**Prospero, the Divine Shepherd, and Providence: Psalm 23 as a Rubric for Alonso's Redemptive Progress and the Providential Workings of Prospero's Spiritual Restoration in Shakespeare's** *The Tempest*

#### **David V. Urban**

English Department, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA; dvu2@calvin.edu

Received: 16 June 2019; Accepted: 18 July 2019; Published: 24 July 2019

**Abstract:** In this essay, I argue that Psalm 23 serves as a thematic rubric through which to understand how Prospero's machinations affect the progress of the redemption of King Alonso throughout the play. At the same time, however, recognizing Prospero's moral complexities and deficiencies, I also argue that Prospero's mercy toward and reconciliation with Alonso ultimately demonstrates the sovereign influence of a Providence beyond Prospero's control—a Providence that works through charity and grace beyond Prospero's initial intentions. This higher providential power, therefore, ought rightly to be seen as the ultimate shepherd of the play—one who works to effect not only Alonso's but also Prospero's spiritual restoration.

**Keywords:** *The Tempest*; Bible; Providence; Prospero; Alonso; Ariel; Caliban; Epilogue; Richard Hooker; John Calvin; *Twelfth Night*; Malvolio; Gonzalo

Studies on Shakespeare's use of the themes and language from the Bible have flourished since the beginning of the twentieth century, continuing to the present day.1 However, no critic has yet investigated Shakespeare's use of Psalm 23 in his late romance, *The Tempest*. In this essay, however, I will argue that Psalm 23 serves as a thematic rubric through which to understand how Prospero's machinations affect the progress of redemption of King Alonso throughout the play. (Readers will recall that Alonso—now shipwrecked with his royal company by Prospero's magic on the island Prospero rules—supported then-Duke Prospero's usurpation by his brother, Antonio). I suggest that Shakespeare's text demonstrates, in ways that Alonso himself never recognizes and in ways that transcend Prospero's own understanding, that Prospero's supernatural orchestration of various events—particularly his preventing Alonso's murder and his spectacular but ultimately merciful prodding of Alonso's conscience in ways that elicit the king's repentance and restoration—allows Shakespeare's audience to view Alonso in relation to the psalm's speaker and to view Prospero in relation to the psalm's Lord and shepherd.

At the same time, however, recognizing Prospero's own moral deficiencies—his problematic penchant for complete control over the persons and events of the play, his deep-seated bitterness against his enemies, and, indeed, his own need for redemption—in this essay, I will also argue that Prospero's mercy toward and reconciliation with Alonso ultimately demonstrates the sovereign influence of a Providence beyond Prospero's control—a Providence that works through charity and grace beyond Prospero's initial intentions, a Providence that transcends the efforts of any human individual, however powerful and however benevolent or flawed, who would seek to exercise godlike machinations even within his limited sphere of control. This higher providential power, therefore, ought rightly to be seen

<sup>1</sup> See especially (Shaheen 1999), (Hamlin 2013), and, very recently and for the Special Issue "Religions in Shakespeare's Writings," (Skwire 2018) and (Stelzer 2019).

as the ultimate shepherd of the play—one who works to affect not only Alonso's but also Prospero's spiritual restoration in ways that also recall aspects of Psalm 23.

My essay, on one level, falls within the long tradition of viewing Prospero as a kind of God figure upon his island, although my recognition of Prospero's various moral shortcomings distinguishes my reading of Prospero from the more idealized views offered by (Russell 1876, pp. 482–85), (Still 1921, pp. 202–3), or (Boitani 2013, pp. 89–123).2 Nonetheless, I argue that Prospero's basic attitude toward Alonso is benevolent, seeking genuine reconciliation with the man largely responsible for exiling Prospero and his daughter Miranda, desiring the restoration of Alonso's soul.3 In this sense, Prospero plays the role of the divine shepherd of Psalm 23, and we may trace the path of Alonso's redemption through Prospero's benevolent (albeit also self-interested) machinations by comparing certain stages of Alonso's time on the island with specific portions of the psalm. I will note that certain specific connections between the psalm and the play are ironic in nature, but when we view these connections within the larger process of Alonso's redemption, we may recognize that these ironic elements play significant roles within Alonso's redemptive progress. Finally, in this essay, I shall demonstrate that the goodness and mercy that pursue Alonso throughout the play transcend Prospero's intentions toward Alonso—intentions that combine both benevolence and a bitterness that wars against Prospero's better virtues. Indeed, our recognition that a higher benevolence than Prospero's guides the paths of Alonso's and Prospero's redemptions allows us to better understand Prospero's complexities as one who, amid his own godlike control of the events and persons who surround him, is in the end a fallible human being also needing forgiveness.<sup>4</sup>

