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Wednesday
Note: If today’s essay is a bit uneven, it’s because–writing it from Slovenia–I started it fairly confident that Kamala Harris would win the election, only to begin realizing we were witnessing 2016 redux as the night wore on. What is meant as a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot in Shakespeare’s final play–inept insurrectionists trying to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda–suddenly became the central action. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III. (Think of Prospero’s book as the Constitution, Miranda as reproductive freedom.) In the course of the night, my headline changed from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.” Following Trump’s victory, white nationalist Nick Fuentes gloated, in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Or as Caliban fantasizes after Prospero reminds him that he “didst seek to violate the honour of my child,”
O ho, O ho! would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.
Anyway, here’s the essay that finally emerged from that dreadful night.
I taught The Tempest yesterday in my Ljubljana Shakespeare class and, as I await election results—it’s midnight on the east coast, early morning Central European Time—I’ve been having a fantasy based on the play. It involves many of Trump’s fanatical followers coming to see him as he really is.
Of course, this fantasy can only happen if he loses. If he wins, he will only build on the mythological status that he has assumed in their eyes.
I draw on one of the play’s subplots for the fantasy. Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax and a thoroughly disagreeable character, encounters two of the lesser survivors of the shipwreck, the drunken butler Stephano and court jester Trinculo. Thinking they are his key to overthrowing the magician Prospero and freeing him from servitude, Caliban links his fate with theirs.
Winning him over is the wine that Stephano is carrying, which I associate with Trump’s seductive rhetoric, whether it be his birther lie about Obama, his misogynist attacks on women, his xenophobic descriptions of Mexicans, his Muslim ban, or all his other countless invitations to become our worst selves. Caliban, like Trump’s ardent fans, is enthralled:
These be fine things, an if they be not sprites. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
I will kneel to him.
“Hast thou not dropp’d from heaven?” Caliban goes on to ask breathlessly and then goes even further in his adulation. Thrice we see him kneel down to kiss Stefano’s foot:
I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island;
And I will kiss thy foot: I prithee, be my god.
Why obey the old norms and conventions when one can follow a leader such as this? “A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!” Caliban declares as switches masters:
No more dams I’ll make for fish
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring;
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish
‘Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom,
hey-day, freedom!
Caliban even has version of the Right’s “America for Americans” declaration: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me“–ignoring the fact that his mother, the witch Sycorax, established her family by conquest, imprisoning original inhabitant Ariel in a tree.
To be sure, to Trinculo’s outsider perspective Caliban appears a howling, drunken monster. But that’s often the way with cults: they seem perfectly logical and sane to those caught up in them.
As every student of fascism understands, from blind adoration to violence is only a short step. Caliban’s plan is to overthrow Prospero and seize his daughter:
Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him,
I’ th’ afternoon to sleep: there thou mayst brain him,
Having first seized his books, or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife. Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command: they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
He has brave utensils,–for so he calls them–
Which when he has a house, he’ll deck withal
And that most deeply to consider is
The beauty of his daughter; he himself
Calls her a nonpareil…
Stefano is as enthralled with the battle plan as were the January 6 insurrectionists with the idea of storming the Capitol. When he and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, however, they behave somewhat like those same intruders who wandered around the building taking selfies, trashing Nancy Pelosi’s office, and looting souvenirs. In this case, they put on Prospero’s garments, infuriating Caliban, who understands Prospero’s power:
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean
To dote thus on such luggage? Let’s alone
And do the murder first: if he awake,
From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches,
Make us strange stuff.
Prospero, with the aid of the spirit Aeriel, then sends in his version of the National Guard— “Stage direction: Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds”—hunting the three as relentlessly as the FBI and Justice Department have hunted those who attacked the Capitol:
Prospero: Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!
Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o’ mountain.
Aeriel: Hark, they roar!
In the end they are routed and tormented, after which comes the moment that I’m hoping for with Trump cultists. Prospero having ordered Caliban to his cell—”As you look to have my pardon, trim it handsomely”—the monsters see butler Stephano for who he really is. This is the moment I’m dreaming of with regard to Trump supporters:
Caliban: I’ll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!
A major theme of The Tempest is rising above our earthly selves to a spiritual vision. As a white magic magus, Prospero seeks to bring order and enlightenment to a world that is riven by dark impulses, including political insurrection and unlawful passion.
But Caliban too is an integral part of who we are. America, a nation founded both on Enlightenment optimism and bloody conquest/enslaved labor, has a history of swinging back and forth between progressive ideals and brute impulse. “This thing of darkness, [I] acknowledge him mine,” Prospero says at the end of the play.
Will our version of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy end in tragedy or comedy? We stand here, as if on as knife edge, as
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives.
The passage is from Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written at another time when the world faced a fascist threat.
