, in
the description of his ideal commonwealth, essentially draws on the first of the two viewpoints, as he
makes clear in his final words:
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 it own kind all foison, all abundance
To feed my innocent people.
[. . .]
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
T’ excel the golden age.
(II.1.162-171)
As a whole, Gonzalo’s “utopian” vision presupposes that the elimination of all that makes human life
“civilized” and “developed”, far from throwing people into danger and poverty, would make their lives far
happier and purer:
[. . .]
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,
No sovereignty—
(II.1.151-159)
This vision may of course only be termed “utopian” in a broad sense (as representing an ideal form of
collective human existence), since Thomas More’s imaginary commonwealth, unlike Gonzalo’s, is carefully
planned and structured, characterized by the presence of good laws and institutions rather than by
absolute anarchy (i.e., etymologically, “lack of government”) and the absence of any social, political,
legal and economic organization.
Gonzalo’s description is an almost word-by-word reproduction of a
famous passage in Michel de Montaigne’s Essay “of Cannibals”:
there is nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarism which
is not common to them.13 [ . . . ] what in those nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all
the pictures wherewith licentious poesy14 hath proudly embellished the golden age and all her quaint
inventions to feign15 a happy condition of man, but also the conception and desire of philosophy. They
could not imagine a genuityso pure and simple as we see it by experience, nor even believe our society
might be maintained with so little art and human combination.16 It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (Des cannibales), in Essays (Essais), Eng. trans. John Florio (1603). In
modern English the passage might read as follows: «there is nothing in that population that is either barbarous or
savage, unless one calls barbarism that which is uncommon in one’s social and cultural context. [ . . . ] What we see
among those [New World] populations through [reports of travellers’] experience is not only superior to all the
representations with which literature based on imagination has proudly adorned the [myth of the] golden age, and
[also superior] to all the sophisticated inventions [which the same literature constructs in order] to describe a[n
original] human condition of happiness, but [it is] also [better than] the [ideal societies] created and wished for by
philosophers [such as Plato in his Republic]. The latter were unable to imagine a genuineness as pure and simple as
that which we see [in those countries] through [reports of travellers’] experience, and [they were] incapable of
believing that our society might be kept alive and well with so little human intervention [aimed at establishing
institutions, laws and all that characterizes “civilized” life]. This is a population—I would say in answer to Plato—which
has no kind of commerce, no knowledge of books, no understanding of mathematics and music, no post of public
official or administrator nor any role implying political superiority, no master-servant relationship nor social difference
based on property, no contracts, no inheritance, no division of land or wealth [i.e., no private property, everything
being owned in common by all], no work of any kind, all being inactive, no respect of family ties but only of the
common [ties among all members of the nation], no clothing or body coverings except those provided by natural
objects, no cultivation of land, no use of wine, corn or metal. Even the words which mean lying, falsehood, treason,
dissimulation, covetousness, envy, denigration and pardon were never heard among them».
14
“Poesy” in the Renaissance did not necessarily refer to verse but indicated all forms of imaginative writing and
fiction, as opposed to realistic, matter-of-fact writing (e.g., treatises, religious works, etc.). “Licentious” here
essentially means “unrestrained by concerns with truthfulness or likelihood”.
15
“Feigning” expresses the same idea represented in modern English by the noun “fiction”: imagining, creating,
without aiming at reproducing factual reality.
16
“Art” and “human combination” are almost synonyms. Both are seen in opposition to “nature” as the contribution
of human beings to the modification (and, ideally, the improvement) of the original state of the physical world.
6
13
hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers,17 no name of magistrate nor
of politic superiority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions, no
dividences, no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no
manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason,
dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon were never heard amongst them.
There is a striking similarity between Montaigne’s (and Gonzalo’s) description and a passage in Thomas
Hobbes’s Leviathan representing what the English philosopher of absolutism depicts as the “state of
nature”—the original condition of humankind before the “invention” of states:
In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently
no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no
commodious building; no instrument of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no
knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is
worst of all, continual fear; and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short.18
As is made clear by the final part of the passage, despite the linguistic analogies with Montaigne here the
picture is entirely negative: far from being happy and innocent, life in this condition becomes so
unpleasant, uncomfortable and dangerous as to be a sort of hell on earth. This is directly linked to
Hobbes’s pessimism as regards human nature, characterized in his view by an aggressiveness which is
not susceptible of being restrained by reason (hence the well-known formula homo homini lupus) but
may only be checked by the external authority of an absolute monarch or dictator on whom his subjects
bestow their personal freedom in exchange for safety. Outside strong “civil” states with rigorous laws
and institutions, Hobbes declares, “there is always war of every one against every one”.19
This
perspective is essentially the same taken by Jonathan Swift in the fourth section of his Gulliver’s Travels
(1727), which transfers the utopian vision onto the Houhynms—the noble horses who live according to
reason and virtue—and pits them against the “human” Yahoos, disgusting creatures ruled by instinct and
primary desires such as greed and lust.20
the king of a New World cannibal tribe
(17th-century engraving)
On one level, this is precisely what Caliban is—insofar as he is a human being rather than half-human
and half-devil—21 and the context of the play suggests that Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth is absolutely
unrealistic, because “wild” human beings are aggressive yahoos rather than meek inhabitants of Eden or
gentle Golden Age people.
