Boydell’s Illustrations of the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (1797) is a collection of broadsheet engravings that collectively constitute one of the most ambitious and costly art-publishing ventures of the late eighteenth century. Toward the middle of the collection, one can find a depiction of an early moment in The Tempest where Prospero responds to Caliban’s insolence by issuing the following judgement:
For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall forth at vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made ’em. (1.2.389-394).
As he enumerates these tortures, the Duke holds his left arm out with forefinger extended, a gesture of condemnation that recalls the outstretched hand of God from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. In contrast to Adam, however, the naked, dark-skinned object of his admonition does not respond with a reciprocal gesture, but with a clenched fist, and with an overall semblance of alien hostility. His eyeballs bulge beneath a heavy brow. His ears taper to fine points. His hair stands straight in quill-like spikes. And most conspicuously of all, his nipples droop from his chest with a peculiar insistence, kind of like tubers on a lumpy potato.
As an entry point to explanation, it will help to note that the image emerged at a time when theatrical impresarios such as David Garrick and John Philip Kemble were building Shakespeare temples, erecting Shakespeare statues, and collecting Shakespeare relics in honor of a figure who had somehow risen from the rank of mere dramatist to national hero and secular deity. Following in the path established by these endeavors, plans to inaugurate a distinctly English tradition of monumental art began under the direction of John Boydell, a London publisher who enlisted the services of more than thirty artists to produce a Shakespeare-themed series of paintings that provided the basis for engravings sold by subscription at the handsome sum of ninety guineas, or £94.50, enough money to purchase a modest home at the time. One of the central contributors to the project was Henry Fuseli, a Swiss-born painter who provided eight illustrations, including the depiction of Caliban’s admonishment.
In all likelihood, the gestural similarity between Fuseli’s depiction of Prospero and the finger of God in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam is not a coincidence. During a pilgrimage to Italy from 1770 to 1778, the artist immersed himself in a study of the Renaissance masters, especially Michelangelo, whose muscular, expressive figures left a lasting imprint on his work. Upon his return to England in 1780, he made contact with Boydell and shared his idea for a cycle of Shakespeare paintings modeled on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a plan that may have inspired the publisher’s ambitious spate of commissions.
In addition to marking a formative moment in the evolution of Shakespeare’s popularity, the Boydell engravings are also indicative of tensions surrounding the British slave trade and the rise of pseudo-scientific racism. As Kristina Straub has recently observed, the racialized depiction of Caliban shown above is an especially telling case in point because it clashes with a foregoing tradition of caricaturing Prospero’s dissentious “slave” as a safe, sanitized fool, bereft of humanity and ethical complexity. Quills notwithstanding, Fuseli’s islander is neither wholly monstrous nor safely ridiculous, but recognizably human and insistently marked by a cluster of grotesque details that animalize and effeminize him without diluting an intensely affective presence. Claws curl out from his fingers and toes. Tufts sprout from his shoulders and thighs. And those weirdly elongated wolf-nipples suggest an unnerving departure from idealized norms of masculine perfection. He’s human enough to be a slave, but obviously marginal.
With all of these elements in view, it’s easy to see how the illustration lends itself to a post-colonial reading, and to an analysis of Shakespeare’s imbrication in the evolution of racist ideologies—but the story doesn’t end there. To bring the full range of subtextual tensions into perspective, take a moment to consider Fuseli’s most famous painting, “The Nightmare” (1781), a depiction of a naked, dark-skinned incubus who squats thoughtfully on a slumbering woman’s torso while a blind horse peeks out from behind a curtain:
What’s going on here?
Well, quite a lot, as it turns out… Let’s begin by taking stock of correspondences between the squatting incubus and Fuseli’s Caliban: pointed ears, dark skin, heavy brow, bulging eyes, claws, and a jaw that juts out from beneath a fixed frown.
Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness, I have used thee,
Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honor of my child. (1.2.411-415)
Rather than denying the accusation or expressing remorse, Caliban replies with a chuckling reflection on the children he might have fathered if his attempt had been successful:
O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans. (1.2.419-421)
In addition to providing some context for Miranda’s contemptuous glare, the accusation of attempted rape helps to uncover an ominous threat of miscegenation that Fuseli incorporated into both images. But why did he decide to use the same faces twice? Who is that woman? What is going on?
The best way to answer these questions is to pay a visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, carefully remove “The Nightmare” from its place on the gallery wall, turn it around, and inspect the reverse side. Here’s what you will find:
She’s everywhere!
In an essay from 1963, H.W. Janson suggests that the woman depicted above is Anna Landolt, niece of the artist’s longtime friend, Johann Kaspar Lavater. During a visit to Zürich in 1779, Fuseli became infatuated with Landolt and made a proposal of marriage that received a flat refusal, probably on the grounds of poor financial prospects. Shortly thereafter, she married a merchant with more money, and Fuseli fell to pieces. In a letter to Lavater from the same year, the artist wrote with tortured candor about his refusal to accept the rejection: “Last night I had her in bed with me—tossed my bedclothes hugger-mugger—wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her—fused her body and soul together with my own—poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will…”
According to Janson’s hypothesis, Landolt continued to occupy Fuseli’s mind for another two years, and eventually found a place on both sides of his most famous painting. In light of this conjecture, the incubus becomes an ugly abstraction of Fuseli himself: a menacing figure of disgust, warped by longing and unrequited passion. If Janson is correct, then it looks as though the same feelings were still fueling the artist’s imagination eighteen years later, when Boydell commissioned him to illustrate a scene from The Tempest. Although there can be no reliable way to know for sure, I suspect that the disgust powering his debased, animalistic image of Caliban is concomitant with some form of acute heartache, a personal misery that metastasized into ideological ugliness.