#### **1. Psalm 23, Prospero, and Alonso's Redemptive Progress**

I quote Psalm 235 in full below:


Throughout my discussion, I do not argue that the stages of Alonso's Prospero-guided progress of redemption occur in an order that coincides with the order of the psalm's verses; however, each of the verses expresses an idea or action that, in some way, significantly coincides with Prospero's restoration of Alonso.6 The psalm's first verse establishes both Prospero's essential godlike benevolence toward Alonso and a basic assurance that, whatever his hardships on Prospero's island, Alonso will be cared for by his merciful host. The sixth and final verse similarly establishes the mercy and grace with which Prospero pursues Alonso—a grace that offers blessings that extend well beyond the temporal

<sup>2</sup> See also (Knight 1948, pp. 208, 232, 234, 242) and (Nuttal 1957, pp. 6–7, 9–10).

<sup>3</sup> Robert Egan states that Prospero's intentions in shipwrecking the royal party are to subject Alonso (and, ideally, Antonio and Sebastian as well) "to an ordeal of self-knowledge and purgation" (Egan 1972, p. 175).

<sup>4</sup> My reading of Prospero as one whose intentions toward his enemies are genuinely restorative but nonetheless significantly tainted by morally problematic emotions and actions goes against the portrayal of Prospero as primarily manipulative and self-serving as seen in (Shakespeare 1987), although I do not thereby deny the appropriateness of some of Orgel's skepticism about Prospero's character.

<sup>5</sup> This and all biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the 1560 Geneva Bible (Geneva Bible 1969).

<sup>6</sup> My extensive use of Psalm 23 as a rubric by which to understand *The Tempest* finds some precedent in (Esolen 1997) and its extensive use of Isaiah as a key for understanding the same play.

parameters of the play. The verses in 23.2–5 suggest specific ways in which Prospero's benevolence toward Alonso manifests itself.

Psalm 23.2 parallels rather explicitly Prospero's machinations toward Alonso in Act 2, Scene 2, even as Psalm 23.6 is implicitly present here and in the other scenes where Alonso is present. Although of course ignorant of the source of the benevolence that now "follow[s]" them, Alonso's councilor, Gonzalo, immediately recognizes Prospero's "mercie" toward the king's party. As the party—consisting also of the evil Antonio, Alonso's treacherous brother Sebastian (who also supported Prospero's usurpation), and the young lords Adrian and Francisco—walks, presumably not far from the now "stil waters" from which they emerged, Gonzalo observes the "miracle" of their "preservation" (2.2.6–7), noting not only that they are all alive upon a verdant island but also the strange fact that their recently sea-drenched garments are unstained and in excellent condition. Specific parallels with Psalm 23.2 are evident in lines 189–98, when Alonso, along with the other voyagers besides Antonio and Sebastian, are *made* to rest, indeed sleep, by Prospero's magic via Ariel. This rest is a great mercy indeed to Alonso, whose soul—not to mention body—is painfully weary because of the presumed drowning of his son, Ferdinand. Significantly, the grass in which they lie down is described by Gonzalo as "lush and lusty" and "green" (2.2.53–54), and Gonzalo's description recalls the "grene pasture" of Psalm 23.2, in which the psalm's speaker proclaims that the Lord "maketh me rest." When Ariel awakens Alonso and Gonzalo just in time to foil Antonio and Sebastian's attempt to murder them, we see Psalm 23.4 come into view. For although Alonso "walke[s] through the valley of the shadow of death" (or sleeps there!), he need "feare no euil," because Prospero is with him through Ariel, with Prospero's magic "staffe" protecting the king.7

When Alonso next appears in Act 3, Scene 3, we again see him "walke through the valley of the shadow of death" in ways that he himself does not recognize. He again complains of his weariness and hopelessness because of Ferdinand's supposed death (3.3.5–10), and we may rightly suspect that he now contemplates suicide; more explicitly, however, Antonio and Sebastian remain resolved to murder Alonso and Gonzalo (3.3.11–17). However, amid Alonso's danger, Prospero is there—explicitly present "on the top" of the stage and "invisible" to the other human characters,8 as is described by the stage directions following line 17—protecting the king with his magic staff in ways that I shall discuss below.

