The Tempest (Oxford Shakespeare)

Prospero's Art

Prospero's use of magic in The Tempest is a source of apparently endless critical speculation. It has been defined as benign and redemptive, its violence excused or legitimated. At the opposite end of the critical spectrum it has been defined as witchcraft and read as a metaphor for colonial oppression. But the possibility that Prospero's Art refers to more localized parochial Jacobean contexts has not received the attention it deserves.

Mycotoxicology is the study of poisoning caused by fungi. Unlikely though it seems, this field of study offers evidence that the pains Prospero inflicts on Caliban, which would have been recognized by a Jacobean audience as real and familiar, had physical causes. Although Shakespeare and his audience could only have known Caliban's symptoms as those induced by witchcraft, medical science since the late seventeenth century has defined those symptomsthem as the symptoms of disease of ergotism, a form of poisoning caused by a fungus infestation of cereals, especially rye grain.

By whatever means The Tempest is approached, magic is the defining factor in the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. Prospero the usurper continually threatens his slave with sufferings that have apparently magical causes, and the rebel Caliban acknowledges the power Prospero exerts over him by this means. Wherever Shakespeare uses magic as a theme in his plays, this entertaining and spectacular theatrical device played to Tudor and early Jacobean belief in all kinds of occult practices, and their social and political significance. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, magic directs attention to and acts as a metaphor for various social, political and religious issues.

In his book Renaissance Magic (1989), John Mebane discussed many forms of high-status and learned magic which were studied and regarded as science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he interpreted Prospero as a magus, like John Dee, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. Mebane stressed the redemptive aspect of Prospero's magic, apparently ignoring its brutal and repressive effects. Other early-modern English social contexts reveal very different interpretations. In contrast to the occult science defined by Mebane, post-Reformation society was deeply influenced by popular forms of magic. Belief in the malevolent interference of fairies was widespread. Their propensity for causing bad dreams and for taking away human children was well known and exploited by Shakespeare to dramatic effect in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fairy magic was, however, largely a domestic and individual misfortune. Witchcraft could be equally domestic and individual in performance and effect, but it also concerned communities. In Essex in the late sixteenth century, a spate of accusations of witchcraft and accompanying witch trials took place, but the most spectacular manifestation was in Scotland, where James VI took personal charge of witch trials in 1590. Witchcraft acquired political significance when it was perceived to have been used in acts of treason such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

It is received wisdom that Shakespeare was pandering to James's obsession with the occult when he wrote both Macbeth and The Tempest. The King's interest in witchcraft was given its own written form in 1597 when he published Daemonologie, a treatise in which he declared that witches: “can rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire, either vpon Sea or land”. James went on to link this ancient belief to the Devil, the master of witches, when he wrote:

this is likewise verie possible to their master to do, he having such affinitie with the air as being a spirite, and hauing such power of the forming and moouing thereof . . . . For in the Scripture, that stile of the prince of the aire is given vnto him.

In this context, Prospero's command of atmospheric disturbance and “airy spirits” lends clear overtones both of witchcraft and the demonic to his characterization as he uses Ariel, his spirit familiar, to summon the storm and harass the shipwrecked Italians. Even without James's comment, however, a Jacobean audience would have recognized the demonic significance of Prospero's power from the Biblical description of the devil as “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2).

Although some critics continue to argue for a benign reading of Prospero's mastery and magic, his magic is, with the doubtful exception of his indulgence in the masque, wholly characteristic of the maleficum associated with witches, and King James asserted that people practised witchcraft for three reasons:

Even by these three passiones that are within our selues: Curiositie in great ingines: thrist for revenge, for some tortes deeply apprehended: or greedie appetite of geare, caused through great pouerty. As to the first of these, Curiositie, it is onelie the inticement of Magiciens or Necromanciers.

In The Tempest, the aristocratic magician develops his interest, his “Curiositie”, while still in Milan. He has the storm created as part of his plan to be revenged against those who usurped his power. This is the only redress he can perceive for the private wrong done to him. He then uses his magic to wield power over the island where he and his daughter are marooned in a state of poverty which is only alleviated by the provisions and services provided by Caliban under the threat of painful bewitchmentpunishment. Throughout The Tempest, Prospero controls Caliban, as he controls other characters, by inflicting suffering on him. The physical symptoms of that suffering are the symptoms of bewitchment as these were recognized and understood throughout early modern Europe.