For a full elaboration of the psychological dynamic I am describing, one can find no better source than Black Skins, White Masks (1952), a searing analysis of colonial power by the anti-colonial psychiatrist and political philosopher, Frantz Fanon. In Fanon’s formulation, colonial racism functions less as a confident assertion of superiority than as a neurotic defense mechanism that displaces feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, and unresolved desire onto racialized bodies. Viewed from this perspective, Fuseli’s Tempest illustration takes on a double layer of meaning that is also present in his letter to Lavater. In both cases, an assertion of power facilitates the exposition of deficiency, like a fist that draws attention to tiny hands.
But what about the Tempest itself? How closely do Fuseli’s politics align with the politics in Shakespeare’s play? And to what extent, if any, is the original Caliban also an expression of colonial stigmatization?
In my view, any answer to these questions must pay strict attention to historical context: Shakespeare wrote The Tempest sometime around 1610 or 1611, approximately a century after the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas. As I have noted in my chapter on the play in Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion, those years coincided with a major promotional blitz by the Virginia Company, which was having trouble finding investors to fund a new colonial venture. Just a few years earlier, starvation and disease had killed almost two-thirds of the would-be colonists in an expedition to Jamestown, so there was good cause to be wary of New World investments.
In addition to financial reservations, there were also concerns in those years over the prospect of dispossessing aboriginal Americans. By the time of Caliban’s first appearance on the London stage, harrowing stories of the horrors perpetrated by Spanish colonizers had become a standard feature of anti-Catholic discourse, and images of unspeakable violence were available in the pages of texts such as Bartolomé de las Casas’s The Spanish Colony, a firsthand account of hair-raising abuses. Here’s a small taste of the illustrations on offer in Las Casas’s exposé:
In response to concerns that England might be heading down the same road as Spain, spokespeople for the Virginia Company made earnest promises of a more peaceful approach to colonial domination. For a representative example, consider the following assurances from Robert Johnson, an alderman and grocer who served as the Company’s deputy treasurer: “Our dominions shall be enlarged, not by storms of raging cruelties (as West India was converted) with rapier’s point and musket shot, murdering so many millions of naked Indians, […] but by fair and loving means, suiting to our English natures.”
In the very same document, however, Johnson also notes that any of the aboriginal “sheep” who “obstinately refuse to unite themselves unto us” or otherwise “disturb our plantation” will be “held and reputed recusant, withstanding their own good, and shall be dealt with as enemies of the Commonwealth of their country.” Apparently, the beneficence flowing from his “fair and loving” English nature had limits.
When I read The Tempest, I see glimmers of Johnson’s policy in Prospero’s account of his history with Caliban: he was caring and “humane” until the attempted rape, which provided a convenient justification for enslavement. Despite this connection and many others along the same lines, however, I still find it difficult to see any clear signs of an argument for or against colonialism in and of itself. As always, Shakespeare considers the issue from all sides, and raises tough questions that audience members must grapple with on their own terms. Rather than telling us what to think, his primary concern is to make us think, critically and feelingly, in a process of collective imagining suffused with puns, swordplay, kinky humor, propulsive poetry, and allusions to the literature of classical antiquity, especially Ovid. In its fundamental essence, this style of drama is not didactic: it is interrogative, exploratory, dialogic, and interactive.
By noting The Tempest’s general quality of multi-sidedness, however, I do not mean to suggest that it is absolutely inscrutable, or that it has nothing to teach us—but I do think that, if we really want to learn from it, we have to take it for what it is, warts and all. In consonance with Fanon, Shakespeare worked honestly and unflinchingly to unpack the psychology of hatred throughout his entire career: Shylock hates Antonio, Iago hates Othello, the Montagues hate the Capulets, the Yorkists hate the Lancastrians, Prospero hates Caliban, and Thersites hates everything. Moreover—and in consonance with Fuseli—his plays can sometimes also be conducive to hatred, even while they hold it up to ethical interrogation. Caliban is a good example because he reiterates a cluster of derisive stereotypes, but is also expressive of psychological depth and emotional authenticity: “This island’s mine!” he insists, and his argument has the force of truth (1.2.396).
In view of this complexity, I suggest that The Tempest can offer an instructively imperfect example of how to confront hateful ideologies in our own age. The lesson, if there is one, is to resist the pull of mawkish generalizations, attend to the human motivations that flow beneath ideology, and try to think of people as people, rather than bugaboos or iterations of types.
On a similar note, I also want to suggest that we would do well to think of great artists as normal, imperfect humans as well, rather than making them deities, celebrities, or symbols of national pride. Boydell’s engravings offer a rich and sophisticated record of an important moment in the history of Shakespeare reception. But they also project a kitschy, jingoistic ardour that threatens to cheapen the drama they celebrate. As is the case with many Shakespeareans, I have an enduring fondness for Shakespeare kitsch, especially the Shakespeare kitsch of the eighteenth century. But I also see serious potential for harm in unexamined adulation and superfluous assertions of superiority, particularly when the praise is concomitant with political instrumentalism. Fuseli’s vision of Caliban—with his claws, quills, and drooping nipples—is a helpful reminder of that exact threat.