It is just at this point that Prospero's spirits bring forward their banquet table, and here the play's connection to Psalm 23—specifically verse 5—again becomes explicit: Prospero here "prepare[s] a table before me [Alonso] in the sight of my aduersaries." At this point, the ironic nature of the play's connection to Psalm 23 is increasingly significant. For although Prospero does indeed prepare a banquet table for Alonso in the presence of his unknown-to-him enemies and would-be murderers, the table disappears before they can eat of it, and any blessing Prospero here offers the hungry king is not immediately apparent. Such blessing is even less apparent when, upon the table's disappearance, Ariel appears as a harpy—a mythical bird "associated with guilt and punishment" (Kott 1976, p. 433)—to rebuke Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian, whom Ariel calls "three men of sin" (3.3.53) for their respective roles in Prospero's usurpation and, says Ariel, Prospero's and Miranda's drowning. Ariel also specifically tells Alonso that because of divine justice, his own son has also been drowned:

. . . for which foul deed

The pow'rs, delaying, not forgetting, have Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures,

<sup>7</sup> Unless otherwise noted, all quotations for *The Tempest* are from (Shakespeare 1999). A more cynical reading of this scene is offered by Curt Breight, who suggests that "Prospero is responsible for setting up [Antonio and Sebastian's] conspiracy," the knowledge of which Prospero uses at the end of the play "to blackmail" the duo (Breight 1990, p. 16). I rather suggest that, in this scene, Prospero uses Ariel's ministrations to test Antonio and Sebastian, finding them unchanged in their morality from twelve years earlier.

<sup>8</sup> In a comment germane to the present study, John C. Adams describes Prospero here as appearing "like some god of Olympus surveying mortals on the earth" (Adams 1938, p. 415).

Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me Ling'ring perdition (worse than any death Can be at once) shall step by attend You and your ways. . . (3.3.72–79)

One might object at this point that the table that Prospero prepares for Alonso hardly resembles the image of blessing, protection, and spiritual refreshment suggested by Psalm 23.5. However, Ariel's speech, though it initially torments the guilt-stricken Alonso, is intended "to reform" (Lamb 1998, p. 544). At the end of his terrifying speech, Ariel offers an alternative to "Ling'ring perdition": "heart's sorrow" (repentance) that brings about "a clear [innocent] life" (3.3.81–82).<sup>9</sup> Indeed, Ariel's confrontation becomes a wondrous instrument of grace to affect the king's redemption, and when Prospero, describing Ariel's speech, says, "a grace it had" (3.3.84), he speaks better than most commentators recognize. As Grace Tiffany recognizes, Ariel "has 'grace'" and "is a heavenly hound who drives" sinners "to repentance" (Tiffany 2000, p. 429). Indeed, the "table" that Prospero prepares for Alonso "in the sight of" his enemies is a table that confronts sin and offers spiritual cleansing.<sup>10</sup> Moreover, both Alonso's mournful admission of his transgression against Prospero and his recognition of the consequent (seeming) drowning of Ferdinand (3.3.95–99, which I examine closely later) clearly distinguish him from the thoroughly unrepentant responses of Antonio and Sebastian, who exit after senselessly declaring their intentions to battle the supernatural forces they are powerless to oppose (3.3.103–4). Significantly, their shocked reactions to Ariel's speech have displaced their plot to murder Alonso—a displacement attributable to Prospero's machinations. Nonetheless, we should note that Alonso's final words in the scene are not hopeful:

Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded And with him there lie mudded. (3.3.100–2)

Here, Alonso declares his frankly suicidal intention, but he does not act on his despair. Rather, the next time we see Alonso is early in the play's final scene (stage instructions following 5.1.57). There, he enters with Sebastian and Antonio, as well as Gonzalo, Adrian, and Francisco, all charmed by Prospero's spell, unable to speak, and seemingly unable to move but by Ariel's leading, presumably taken captive by Ariel at Prospero's behest shortly after the party's exit at the end of Act 3, Scene 3. Here, we can see that Prospero has again protected Alonso as he "walke[s] through the valley of the shadow of death," for Alonso has been harmed neither by Antonio and Sebastian nor by himself.