Caliban’s name suggests his being linked with cannibals, and the latter—
except in Montaigne’s paradoxical defence where despite their anthropophagic habits they are still
Montaigne sees this kind of human intervention as absolutely negative, resulting in creating a steadily increasing
distance between contemporary societies (in late-16th-century Europe)—societies characterized by corruption and
injustice—and the purity and happiness enjoyed by human groups in their original, “natural” condition.
17
“Letters” refers to literature and erudition in general (all that one can read in books), but also to literacy and
reading as such; “numbers” indicates primarily the knowledge of mathematics, but may also be referred to music and
poetry (based on “numbers” in the sense of rhythm and stresses).
17
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1650), Chapter XIII.
18
Hobbes’ representation of this state of generalized war in turn resembles Ovid’s description of the Iron Age in the
Metamorphoses: see Appendix 1.
19
For Swift’s Yahoos, see Appendix 2.
20
As Prospero seems to think (I.2.320-321; IV.1.188). Caliban’s being half-human and half-animal in the view of
most other characters may simply be interpreted as a recognition of his “wildness”, his being “uncivilized”.
7
morally better than the corrupt “civilized” Europeans—represent symbolically all serious forms of
transgression, all forms of violence which identify potential threats not only to individuals but to the
precarious structures of civilization itself, always subject to a fall back into chaos and anarchy. Thus the
attempted rape of Miranda—an act against another primary taboo of civilization—symbolizes an
“absence” of rules, and of civilization, which places Caliban dangerously near Gonzalo’s savage utopia.
That The Tempest does not support Gonzalo’s anarchic ideal is also indirectly suggested by the central,
benevolent presence in the masque (IV.1.76 ff.) of Ceres, the deity who according to classical and
Renaissance mythographers was originally responsible for civilizing human societies through the
introduction of agriculture, of which she is, traditionally, the goddess: in the words of a contemporary of
Shakespeare’s, she
first found and taught the use of corn and grain, and thereby brought men from that wild and savage
wandering in woods and eating of acorns to a civil conversing and more orderly diet, and caused them to
inhabit towns, to live sociably, to observe certain laws and institutions, and for these causes was herself
made a goddess.22
Caliban is often referred
to by the other characters as a “monster”. Even though in application to him
the term unquestionably has pejorative implications, it is important to remember that etymologically the
Latin word monstrum (from moneo) was originally used in reference to exceptional creatures, things or
events, regardless of their aesthetic qualities, and that in Renaissance collections of images (like the one
from which the two engravings reproduced on pp. 5 and 7 above are taken) the term “monster” was
applied to all that was strange or unfamiliar, different from the kinds of people, animals and plants then
common in European countries. Likewise (though in a completely positive sense), Miranda’s name is
etymologically linked to the feeling of wonder or admiration, which is precisely what Ferdinand
instinctively experiences for her: “O you wonder!”, he exclaims before knowing her name in I.2.427); and
later, on being told it, he repeats “Admired Miranda, / Indeed the top of admiration, worth / What’s
dearest in the world!” (III.1.37-39).
It is not easy to understand whether, apart from the literal meaning (“he’s my servant, as the other
two, Stephano and Trinculo, are yours”) there are symbolic implications to what Prospero says in
speaking of Caliban with Alonso, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (V.1.275-276). In a
sense, this may perhaps be interpreted as a recognition of the fact that inside Prospero, as inside all
other “civilized” humans, there is a core of “darkness”, wildness, savagery, violence—what three
centuries later, in a Freudian perspective, one might have termed the Es or the unconscious—and that, if
it is not kept under strict and constant control, this part of the individual is potentially disruptive, or even
completely destructive.
Abraham Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurche (1592) (MS, pp. 26-27). For Ovid’s description of
Ceres as the goddess who did not only give humankind agriculture but also the laws necessary to prevent violence and
war and make like as happy as possible in a post-Golden Age condition, see the last passage in Appendix 1.
8
22
AN ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
1. Building above stage known as the “Heavens”. It contains a windlass for special
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
effects (e.g., descent of enthroned “gods” from the “sky” to the stage).
Flag flown every playing day.
Trumpet sounded to announce performance.
The ceiling under this roof is ornamentally painted as “Sky”.
Upper stage and windows.
Curtained recess or “discovery place”.
Privileged spectators seated on stage.
Trapdoor to “Hell” area under the stage (traditionally used for appearances of devils,
ghosts, etc.).
One-penny audience (“groundlings”) standing in yard.
Two-penny gallery.
Private rooms (boxes).
Backstage area (called the “tiring house”).
Staircases to galleries.
9
2. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO ROBINSON CRUSOE23
► Defoe’s novel dates from 1719, when great changes were taking place in English politics, society and
economy. The Puritan revolution and the Commonwealth (1642-1660) had left very important traces
despite the apparent return to the previous state of things effected by the Restoration. From an
ideological point of view, those years had witnessed a reversal of the traditional worldview and a drastic
denial of the central role of both monarchy and aristocracy in society.
