A julio de burgos

Seduction and Service in The Tempest
Sanchez, Melissa E.
Studies in Philology, Volume 105, Number 1, Winter 2008, pp. 50-82 (Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: 10.1353/sip.2008.0001

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Seduction and Service   in The Tempest
by Melissa E. Sanchez
he Tempest  is  unique  among  Shakespeare’s  plays  in  that  it  lists  only one female character in the dramatis personae. Yet Miranda’s  isolation is neither inconsequential nor entire; in actuality, she is the touchstone for the women who enter the play via its tissue of allusions and whose presence makes legible a contemporary political discourse that likened the relation of sovereign and subject to that of husband and wife. The sixteenth century had seen critiques of Elizabethan  policy couched in the erotic entanglements of such influential romances  as Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s  late plays evoke similar narrative structures to participate in an ongoing debate regarding the location and scope of sovereignty in early Stuart  England.  Read  in  such  a  discursive  context,  The Tempest’s  attention  to female desire and consent registers the participation of both populace and ruler, women and men, in sustaining structures of authority.  Miranda’s enactment of political subjection differs conspicuously from  that of Ariel, Caliban, or any of the shipwrecked Italians, for her femininity accentuates  an  erotic  dynamic that  is  less  visible—but  equally  significant—in Prospero’s relations with his male subjects and rivals.   Given  the  prominent  conjunction  of  courtship  and  politics  in  early  Stuart discourse, it is surprising that female figures have generated little  interest in criticism of The Tempest, which has typically responded more to the masculine struggles emphasized in the play’s comic subplot than   Critics have differed as to the relation of Shakespeare’s last four plays to the rest of his  oeuvre. E. M. W. Tillyard, for instance, argues that the romances incorporate the experience of the tragedies in order to transcend it, while Howard Felperin suggests that in their  emphasis on disenchantment and human limitation, these plays actually produce effects more akin to the epics of Spenser or Milton than to Shakespeare’s own previous work.  See Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938), 16–20 and 81–89;  and Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 53–58. 50 © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press

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to the male and female negotiations staged by its romantic main plot. Early twentieth-century readers saw The Tempest as a struggle over the  angelic—but passive—soul (Miranda), between the forces of divine enlightenment (Prospero), on the one hand, and bestial desire (Caliban),  on the other. As numerous postcolonial adaptations of the play have  demonstrated,  such  mythic  interpretations,  far  from  being  apolitical,  are saturated with precisely the ideological mystifications that helped justify the brutalities of colonial regimes. Drawing on these identifications of Caliban with the insurgent native, Prospero with the ruthless  colonizer,  Shakespearean  critics  of  the  past  few decades  have  tended  to  see  The Tempest  less  as  a  simple  encomium  to  humanist,  European  values than as an imaginative arena of political struggle and ambivalence.  While  postcolonial  criticism  of The Tempest  has  offered  an  im Works  that  tend  implicitly  to  justify  imperial  and  colonial  projects  by  interpreting  Prospero as the beneficent voice of education, civility, and providence include G. Wilson  Knight’s The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s...