When Prospero breaks his charm and restores Alonso and the others to their senses, Alonso, who had been described as entering the scene "with a frantic gesture," responds immediately to Prospero's self-revelation with both relief and humble, tangible repentance as he speaks to his former captor:

Thy pulse

Beats, as of flesh and blood; and, since I saw thee, Th' affliction of my mind amends, with which, I fear, a madness held me.. . .

...

Thy dukedom I resign and I do entreat

<sup>9</sup> My glosses upon "heart's sorrow" and "clear" are taken from Peter Holland's notes in (Shakespeare 1999, p. 59). Perhaps more helpfully, Maurice Hunt defines "heart's sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing" as "repentance and sanctification" (Hunt 1993, p. 294). Thomas McAlindon correctly observes that here, Alonso has "been subjected to an experience designed by Prospero to lead him through 'heart's sorrow' to 'a clear life ensuing' (III.iii.81–2)" (McAlindon 2001, p. 348).

<sup>10</sup> Anthony M. Esolen, following the reading of (Berger 1977, pp. 226–27) that Ariel's banquet table "is eucharistic," argues that the sinful trio's unconfessed sin prevents them from eating at the table. Indeed, "There can be no communion ... without repentance" (Esolen 1997, p. 233).

Thou pardon me my wrongs. (5.1.113–16, 118–19)

Alonso's plea for Prospero's forgiveness<sup>11</sup> is accompanied by his report that his afflicted mind has been healed, presumably by the opportunity to gain reconciliation with the man for whose supposed death the conscience-stricken Alonso knew he was responsible. Here, we see that Prospero's machinations have again brought about another specific and spiritually crucial element of Psalm 23: the psalmist's declaration that the Lord "restoreth my soule" (23.3), with the soul encompassing both the emotional and moral dimensions that Alonso describes above. Moreover, Alonso's stated intention to return Milan's dukedom to Prospero—who introduces himself to Alonso as "The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero!" (5.1.107)—demonstrates that Prospero is successfully leading Alonso "in the paths of righteousness for his Names sake" (Psalm 23.3). Indeed, Prospero's self-interest in Alonso's redemptive progress is captured within the psalm as well, for Alonso's repentance affirms the truth of Prospero's naming himself the rightful Duke of Milan.

However, the blessings that Prospero here offers Alonso go beyond forgiveness and moral/spiritual restoration; indeed, Prospero blesses Alonso in ways that exceed the king's hopes, thus coinciding with another portion of Psalm 23. We must recognize that, even after Alonso and Prospero are reconciled, Alonso remains convinced that Ferdinand is drowned, expressing his resignation to this supposed fact: "Irreparable is the loss, and patience / Says it is past her cure" (5.1.140–41). Moreover, when Prospero tells him that he also "lost [his] daughter" (5.1.148), Alonso responds by uttering a seemingly unanswerable prayer for the two youths and then expressing his desire to die in their stead:

O heavens, that they were both living in Naples, The king and queen there! That they were, I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies. (5.1.149–52)

Prospero soon proceeds to present the still-living and now-engaged Ferdinand and Miranda to Alonso, who responds with joy and amazement (see 5.172–215). Remarkably, what Prospero now gives Alonso transcends even the king's stated fantasy: Alonso had wished that the couple could be ruling in Naples, at the price of his own life; but now, his wish has been granted beyond his utterance, for Alonso is separated from Ferdinand and his bride neither by death nor by location, and they have every expectation to live together happily back in Naples for years to come. Alonso's joy in his "discovery that [his] despairing prayer is to be answered" is repeated in his "ecstatic" "amen" (5.1.204) to Gonzalo's benediction upon the young couple (5.1.201–4) (McAlindon 2001, p. 347). The fact that Prospero here blesses Alonso in ways that transcend the king's deepest hopes again reflects Psalm 23, in which the psalmist proclaims, "my cup runneth ouer" (23.5). Moreover, Alonso's overflowing blessings increase upon the sudden reappearance of the Boatswain, who joyously announces that their ship, which they thought had been destroyed, is now miraculously "tight and yare and bravely rigged as when / We first put out to sea" (5.1.224–25), having been secretly repaired by Ariel at Prospero's direction.