The Restoration, which
marginalized or even persecuted Puritans and republicans, endeavoured to re-create an absolutist system
hegemonized by the Court and the nobility; but the attempt was only partly successful, and less than 20
years later the Glorious Revolution (1688) marked the beginning of a new era. The monarchy of course
survived (no longer with the Stuarts, though) but instead of representing itself as deriving from divine
right (i.e., from above) it implicitly became authorized by popular consent and by Parliament (i.e., from
below) and Parliament itself gradually evolved into a fundamental institution, as did the government—
which became almost completely autonomous with regard to the king, with a consequent rise in the
importance of the figure of the Prime Minister. Political life became very active, and two parties began to
form and to compete for power and premiership—the Tories and the Whigs. The Tories essentially
represented the traditional dominant classes (aristocracy, gentry, Anglican bishops, etc.), while the
Whigs were linked with the new economy of the middle class, based on business, trade, manufacture and
finance. Progressively, old aristocratic values such as “leisure”—i.e., the fact of not having to work for a
living: an exclusive privilege of the upper classes—began to lose their positive connotations and were
replaced by their opposites (in this case the value of work), so that in the space of a few decades a new
middle-class ideology took up the central position in society which had previously been occupied by the
aristocratic one. Thus by the mid- or late-18th century the whole of society (including the nobility)
tended to identify with the ideals, ethos, ways of life and behaviours of its bourgeoisie, in the same way
in which it had identified with its aristocracy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
examples of
ARISTOCRATIC VALUES
▪ leisure
▪ exteriority
(display – theatricality – exhibitionism)
▪ excess
(in expense, food, drink, etc.)
VS
examples of
MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES
▪ work
▪ interiority
▪ temperance, parsimony
▪ honour
▪ coming from a great family
▪ respectability
▪ creating one’s own fortune
(having inherited one’s name and wealth)
(starting from an unfavourable condition
\and rising in the world)
etc.
etc.
► According to many critics, Robinson Crusoe is the first English novel.24 In the same way in which
earlier literary genres—in particular the romance, but also the epic and the tragedy—tended to idealize
and celebrate the aristocracy, this new narrative genre is directly linked with the rise of the middle
class and promotes its way of life and its values. The initial pages of RC are very explicit about this.
When Robinson tells his father about his desire to leave home and know the world, Mr KreutznaerCrusoe—who wants him to study law and become a respectable member of the community—represents
to him the advantages and the happiness enjoyed by those who, like the Crusoes, belong to what he calls
the «middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by
experience was the best state in the world» (p. 18).25 He goes on to say
that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues and all kinds of enjoyments; that
peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness,
health, society [= social life and friendships], all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were
the blessings attending the middle station of life [ . . . ] (18).
AS WAS SAID WITH REGARD TO THE TEMPEST, THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL, AND PREPARATION FOR THE
EXAM MUST BE BASED ON THE READING OF THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TEXT AND OF A GOOD INTRODUCTION.
23
See for instance Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel. This of course does not mean that elements of what was to
characterize the novel were not present in texts written slightly earlier, especially in some 17th-century romances such
as Behn’s Oroonoko, but also in other forms of narratives such as Milton’s Paradise Lost (a verse epic) and Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress (an allegorical fiction). For a detailed discussion of differences between the romance and the novel
see Lennard Davies, Factual Fictions.
25
Quotations refer to Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988.
10
24
This «middle state» or «middle station» is precisely the living condition of the middle class (or of its large
majority); whose main occupation should be that of increasing its «fortune by application and industry»
(17). Adventures and rambling lives, on the contrary, are for the very high or the very low on the social
scale (18). Having refused to follow his father’s advice, Robinson is later “condemned” to discover its
truth—forced to “reconstruct” precisely this way of life and to re-embrace the corresponding values
during his long stay on the island.
► Besides celebrating the middle class, the novel makes it possible for readers belonging to this part of
society to see themselves reflected in protagonists who, differently from what happens in romances,
are middle-class (or at times even lower-class) men or women themselves. Another remarkable feature
of the novel is precisely the frequent presence of women protagonists in it (cf e.g. Defoe’s Moll Flanders
and Lady Roxana, or Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa), and the related phenomenon of the enormous
expansion of the female readership over the 18th century.
► The novel places a strong emphasis on the individual: the protagonist is not (merely) a “type” or the
representative of a category, but a specific person with a well-defined identity. The beginning of RC is
particularly significant in this connection. The very first word of the novel is the personal pronoun «I»,
and the following lines give the reader detailed indications about the time, place, social position and
national origin which constitute the framework of the speaking subject’s existence and adventures: «I
was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country, my father being
a foreigner of Bremen, who [ . . . ] got a good estate by merchandise [ . . . ]» (17). The emphasis on
the individual in the novel is often signalled by the title coinciding with, or containing, the name of its
protagonist (e.g., besides RC, Moll Flanders, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Jane Eyre,
David Copperfield, etc.).
►The novel, differently from the romance, is characterized by its realism. The romance gives large
space to magic, the supernatural, the extraordinary, whereas the novel represents people and events
that—however mostly imaginary or transfigured by imagination—are “like” those of the real world. It is
this (not coincidence but) similarity or contiguity with the real world that is known as realism.
► Realism also implies a different relationship with time. In the romance, time is essentially “circular”,
in the sense that there is little or no linear development in the characters, who tend to remain very much
the same at the end of their adventures as they were at the beginning. The little evolution that takes
place in them basically consists in the full manifestation of traits or elements which previously existed
only on the level of potentialities. Contrariwise, the novel tends to structure itself on the basis of a linear
notion of time where the character actually changes on account of his/her experiences and interactions
with what comes into contact with him/her. A good example of this visible evolution is provided by the
so-called Bildungsroman,26 which follows the physical but especially mental, moral and spiritual growth of
a very young protagonist, generally a child or adolescent (RC is partly relatable to this genre, since
Robinson is initially very young—probably in his late teens—as well as immature and rebellious).