The diagnosis of bewitchment in Elizabethan and Jacobean England recognized a number of symptoms. Among the most frequently mentioned are internal and external physical pains, fits, and forms of psychological disturbance such as hallucinations and visions. Recorded cases of alleged bewitchment do not necessarily include all these symptoms; nevertheless, Barry Reay, in Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (1998), writes that throughout Europe at this time, “physical or psychological distress without any natural explanation” was likely to be diagnosed as witchcraft, and the symptoms of witchcraft were likely to include sensations of “various nippings, pinchings, bitings and scratchings”, exactly the sensations Prospero inflicts on Caliban, according to his own threats and Caliban's complaints.

When they first confront each other, in response to Caliban's curses, Prospero tells him “Thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made 'em”. He later dismisses Caliban, telling him: “I'll rack thee with old cramps, / Fill all thy bones with achës, make thee roar, / That beasts shall tremble at thy din”. These might seem like threats simply intended to frighten Caliban into submission, except that Caliban later acknowledges that they are spells that take effect. As he impotently curses Prospero in his absence, Caliban hesitates, saying:

His spirits hear me. And yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin shows, pitch me i' th' mire', Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark Out of my way, unless he bid 'em; but For every trifle are they set upon me, Sometimes like apes that mow and chatter at me, And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues Do hiss me into madness.

A post-Reformation audience would have recognized the physical discomforts, and the visions, or hallucinations, as the symptoms of Caliban's bewitchment by Prospero. When Caliban tells the audience of the extent to which Prospero's curses affect and control him, all the effects he complains of are symptoms of witchcraft as these were recorded in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but they are also the symptoms of ergotism, which afflicted Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period.

Interest in ergotism has grown since Linnda Caporael famously suggested that this sickness was the underlying factor in the Salem witch trials. Mary Matossian studied manifestations of the disease which reveal its presence in England at the time when Shakespeare was writing, and at a time when accusations of witchcraft reached a peak. Ian White and W. E. Boyd separately discussed its presence in Scotland at the time of the witch trials of the early 1600s.

Matossian lists many symptoms of the disease. Among these are: feelings of being pinched, choked and suffocated; tingling and itching sensations known as formication, because the skin feels as if ants are crawling on it; redness, swelling, blistering, hallucinations, drowsiness, dizziness, delusions, psychosis, blindness, deafness, numbness. Caliban's speeches are full of references to his sufferings which repeat or echo these. His hearing is certainly troubled. The island, he says, is “full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs”, “a thousand twangling instruments”, and voices which make him sleepy. He feels the cramps, pinches and aches that Prospero threatens him with, and he is sure that Prospero commands the strange things he sees: the “urchin-shows”, the biting apes and the adders. The hallucinatory nature of these visions is not only consistent with bewitchment but depict the kind of hallucinations most relevant to English people. There is nothing about Caliban's visions of hedgehogs, firebrands, or adders which is in keeping with the apparently exotic location of the island, not even the apes, which had been a long-standing image of folly and perverted humanity in literature since the Middle Ages.

Is it likely then that ergotism was being mistaken for the effects of witchcraft in England when Shakespeare was writing? Matossian has written that “prior to 1650 it was believed that a supernatural being, benign or malign, was the cause of ergotism”. Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), also notes that

a supernatural explanation was particularly seductive in the field of medicine, where human impotence in the face of a variety of hazards was only too obvious . . . Lacking any natural explanation, men turned to a supernatural one . . . . There was thus a standing disposition to attribute to witchcraft a variety of deaths and disease, aches and pains, which would cause us no intellectual problem today.

With unwitting accuracy, Shakespeare himself links the fungal infestation of wheat directly to human suffering, though he attributes it to demonic activity, in King Lear. Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, interprets the torch-bearing Gloucester as a devil and declares: “This is the foul Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks until the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squinies the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth”.

Matossian explored the connection between witchcraft and ergotism in late sixteenth- century Essex, where she found a correlation between accusations of witchcraft and areas in which rye was grown for consumption locally and in London. The link between ergotism and witchcraft accusations depends on establishing one crucial factor: the climate, for the ergot- producing fungus flourishes in bad weather. The fungus claviceps purpurea infests rye grains, causing them to metamorphose into hard black sclerotia. Infestations are particularly severe during years when the weather in winter and spring is more than usually wet and cold, and Matossian notes:

in a community that grew both rye and wheat, consumption of rye was likely to increase after a severe winter, for winter rye, planted in the fall, was more likely to survive than winter wheat. But after a severe winter, rye was likely to contain more ergot than usual.