Having examined specific parallels between portions of *The Tempest* and particular phrases in Psalm 23.2–5, let us now return to the larger thematic parallels between Alonso and Prospero's relationship and Psalm 23.1 and 23.6, particularly the latter. In light of Prospero's arranging of the presumably happy and fruitful marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda, we recognize that Prospero's "kindenes & mercie" will pursue Alonso "all the dayes of [his] life." Indeed, Alonso's delight in the couple's engagement suggests that their marriage and anticipated children will indeed bless Alonso for the remainder of his years.

Moreover, Prospero's charity toward Alonso is evident throughout the entire play, for the opening scene suggests Prospero's first effort to "restore" Alonso's "soule" (23.3). We see little of Alonso in the

<sup>11</sup> Francis Neilson notes that Alonso's "remorse" and "confession" follows the pattern of "the Lord's Prayer" (Neilson 1959, p. 430).

first scene, but what we hear about him is extremely important: amid the tempest, Gonzalo announces that "The king and prince [are] at prayers," urging the others to "assist them, for our case is as theirs" (1.1.52–53). In stark contrast to Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian show no interest in prayers, even as their lives seem almost certain to end, and Antonio continues to heap abuse upon the Boatswain, to whom he has recently said, "We [he and Sebastian] are less afraid to be drowned than thou art" (1.1.44–45), displaying a startling degree of self-righteousness for a fratricide at death's door. Significantly, from the onset of the play, Alonso behaves very differently from Prospero's other enemies, recognizing his own mortality and his need to make peace with the divine before his death.

If Alonso is "at prayers" during the first scene's tempest, we may speculate regarding the content of his prayers. Given that the passengers recognize their imminent deaths as almost inevitable, we may expect that Alonso here offers prayers of confession, asking for forgiveness of past sins. The play's text suggests both that the praying Alonso is remembering his sin against Prospero and that Prospero himself is orchestrating this recollection. The evidence for this assertion can be found in Alonso's response to Ariel's speech to the "three men of sin":

O, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass. (3.3.95–99)

The immediate context of these lines suggests that the "billows," "winds," and "thunder" that Alonso mentions are those that accompany Ariel's speech (McAlindon 2001, p. 348), which the stage directions tell us is accompanied by "Thunder and lightning" and, arguably, the "loud winds" and "still-closing waters" that Ariel mentions when he tells Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio the following:

The elements, Of whom your swords are tempered, may as well Wound the loud winds, or with bemocked-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish One dowl that's in my plume. (3.3.61–65)

Robert Grams Hunter goes so far as to assert that Alonso's "memory of his crime against Prospero [had] sunk to the bottom of his mind" until Ariel's speech (Hunter 1965, p. 232).

However, the idea that Alonso would not have considered—during what he thinks are his final prayers before death!—his role in the presumed deaths of Prospero and Miranda seems highly unlikely. Rather, Alonso's diction suggests that his above lines also, or even primarily, refer to the initial tempest of the opening scene. Indeed, For Alonso to say "*Methought* the billows spoke ... " with reference to Ariel's speech seems odd on several levels. First, because Ariel's speech ends only seconds before Alonso speaks, "Me*thinks*" would be the more appropriate word choice if Alonso were referring to this speech. However, "Methought" is entirely appropriate if Alonso is referring back to what he thought he heard in the initial tempest. Second, the word "methought" implies that Alonso has some uncertainty about what he just heard concerning Prospero and his sin against him. However, what Ariel, fully visible in the form of a harpy, has just spoken is abundantly clear, both to Alonso and the others, so any expression of uncertainly by Alonso regarding Ariel's speech seems out of place. Such uncertainty, however, is entirely understandable if, during the opening scene's tempest, an invisible Ariel spoke to the king of his sin against Prospero. Moreover, Alonso's presumed prayers of confession in the opening scene are a sensible response to such foreboding words.