► As is typical of Defoe’s narratives in general, RC is written in the form of a fictional autobiography,
with a first-person narrator and a past-tense narration. The subject or “I” who is writing this story is
(supposed to be) an elderly man who reflects on the whole of his past life from the moment he left home.
This, characteristically, implies that the “I” is split into two—the present narrator who is ideally
contemporary with his reader, and the protagonist who starts his adventures several decades earlier.
The distance between narrator and protagonist is most of the times imperceptible, since the two are one
and the same person at two different stages in his existence, but it occasionally becomes visible when the
older man comments on the younger one’s inexperience, sinfulness or tendency to error. Within this
autobiographical framework Defoe inserts a section entitled “The Journal” (87-117) which is presented as
a faithful reproduction of the diary written by Robinson in the initial phase of his stay on the island. The
principal difference between a journal and an autobiography is that the former presupposes very little if
no distance between narrator and protagonist, and therefore resembles more closely the epistolary
form.27 The writing subject of a journal or of a series of letters writes a story which is still in the
making—a story of which he/she does not know the future developments, much less the end, and which
therefore appears fragmentary and hard to interpret before the end of the story itself. The writing
subject of an autobiography, on the other hand, knows the whole story and its “form” before he/she
starts writing it, and is therefore able to make his/her narration into a continuous whole without
fractures, selecting relevant facts, discarding those unrelated to the general evolution of the protagonist’s
life and incorporating elements of interpretation or moralizing.
►This aspect of interpretation or moralizing by the writing “I” appears clearly in RC, and is very much
related to religion. The narrator seems to see his past life as a sort of modernized recapitulation of the
Biblical story of Adam, as is indicated for instance by his recurrently referring to his initial rebellion to his
father’s will as «my original sin», and by the implication that the «middle state» which the father himself
had described to him in enormously positive terms was a sort of paradise on earth. This initial rebellion
is in sum a rebellion against God and divine providence, even though Robinson always remains formally a
Christian. Having lost his original Eden, the protagonist spends his life trying to re-create it. However, it
is only after his “conversion” to a more interior and deeply felt form of Christianity, when he submits to
Known in Italian as romanzo di formazione.
The epistolary novel was also very popular in the 18 th century; two of the best-known examples are S. Richardson’s
Pamela and Clarissa.
11
26
27
God’s will and begins a dialogue with him in his heart that, through work, prayer and day-to-day
commitment, he (partly) succeeds in generating a surrogate Eden on the island. Meanwhile, what
initially appeared to him as a horrid place—a «dismal unfortunate island, which I called the Island of
Despair», as he says at the beginning of the Journal (87)—not very long later has already become in his
eyes a beautiful garden which only needs some cultivation in order to turn into an actual paradise:
[ . . . ] the country appeared so fresh, so green, so flourishing, every thing being in a constant verdure
or flourish of spring, that it looked like a planted garden. I descended a little on the side of that
delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure [ . . . ] to think that this was all my own, that I
was king and lord of all this country [ . . . ] (113-14).
But of course Robinson does not find his “real” paradise until he is delivered from his «captivity» (as he
calls it) on the island and enabled to go back to his country and to an existence which is essentially a
repetition of his father’s «middle state» at the beginning of the novel.
►Secularization. The pervasive presence of religion in RC reflects Defoe’s own view. He was a
Dissenter or Non-conformist, i.e., one of those who in the previous century were identified as Puritans
(essentially, a non-Anglican Protestant). In the space of a few decades, however, even Puritans had
changed like the rest of society, and in Defoe’s time most of them tended to be more moderate in politics
(no longer strict republicans as they had been before) and less fundamentalist in their attitude towards
the role of religion in human life. RC is significant in this regard, too. Despite the declared depth of the
religious feelings expressed by Robinson (after his “conversion”), a reader cannot avoid the impression
that his religiosity is strongly secularized and aimed at reaching success and happiness in this world
rather than postponing the enjoyment of bliss to the afterlife. In the past Puritans had represented
human existence as a mere preparation for what really mattered—salvation of the soul and ingression
into eternity. Defoe on the contrary seems to place great value in the here and now, to the point where,
in RC as well as in his other novels, he makes worldly achievements and wealth into direct counterparts
and proofs of divine benevolence and, implicitly, into tokens of eternal salvation.
►This new “materialism” is in sharp contrast with the negative view of material possessions, money
and the accumulation of capitals expressed by great Puritan writers such as John Milton (Paradise Lost)
and John Bunyan (The Pilgrim’s Progress) in the 1660s and 1670s, along a line inaugurated by a Catholic
humanist like Thomas More in his description of the treatment of gold and silver by the Utopians. When
Robinson discovers a certain sum of money and gold and silver coins on the ship from which he is
recovering all the tools and objects he may need for his life on the island, his initial reaction seems to be
the traditional Puritan one:
I smiled to my self at the sight of this money. “O drug!” said I aloud, “what are thou good for? Thou art
not worth to me, no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no
manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not
worth saving” (75).
A large part of his contempt is of course due to the fact that, being alone on the island, he really has no
use for money. The life to which he is condemned forces him to move away from the concept of
exchange-value, dominant in European societies, where the value of things is essentially determined by
the amount of money that one receives in exchange for them, to that of use-value, on the basis of which
value is determined only by the usefulness of things. In spite of all these considerations, Robinson’s final
decision is typical of his mercantile and acquisitive attitude: «However, upon second thoughts, I took it
away with me».