If heavily infected rye is ground in with healthy grain during milling, the resulting rye flour is still poisonous. Bread made from that flour will cause those who eat it to experience symptoms including the tingling and itching of formication, hallucinations, disturbed vision and hearing, and pains of varying degrees of severity in joints and limbs. The disease may be so severe as to cause death, but only after great suffering.

Ergotism would have been part of life in later Tudor and early Jacobean England. The Tempest itself refers to the growing of rye when Iris commands the nymphs in the masque “Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on”. Such hats would be a natural by-product of the diet of those “sunburned sickle-men” depicted by the nymphs and forming part of the bucolic fantasy which romanticizes harsh reality. Rye bread was the dietary staple of most working people in England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Only the wealthy could afford wheat bread, and the grain shortages of the 1590s pushed up prices. Parliament eventually intervened and prohibited price increases, forbade the export of grain, and imported wheat and rye. Unfortunately, much of that rye came from the Baltic, where the climate was just as likely to produce ergot as the chilly damp of England.

There is no difficulty in recovering the climatic conditions in England that are known to produce ergot. Shakespeare sets them out exactly in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although the play offers the charming conceit of a dispute between fairies as the cause of bad weather, the results are exactly right for ergot to flourish. Titania speaks of

Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard. The fold stands empty in the drowned field.

The effect of adverse climatic conditions could not be plainer, and accurately mirrors the terrible weather that gave rise to the dearth which afflicted Britain during the 1590s. In January 1597 William James, the Dean of Durham, wrote to Lord Burghley that the famine was so bad in the north that people were travelling from Carlisle to Durham to buy bread. In April of that year the Sheriff of Norfolk wrote to Burghley that “the prices of corn daily rise, being such as were never known before”. The following month an account of imports into the port of London shows almost twice as much rye as wheat entering the country. Under these conditions, increasing numbers of people would have been at risk from ergot poisoning, so perhaps it is not surprising that Bottom the weaver and Caliban the menial experience what appear to be hallucinogenic states.

That Caliban's symptoms are real and that these were recognizable to the Jacobean audience as symptoms of witchcraft seems indisputable. While all the symptoms Caliban suffers are symptoms associated with witchcraft, his menial status, fetching wood, finding food, but excluded from the shelter and comforts he provides, situates him in the social stratum which in reality would have been most likely to be affected by ergotism. The work of Matossian, Thomas, and others links witchcraft accusations to English social and economic conditions, shifting the political emphasis from Caliban as a symbol of the colonial Other to Caliban as the local Other of English society, but not analogous to the conventional masterless man. He is instead symbolic of those working people who suffered most under changing economic conditions in post-Reformation England.

These included a continuing programme of enclosures, with subsequent unemployment. On January 16, 1597 the Dean of Durham linked famine to rural change when he wrote to Lord Burghley concerning the local situation:

The decay of tillage and dispeopling of villages offends God by spoiling the Church, dishonours the prince, weakens the commonwealth . . . want and waste have crept into Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland. . . . Of 8,000 acres lately in tillage, now not eight score are tilled; those who have sold corn have to buy; then whole families are turned out.

He then wrote to Lord Cecil that “in Northumberland great villages are dispeopled . . . if corn were not brought in at Newcastle . . . thousands would perish for want of bread”.

In Bread of Dreams (1989) Piero Camporesi discusses the hallucinogenic and physical disorders associated with hunger as well as with contaminated bread in pre-industrial Europe, but Caliban does not suffer from hunger, and he does not eat bread of any kind in the play. He suffers bewitchment, because that is how English society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries understood the painful and hallucinogenic symptoms which would be defined as those of ergotism only later in the seventeenth century. Caliban is, however, deprived of the island, the land to which he asserts a prior claim. As Prospero usurps control of the island and enslaves Caliban, this becomes a metaphor for the power by which enclosures deprived communities of their traditional rights to land.

Prospero's use of witchcraft to maintain his position as usurper defines the abuse of power that takes the use of the land from the people. This use of witchcraft as a metaphor for the power to usurp the land is, however, only the first step in Shakespeare's electrifying portrayal of the relationship between the body politic and the Catholic church in England, as he sets The Tempest up to defend the Oath of Allegiance in opposition to European Catholic political theory. Here, usurpation on the microcosmic scale alludes to usurpation on a macrocosmic scale as Prospero the witch-usurper metamorphoses into the Protestant Pope-Antichrist. That, however, is another, much longer, story.

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