Third and closely related to the previous point, Alonso here speaks of hearing of such matters from the "billows," "winds," and "thunder." However, although Shakespeare's stage directions explicitly mention that "thunder and lightning" precede (and perhaps accompany) Ariel's speech, Ariel's convicting words are clearly spoken by Ariel, not the elements. However, an invisible Ariel speaking

of Alonso's sin during the opening tempest would certainly give the impression that such words were being spoken by the elements themselves. Fourth, again closely related, is Alonso's mention of the "billows" speaking. Although Ariel talks of "still closing waters" in his speech, the stage directions do not mention them, and Ariel's words do not necessarily mean that such threatening waters are near them at this time. However, such billows were certainly present during the tempest.

Finally, Alonso's declaration that the thunder "did bass my trespass" merits scrutiny. Why does Alonso say "my trespass" instead of "*our* trespass," given the fact that Ariel clearly addresses all three transgressors in his speech? Obviously, Alonso is, at this point, consumed with the horrible realization that his sin has brought about the seeming death of his son, and perhaps that is explanation enough. However, the idea of having the thunder specifically speak of *Alonso's* trespass is especially sensible if Ariel, invisible during the tempest, spoke to Alonso individually. In that case, Alonso would already be conscience stricken before he commenced to prayers beneath the ship's hull, and indeed, Ariel's words would have elicited Alonso's determination to pray. Moreover, and related to my first point two paragraphs above, Alonso's saying "did bass"—as opposed to "bassed"—again serves to remove from this scene's immediate temporal context Ariel's initial supernatural declaration of Alonso's sin against Prospero. Moreover, "did bass" also allows for the possibility of the actor playing Alonso to emphasize the word "did"—an emphasis that would affirm Alonso's previous sense that the thunder during the opening scene's tempest *did in fact* "pronounce / The name Prosper" and thus "bass [Alonso's] trespass." All this textual evidence suggests that Alonso's ultimately grace-giving conviction of sin, elicited by Prospero via Ariel, began upon the ship during the initial tempest.

#### **2. Prospero, Providence, and the Path to Redemption**

In this essay thus far, I have demonstrated both that Psalm 23 offers an important interpretive rubric by which to understand Alonso's redemptive progress and that Prospero's active work eliciting Alonso's progress is evident from the play's opening scene, manifesting itself in each scene in which Alonso appears and climaxing during the final scene. For the remainder of the essay, I will move beyond direct discussion of Prospero's efforts in Alonso's redemption and investigate how the play's larger redemptive structure suggests the workings of a greater Providence that guides the action of the play as well as events in Prospero's life that precede the play's action. This Providence transcends Prospero's machinations—be they benevolent or self-serving—and indeed precipitates not only Alonso's but also Prospero's redemption in ways that again call to mind Psalm 23, as we perceive Providence working through both to protect Alonso and Prospero from death and to restore their souls, a restoration that culminates in the play's final scene and Prospero's Epilogue. Throughout this section, while not denying my previous assertions regarding Prospero's ultimately restorative intentions toward Alonso, I will emphasize somewhat Prospero's moral imperfections, recognizing his own need for spiritual restoration amid the conflict that rages within Prospero's soul, as he vacillates between his desires for reconciliation and vengeance.

The play's first suggestion of such a Providence is explicitly mentioned in the second scene. There, after Prospero tells Miranda his account of his betrayal and usurpation at the hands of his beloved brother Antonio, with Alonso's support, Miranda asks, "How came we ashore?" Prospero immediately responds, "By Providence divine" (1.2.159–60).<sup>12</sup> The argument that Prospero's words ought to be considered a genuine acknowledgement of divine aid is strengthened by Prospero's previous description of the unseaworthy boat that his usurpers provided him and Miranda in the hope that they would drown at sea. He calls it:

A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged, Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats Instinctively have quit it. (1.2.146–48)

<sup>12</sup> My capitalization of "Providence" follows (Shakespeare 1974) and various other editions.

Moreover, Prospero's description of the sea's initial condition when he and Miranda were placed in the boat is significant: "There they hoist us, / To cry to th' sea that roared to us" (1.2.148–49). However, likely alluding to the Providence he explicitly mentions moments later, Prospero continues: "to sigh / To the winds, whose pity, sighing back again, / Did us but loving wrongs" (1.2.149–51).13 Indeed, although Prospero's enemies put Prospero and Miranda into a wretched boat in adverse conditions, the winds themselves, guided "[b]y Providence divine," modulated the roaring sea, took them—similar to the psalm's speaker—"through the valley of the shadow of death" (23.4a), and brought them safely to the island where they lived twelve years. Providence is also evident in the ministrations of then-three-year-old Miranda, who, Prospero tells her, was, during their sea journey, "a cherubim / ... that didst preserve me ... / Infuséd with a fortitude from heaven" (152–54).14 Prospero's recollection of Miranda's angelic blessings again parallels the sentiment of the psalmist, who tells his Lord, "for thou art with me: thy rod and thy staffe, they comfort me" (23.4b).