► A similarly utilitarian attitude seems to govern his relationships with human beings. This is particularly
visible in connection with the problem of slavery. Historically, the enslavement of large numbers of
Africans who were then transferred to English, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World in
order to be employed in cotton or sugar-cane plantations had become increasingly frequent during the
17th and early 18th centuries, and was legitimized by international treaties and licences (asientos). Most
Europeans apparently saw the slave-trade as an acceptable practice, and it was only in the second half of
the 18th century that numerous intellectuals, under the influence of the new ideals of freedom, equality
and fraternity introduced by the Enlightenment, began protesting against this inhuman oppression
(Lawrence Sterne and Samuel Johnson are two illustrious English examples of the new anti-slavery
mentality).Defoe, writing in the 1710s and ’20s, seems to have shared his own contemporaries’ lack of
concern for this problem; a fact which at first sight would appear all the more paradoxical in
consideration of his peculiar gift for sympathy and of his perceptiveness in understanding and
representing the points of view of the marginal, the suffering and the weakest members of society.
The first time Robinson comes into direct contact with the world of slavery is when he is captured by a
Turkish ship and kept by the commander as his personal slave in a town on the Atlantic coast of Morocco
(40 ff.); after some two years, having managed to escape with the Moorish boy, Xury, who has so far
been his fellow-slave, he is eventually rescued by a Portuguese ship on its way to Brazil and asked by the
captain to sell him Xury:
12
he offered me also 60 pieces of eight more for my boy Xury, which I was loath to take, not that I was
not willing to let the captain have him, but I was very loath to sell the poor boy’s liberty, who had
assisted me so faithfully in procuring my own. However, when I let him know my reason, he owned it to
be just, and offered me this medium, that he would give the boy an obligation to set him free in ten
years, if he turned Christian; upon this, and Xury saying he was willing to go to him, I let the captain
have him. (54)
It is as if the simple fact of being on board a European ship has reconstructed a Eurocentric perspective,
where human beings from other parts of the world are inferior and may legitimately be treated as
properties, bought and sold without problems, especially when their owners treat them well and promise
to eventually set them free if they convert to the only “true” faith. Also striking is the fact that Robinson
does not even consider the possibility of letting Xury have the money he obtains in exchange for him but
pockets it as if he had every right to keep it. If he later observes «I had done wrong in parting with my
boy Xury» (55), this is not due to moral qualms but to the fact that he is in need of more slaves for his
plantation in Brazil. Precisely on account of this need he later turns into an occasional slave-trader
himself (on behalf of his fellow-planters as well) and embarks on a slaving ship to the African coast,
which he never reaches because he is shipwrecked on the island.
In fact this indifference to the horrors of slavery which Robinson seems to share with his creator,
Defoe—who here projects a large part of his own beliefs and world view onto his protagonist—may be
ascribed to a combination of the general Eurocentric attitude characteristic of his age with the
mercantilist mentality typical of his class. It is possible to find an indirect proof of this by comparing RC
with a narrative written about 30 years earlier, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). Here the outlook on
slavery is far more negative, which is at least in part explainable with this woman writer’s Tory ideology
and attachment to the traditional aristocratic and absolutist ideology: her opposition to the commerce of
human beings, rather than from a humanitarian ideal, derives precisely from her hostility to the
mercantilist mindset of the rising middle class, which (in her perspective) saw everything, including
people, in terms of their monetary value.
When Friday comes to share Robinson’s existence on the island, he is never treated as a slave, even if his
social and cultural inferiority with regard to the protagonist is made clear. The term “slave” is not used in
reference to him in the text, where he is generally referred to as «my servant F.» or «my man [=
servant] F.». The difference between a servant and a slave was (and is) a very significant one. A
servant becomes such by choice (though he/she may be compelled by poverty), whereas slavery is the
fruit of coercion. F. immediately declares his intention to be Robinson’s servant for life in gratitude for
having had his life saved. He gradually also becomes a friend and a son to him, without ever losing his
original subordinate status.
Another indication of Robinson’s Eurocentric stance comes in the “naming-scene”: «I made him know his
name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life; [ . . . ] I likewise taught him to say, Master,
and then let him know that was to be my name» (209). The protagonist does not even consider the
possibility of asking the newcomer his real name, but directly imposes a new one on him—moreover, one
that is not a person’s name—and exchanges his own with a title used to denote a relationship. Likewise,
he enforces on him his Protestant religion as well as his traditions, world view, values and practical
knowledge without ever bothering to find out whether F. has anything interesting to teach him.
Also: see Robinson’s reflections on cannibalism and cultural differences after he sees the footprint on the
shore; compare the idea of slavery in RC to those in Utopia and The Tempest.
► On the island Robinson initially falls back into the «state of nature», as he says repeatedly, using an
expression which had only recently been introduced—one of its first appearances had been in Thomas
Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan—to indicate what was believed to have been the original, primitive and savage
condition of humankind before the development of civilization, or “culture” in the anthropological sense.
He spends the years that follow in the largely successful attempt to “evolve” into civilization, by
enclosing, building, cultivating, creating tools and useful objects and so forth. Thus he recapitulates in
himself, and in a space of less than thirty years, the whole history of human progress from wildness to
civilization (from the point of view of 18th –century pre-anthropology).
Also: it would be interesting to reflect on the intrinsic contradiction present in RC between this new preanthropological model and the traditional Biblical one (the original human state of happiness and
perfection in the garden of Eden; see above).
