Despite the debates around the geographic location of Shakespeare’s imagined island in The Tempest, that play has always spoken to countless readers living under the legacy of European colonialism. There are clear links to the literature of exploration, encounter, and conquest whether it be the account of a shipwreck in Bermuda, the embedding of passages from Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals,” or passing references to European interactions with North Africa.  

The play considers alterity, the dispossession and subjugation of a Native inhabitant in his homeland, and the fear of miscegenation, even as it may also be a more abstract meditation on the power of art, the imaginary, and theater. In teaching The Tempest through this lens, I would focus on our first encounter with Caliban in act 1, scene 2. Prospero calls for his ‘slave’ Caliban and demands he come out of his dwelling; Caliban responds:

I must eat my dinner.  
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,  
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,  
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me  
Water with berries in't, and teach me how  
To name the bigger light, and how the less,  
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee  
And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:  
Cursed be I that did so!  

The scene enacts in miniature a European contact narrative beginning with Prospero’s assertion of Caliban’s baseness. Caliban responds in anger to Prospero’s demands for his labor, saying that he is eating his meal, and then bursts out with an impassioned tirade against Prospero for dispossessing him of his birthright, his island home. Caliban recounts the first encounters with the shipwrecked Prospero and his small child, when they were friendly to Caliban and treated him well. They shared their foodways and knowledge with him and he in turn showed them the island’s resources. Caliban knew from experience where to find potable water and which lands were fertile. He shared that vital knowledge for surviving in his homeland with the newcomers, to his detriment. Once enslaved by Prospero’s magic, Caliban lives in a bond servitude on which his masters become dependent.

How like the various encounter narratives we find in the early modern European archive. Vulnerable European explorers were frequently dependent on the hospitality of the Indigenous peoples of the lands they visited. But if those same explorers found themselves at advantage, through superior weaponry or due to the impact of the pathogens they carried, or a combination of the two, they rarely lost the opportunity to claim hegemony over the land and suzerainty over the native population.  

In the passage above, Caliban recounts how Prospero and Miranda taught him their language, including their names for the sun and the moon, with the implication their nominative system is somehow the more correct one. While teaching The Tempest, you might consider assigning a reading of Thomas Hariot’s account of his interaction in 1585 with the Algonquian peoples of the Atlantic coast of what is now North Carolina as a comparison. After demonstrating the use of various technological instruments he brought, including telescopes, magnifying glasses, and magnets, Hariot claims the Natives considered the objects to be made by the gods, who clearly favored the English, because these tools were beyond their comprehension. Hariot’s technology is analogous to Prospero’s magic and we witness Prospero threaten to use that magic to physically torture Caliban for his insolence.

Caliban is robbed of both his freedom and his land. The relationship of Indigenous peoples to their home territories is an essential part of their identities. Many Indigenous cultures recount their autochthonous beginnings, emerging out of the land itself. Or others who come from the skyworld to the earth are the cause of it becoming a habitable place. Their relationship to the land is one defined as much by obligations to it as their rights of ownership over it. For Indigenous peoples, their duty is to determine what course is best for themselves on the land: in exercising that duty they are demonstrating their sovereignty. Thus, their self-determination of the collective wellbeing is at the center of their autonomy, rather than the wielding of power over a specific territory. Caliban loses his sovereignty when others take away his authority over his own land after he has shared the best ways to live in that environment.  

Caliban’s tragedy is redoubled in act 2, scene 2 when he mistakes the drunken castaway Stephano for a god and the man’s liquor for a divine brew. Caliban, to Stephano, says:

I’ll show thee the best springs. I’ll pluck thee berries.
I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve.
I’ll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man.   

While written for comic effect no doubt, the scene has tragic resonances when we consider how alcoholic spirits were often used as a weapon of conquest in actual negotiations between Europeans and Indigenous people who were unfamiliar with alcohol. In his inebriated state, Caliban once again offers to share the bounty of his home isle in order to gain alliance with Stephano against Prospero’s tyrannical usurpation. The bond Caliban has enjoyed with his environment and the delights of the island’s ethereal music seem doomed to be ruptured by colonial intrusions. When he loses that bond, he loses his sovereignty.