The hand of Providence is also implicitly evident in Prospero and Miranda's ability to live on the island for many years. Prospero immediately follows his mention of providence by noting the gracious efforts of Gonzalo, who, "Out of his *charity*" (emphasis added; we may note Prospero's theologically rich diction here, cf. 1 Corinthians 13), stocked the boat with "food," "fresh water," "garments," and various other "necessaries," as well as Prospero's books (1.2.162, 160, 164; see 160–68). Indeed, in spite of his deadly situation, Prospero, thanks to Gonzalo's charity, did "not want" (Psalm 23.1). The items Gonzalo gave Prospero enabled him and Miranda to survive their trip and initial days on the island, even as they enabled Prospero to free Ariel from the "cloven pine" (1.2.277) where he was trapped for twelve years by the spell of the witch Sycorax (see 1.2.277–79). We may speculate whether the "art" (1.2.291) Prospero used to free Ariel was a magic spell from his books or simply the wielding of an ax Gonzalo might have included among the aforementioned "necessaries" (see 1.2.291–93). Indeed, we may see the hand of Providence in providing Prospero and Miranda with the assistance of Caliban, who, upon their initial encounters, "showed the[m] all the qualities o' th' isle" (1.2.337). Conversely, we may ask whether Prospero's decisions to enslave Ariel and eventually Caliban mark Prospero's violation of these providential provisions in favor of misusing his powers to lord his authority over others. We may not unreasonably speculate that Ariel would have happily assisted Prospero out of gratitude instead of compulsion, as Caliban happily assisted Prospero when he first befriended him. In any event, I suggest that Prospero's decision to enslave the two beings whom Providence provided to assist him marks Prospero's transition away from righteous dependence on the good shepherd to his morally problematic penchant for controlling others, which characterizes his rule of the island.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss at length the significant moral violations evident in Prospero's enslavement—and, at least in the case of Caliban, consistently harsh treatment—of Ariel and Caliban.<sup>15</sup> However, we ought to note that Prospero's extreme control of Ariel and Caliban seems motivated by expedience over morality—a practice ironically similar to Antonio's self-justification for usurping Prospero's dukedom. Significantly, it is within his exercise of extreme control that we meet Prospero and see him in action for the vast majority of the play, and amid this exercise of control, Prospero's word choice reveals a disinclination to recognize the Providence that works above his own efforts.

Prospero's movement away from acknowledging Providence displays itself promptly in his conversation with Miranda. After Miranda asks his "reason" (1.2.175) for causing the tempest, Prospero replies:

<sup>13</sup> James Walter asserts that these lines allude to "a Spirit at work in the very processes of nature and history" (Walter 1983, p. 71). <sup>14</sup> McAlindon writes that "Providence operated first through Gonzalo ... and secondly, through Miranda herself, who was to her despairing father what the comforting angel was to the storm-tossed Paul" (McAlindon 2001, p. 340).

<sup>15</sup> Intriguing recent commentary on this topic is offered by Julia Reinhard Lupton, who writes that Prospero fails to grasp a proper "natural law perspective" that could show him his "equality with Caliban in both dignity and sin," even as he "negate[s] the emancipatory potential of natural law and instead wield[s] the rhetoric of nature to justify slavery" (Lupton 2019, p. 9).