► Robinson’s evolution from the «state of nature» is made harder by the fact that, as he stresses
repeatedly, at first he possesses no practical skills nor knows anything about manual work, so that he has
to teach himself all through a process of trial-and-error. At the beginning he is a tabularasa, a “blank
page”, to use a metaphor employed by another philosopher, John Locke, in describing the original state
of the mind before experiences “write” themselves on it (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
1700). Likewise, the space of the island is to him, initially, also atabularasa, on which he gradually
“writes”, by dividing and delimiting areas and investing them with different “meanings” (the main
residence, the summer residence, the grove, the cultivated fields, etc.).
13
Appendix 1
OVID, Metamorphoses
from Book I
Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo,
sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat.
poena metusque aberant, nec verba minantia fixo
aere legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat
iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine vindice tuti.
nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem,
montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas,
nullaque mortales praeter sua litora norant;
nondum praecipites cingebant oppida fossae;
non tuba derecti, non aeris cornua flexi,
non galeae, non ensis erat: sine militis usu
mollia securae peragebant otia gentes.
ipsa quoque inmunis rastroque intacta nec ullis
saucia vomeribus per se dabat omnia tellus,
contentique cibis nullo cogente creatis
arbuteos fetus montanaque fraga legebant
cornaque et in duris haerentia mora rubetis
et quae deciderant patula Iovis arbore glandes.
ver erat aeternum, placidique tepentibus auris
mulcebant zephyri natos sine semine flores;
mox etiam fruges tellus inarata ferebat,
nec renovatus ager gravidis canebat aristis;
flumina iam lactis, iam flumina nectaris ibant,
flavaque de viridi stillabant ilice mella.
Postquam Saturno tenebrosa in Tartara misso
sub Iove mundus erat, subiit argentea proles,
auro deterior, fulvo pretiosior aere.
Iuppiter antiqui contraxit tempora veris
perque hiemes aestusque et inaequalis autumnos
et breve ver spatiis exegit quattuor annum.
tum primum siccis aer fervoribus ustus
canduit, et ventis glacies adstricta pependit;
tum primum subiere domos; domus antra fuerunt
et densi frutices et vinctae cortice virgae.
semina tum primum longis Cerealia sulcis
obruta sunt, pressique iugo gemuere iuvenci.
Tertia post illam successit aenea proles,
saevior ingeniis et ad horrida promptior arma,
non scelerata tamen; de duro est ultima ferro.
protinus inrupit venae peioris in aevum
omne nefas: fugere pudor verumque fidesque;
in quorum subiere locum fraudesque dolusque
insidiaeque et vis et amor sceleratus habendi.
vela dabant ventis nec adhuc bene noverat illos
navita, quaeque prius steterant in montibus altis,
fluctibus ignotis insultavere carinae,
communemque prius ceu lumina solis et auras
cautus humum longo signavit limite mensor.
nec tantum segetes alimentaque debita dives
poscebatur humus, sed itum est in viscera terrae,
quasque recondiderat Stygiisque admoverat umbris,
effodiuntur opes, inritamenta malorum.
iamque nocens ferrum ferroque nocentius aurum
prodierat, prodit bellum, quod pugnat utroque,
sanguineaque manu crepitantia concutit arma.
vivitur ex rapto: non hospes ab hospite tutus,
non socer a genero, fratrum quoque gratia rara est;
inminet exitio vir coniugis, illa mariti,
lurida terribiles miscent aconita novercae,
filius ante diem patrios inquirit in annos:
victa iacet pietas, et virgo caede madentis
ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit.
90
95
100
105
110
115
120
125
130
135
140
145
150
[89-112: The Golden Age] First there came the Golden Age, which, without coercion, without laws,
spontaneously nurtured the good and the true. There was no fear or punishment; there were no
threatening words [i.e., written laws] to be read, fixed in bronze, no crowd of suppliants fearing the
judge’s face; people lived safely without protection. No pine tree felled in the mountains had yet reached
the flowing waves to travel to other lands [i.e., no wooden vessels had been made to travel by sea];
human beings only knew their own shores.
14
There were no steep ditches surrounding towns, no straight war-trumpets, no coiled horns, no swords
and helmets. Without the use of armies, people passed their lives in gentle peace and security. The earth
itself also, freely, without the scars of ploughs, untouched by hoes, produced everything spontaneously.
Contented with food that grew without cultivation, people collected mountain strawberries and the fruit of
the strawberry tree, wild cherries, blackberries clinging to the tough brambles, and acorns fallen from
Jupiter’s spreading oak-tree. Spring was eternal, and gentle breezes caressed with warm air the flowers
that grew without being seeded. Then the untilled earth gave of its produce and, without needing
renewal, the fields whitened with heavy ears of corn. Sometimes rivers of milk flowed, sometimes
streams of nectar, and golden honey trickled from the green holm oak.
[113-124: The Silver Age] When Saturn was banished to gloomy Tartarus, and Jupiter ruled the world,
then came the age of silver that is inferior to gold but more valuable than yellow bronze. Jupiter
shortened spring’s original duration and made the year consist of four seasons, winter, summer,
changeable autumn, and brief spring. Then parched air first glowed white scorched with the heat, and ice
hung down frozen by the wind. Then houses were first made for shelter; before that time, homes had
been made in caves, and dense thickets, or under branches fastened with bark. Then seeds of corn were
first buried in the long furrows, and bullocks groaned, burdened under the yoke.
[125-150: The Bronze and Iron Ages] Third came the age of bronze, when people had fiercer natures
and were readier to indulge in savage warfare, but not yet vicious. The harsh age of iron was last.
Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted into this age of baser natures: truth, shame and honour
vanished; in their place were fraud, deceit, and trickery, violence and pernicious desires. People set sails
to the wind, though as yet the seamen had poor knowledge of their use, and the ships’ keels that once
were trees standing amongst high mountains, now leaped through uncharted waves. The land that was
once common to all, as the light of the sun is, and the air, was marked out, to its furthest boundaries, by
wary surveyors. Not only did people demand the crops and the food the rich soil owed them, but they
entered the bowels of the earth, and excavating brought up the wealth it had concealed in Stygian shade,
wealth that incites men to crime. And now harmful iron appeared, and gold more harmful than iron. War
came, whose struggles employ both, waving clashing arms with bloodstained hands. People lived on
plunder: friend was not safe with friend, nor relative with relative, and kindness was rare between
brothers. Husbands longed for the death of their wives, wives for the death of their husbands. Murderous
stepmothers mixed deadly aconite [i.e., poison], and sons inquired into their fathers’ years [i.e., desired
their death] before their time. Piety was dead, and the virgin Astraea [the goddess of Justice], the last of
all the immortals to depart, herself abandoned the blood-drenched earth.
*
from
*
*
Book V
[Ceres: ll. 341-343]
Prima Ceres unco glaebam dimovit aratro,
prima dedit fruges alimentaque mitia terris,
prima dedit leges; Cereris sunt omnia munus.
Ceres was the first to turn the soil with curving plough, the first to give crops and peaceful food [i.e.,
vegetarian fare that did not involve the use of violence] to the earth, and the first to give laws [to
humankind]; all things are Ceres’s gift.
15
Appendix 2
from
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Part IV: A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS
The Yahoos
from Chapter I
[Gulliver finds himself all alone in an unknown land]
[…] I advanced forward, and soon got upon firm ground, where I sat down on a bank to rest myself,
and consider what I had best do. When I was a little refreshed, I went up into the country, resolving to
deliver myself to the first savages I should meet, and purchase my life from them by some bracelets,
glass rings, and other toys, which sailors usually provide themselves with in those voyages, and whereof
I had some about me. The land was divided by long rows of trees, not regularly planted, but naturally
growing; there was great plenty of grass, and several fields of oats. I walked very circumspectly, for fear
of being surprised, or suddenly shot with an arrow from behind, or on either side. I fell into a beaten
road, where I saw many tracts of human feet, and some of cows, but most of horses. At last I beheld
several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees.
Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind
a thicket to observe them better. Some of them coming forward near the place where I lay, gave me an
opportunity of distinctly marking their form. Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair,
some frizzled, and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs, and
the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins,
which were of a brown buff colour. They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about
the anus, which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the ground, for this
posture they used, as well as lying down, and often stood on their hind feet. They climbed high trees as
nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points,
and hooked. They would often spring, and bound, and leap, with prodigious agility. The females were
not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on their heads, but none on their faces, nor any thing
more than a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda. The dugs
hung between their fore feet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked. The hair of both
sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black, and yellow. Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my
travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy. So
that, thinking I had seen enough, full of contempt and aversion, I got up, and pursued the beaten road,
hoping it might direct me to the cabin of some Indian. I had not got far, when I met one of these
creatures full in my way, and coming up directly to me. The ugly monster, when he saw me, distorted
several ways, every feature of his visage, and stared, as at an object he had never seen before; then
approaching nearer, lifted up his fore-paw, whether out of curiosity or mischief I could not tell; but I drew
my hanger, and gave him a good blow with the flat side of it, for I durst not strike with the edge, fearing
the inhabitants might be provoked against me, if they should come to know that I had killed or maimed
any of their cattle. When the beast felt the smart, he drew back, and roared so loud, that a herd of at
least forty came flocking about me from the next field, howling and making odious faces; but I ran to the
body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by waving my hanger. Several of this
cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to
discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of
the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on every side.
from Ch. VII
[Gulliver has been telling his “master”—one of the noble, rational horses (the Houyhnhnms) who are the
dominant species in the country—about England, its way of life and its institutions]
[…] he observed, that “as I agreed in every feature of my body with other Yahoos, except where it
was to my real disadvantage in point of strength, speed, and activity, the shortness of my claws, and
some other particulars where nature had no part; so from the representation I had given him of our lives,
our manners, and our actions, he found as near a resemblance in the disposition of our minds.” He said,
“the Yahoos were known to hate one another, more than they did any different species of animals; and
the reason usually assigned was, the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest, but
not in themselves. He had therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that
invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be hardly supportable. But
he now found he had been mistaken, and that the dissensions of those brutes in his country were owing
to the same cause with ours, as I had described them. For if,” said he, “you throw among five Yahoos as
much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the ears,
each single one impatient to have all to itself; and therefore a servant was usually employed to stand by
while they were feeding abroad, and those kept at home were tied at a distance from each other: that if
a cow died of age or accident, before a Houyhnhnm could secure it for his own Yahoos, those in the
neighbourhood would come in herds to seize it, and then would ensue such a battle as I had described,
with terrible wounds made by their claws on both sides, although they seldom were able to kill one
another, for want of such convenient instruments of death as we had invented. At other times, the like
battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several neighbourhoods, without any visible cause;
16
those of one district watching all opportunities to surprise the next, before they are prepared. But if they
find their project has miscarried, they return home, and, for want of enemies, engage in what I call a civil
war among themselves.
“That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several colours, whereof the
Yahoos are violently fond: and when part of these stones is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happens,
they will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out; then carry them away, and hide them by
heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out
their treasure.” My master said, “he could never discover the reason of this unnatural appetite, or how
these stones could be of any use to a Yahoo; but now he believed it might proceed from the same
principle of avarice which I had ascribed to mankind. That he had once, by way of experiment, privately
removed a heap of these stones from the place where one of his Yahoos had buried it; whereupon the
sordid animal, missing his treasure, by his loud lamenting brought the whole herd to the place, there
miserably howled, then fell to biting and tearing the rest, began to pine away, would neither eat, nor
sleep, nor work, till he ordered a servant privately to convey the stones into the same hole, and hide
them as before; which, when his Yahoo had found, he presently recovered his spirits and good humour,
but took good care to remove them to a better hiding place, and has ever since been a very serviceable
brute.”
My master further assured me, which I also observed myself, “that in the fields where the shining
stones abound, the fiercest and most frequent battles are fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the
neighbouring Yahoos.”
He said, “it was common, when two Yahoos discovered such a stone in a field, and were contending
which of them should be the proprietor, a third would take the advantage, and carry it away from them
both;” which my master would needs contend to have some kind of resemblance with our suits at law;
wherein I thought it for our credit not to undeceive him; since the decision he mentioned was much more
equitable than many decrees among us; because the plaintiff and defendant there lost nothing beside the
stone they contended for: whereas our courts of equity would never have dismissed the cause, while
either of them had any thing left.
My master, continuing his discourse, said, “there was nothing that rendered the Yahoos more odious,
than their undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing that came in their way, whether herbs, roots,
berries, the corrupted flesh of animals, or all mingled together: and it was peculiar in their temper, that
they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth, at a greater distance, than much better
food provided for them at home. If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to burst; after
which, nature had pointed out to them a certain root that gave them a general evacuation.
“There was also another kind of root, very juicy, but somewhat rare and difficult to be found, which
the Yahoos sought for with much eagerness, and would suck it with great delight; it produced in them the
same effects that wine has upon us. It would make them sometimes hug, and sometimes tear one
another; they would howl, and grin, and chatter, and reel, and tumble, and then fall asleep in the mud.”
I did indeed observe that the Yahoos were the only animals in this country subject to any diseases;
which, however, were much fewer than horses have among us, and contracted, not by any ill-treatment
they meet with, but by the nastiness and greediness of that sordid brute. Neither has their language any
more than a general appellation for those maladies, which is borrowed from the name of the beast, and
called hnea-yahoo, or Yahoo’s evil; and the cure prescribed is a mixture of their own dung and urine,
forcibly put down the Yahoo’s throat. This I have since often known to have been taken with success,
and do here freely recommend it to my countrymen for the public good, as an admirable specific against
all diseases produced by repletion.
“As to learning, government, arts, manufactures, and the like,” my master confessed, “he could find
little or no resemblance between the Yahoos of that country and those in ours; for he only meant to
observe what parity there was in our natures. He had heard, indeed, some curious Houyhnhnms
observe, that in most herds there was a sort of ruling Yahoo (as among us there is generally some
leading or principal stag in a park), who was always more deformed in body, and mischievous in
disposition, than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get,
whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his
kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass’s flesh. This favourite is hated by
the whole herd, and therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually
continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the
head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and discharge
their excrements upon him from head to foot. But how far this might be applicable to our courts, and
favourites, and ministers of state, my master said I could best determine.”
17
from Ch. VII
[more information about the Yahoos]
[…] By what I could discover, the Yahoos appear to be the most unteachable of all animals: their
capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry burdens. Yet I am of opinion, this defect arises
chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition; for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful.
They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel. It
is observed, that the red haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom
yet they much exceed in strength and activity.
The Houyhnhnms keep the Yahoos for present use in huts not far from the house; but the rest are
sent abroad to certain fields, where they dig up roots, eat several kinds of herbs, and search about for
carrion, or sometimes catch weasels and luhimuhs (a sort of wild rat), which they greedily devour.
Nature has taught them to dig deep holes with their nails on the side of a rising ground, wherein they lie
by themselves; only the kennels of the females are larger, sufficient to hold two or three cubs.
They swim from their infancy like frogs, and are able to continue long under water, where they often
take fish, which the females carry home to their young. And, upon this occasion, I hope the reader will
pardon my relating an odd adventure.
Being one day abroad with my protector the sorrel nag, and the weather exceeding hot, I entreated
him to let me bathe in a river that was near. He consented, and I immediately stripped myself stark
naked, and went down softly into the stream. It happened that a young female Yahoo, standing behind a
bank, saw the whole proceeding, and inflamed by desire, as the nag and I conjectured, came running
with all speed, and leaped into the water, within five yards of the place where I bathed. I was never in
my life so terribly frightened. The nag was grazing at some distance, not suspecting any harm. She
embraced me after a most fulsome manner. I roared as loud as I could, and the nag came galloping
towards me, whereupon she quitted her grasp, with the utmost reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite
bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the time I was putting on my clothes.
This was a matter of diversion to my master and his family, as well as of mortification to myself. For
now I could no longer deny that I was a real Yahoo in every limb and feature, since the females had a
natural propensity to me, as one of their own species. Neither was the hair of this brute of a red colour
(which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular), but black as a sloe, and her
countenance did not make an appearance altogether so hideous as the rest of her kind; for I think she
could not be above eleven years old.
18