#### Know thus far forth.

By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune (Now, my dear lady) hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop. (1.2.176–84)

Significantly, and in marked contrast to his statement only minutes before, Prospero here offers no credit to the Christian notion of Providence for the remarkable development of his enemies' ship passing so close the island but, rather, cites to the pagan notion of "Fortune"—a word choice that calls to mind the absurd mutterings of the vain and deceived steward Malvolio in *Twelfth Night* who, contemplating the notion that his rich and beautiful mistress, the Countess Olivia, might indeed love him, says, "'Tis but fortune, all is fortune" (2.5.23),16 a parallel that casts some suspicion on Prospero's character. Prospero's change in diction is noteworthy in that Shakespeare's contemporary Christian audience would likely have considered Alonso's ship's unexpected proximity to the island to be as providential as Prospero and Miranda's safe arrival upon its shore. However, Prospero's rhetoric moves away from such an interpretation. Boasting of his "prescience" and speaking within the context of his own "raising" of the tempest that brought his enemies to his island, he declares his pursuit of another pagan symbol of destiny—a "most auspicious star," which he must actively "court" lest his "fortunes" forever "droop." Remarkably, Prospero's reference to this star again parallels the words of Malvolio, who, reading Olivia's maid Maria's forged letter that he thinks reveals Olivia's love for him, ridiculously proclaims, "I thank my stars ... . Jove and my stars be prais'd!" (2.5.170, 172–73). Though Prospero's words lack the "astrological determinism" (Hunt 1993, p. 281) evident in Malvolio's, Prospero's diction in this paragraph and its accompanying self-exaltation suggest that his portrayal of the supernatural here is on some level as wrongheaded as that of the duped and self-deceived Malvolio—a man who, in the words of Olivia, is characterized by "self-love" (1.5.90).

It is instructive to consider Prospero's aforementioned word choices in light of theological writings contemporary to Shakespeare on the topic of Providence. As Hunt observes, according to the Church of England's most influential theologian, Richard Hooker (1554–1600), "What is Providence to God, working His will through secondary natural agents, goes ... by different names among men" (Hunt 1993, p. 286). "Nature," writes Hooker in *Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity*, "is nothing else but God's instrument" (Hooker 1841, p. 211). He also writes:

Only thus much discerned, that the natural generation and process of all things receiveth order of proceeding from the settled stability of divine understanding. This appointeth unto them their kinds of working; the disposition whereof in the purity of God's own knowledge and will is rightly termed by the name of Providence. The same being referred unto the things themselves here disposed by it, was wont by the ancient to be called natural Destiny. (Hooker 1841, p. 211)

#### Additionally, John Calvin (1509–1564), in his *Institutes of the Christian Religion*, writes:

Basil the Great has truly said that "fortune" and "chance" are pagan terms, with whose significance the minds of the godly ought not to be occupied. For if every success is God's blessings, and calamity and adversity his curse, no place now remains in human affairs for fortune or chance ... . I see that men have a very bad custom, that where one ought to say "God willed this, they say, "fortune willed this." ... [Augustine] sufficiently demonstrates that men are under, and ruled by, providence. (Calvin 1960, pp. 207–8)

<sup>16</sup> The quotations from *Twelfth Night* are from (Shakespeare 1974).

As Hooker asserts, though the ancients might use the term "Destiny"—a term we shall soon see used by Prospero via Ariel—any such workings by natural effects are properly termed God's Providence. Calvin's language is stronger, admonishing the godly not to credit "fortune" with what is in fact God's Providence. We may recognize that Calvin's aforementioned words cast an even more absurd light upon Malvolio who—though he is, in Maria's words, "sometimes ... a kind of a puritan" (2.3.139) and thus should presumably heed Calvin's words—attributes his life's developments to pagan forces. Prospero, of course, makes no pretense to puritanism. Yet, in light of Hooker's and Calvin's words and Prospero's strange parallels to Malvolio, we may recognize something religiously problematic about Prospero's movement away from acknowledging divine Providence.17 This movement coincides with his assertion of control over the natural and the supernatural—an assertion that complicates his spiritual condition even as he continues to orchestrate his "project" (5.1.1) that affects the lives of every person on the island.

Notably, Prospero concludes his aforementioned speech by magically putting Miranda to sleep, punctuating his act by saying, "I know thou canst not choose" (186). Prospero's magical control over his daughter—a control exhibited again in his conversation with Ariel that directly follows—helps explain his choice against giving Providence credit for Alonso's ship's proximity to the island. Twelve years before, the betrayed and victimized Prospero, in the throes of a fratricidal usurpation and expected to die at sea, was utterly dependent upon the "charity" of Gonzalo and the "Providence divine" that modulated the weather and brought him and Miranda safely ashore. (That Prospero's worldview when arriving at the island was still basically Judeo-Christian is also suggested by Caliban when he tells Prospero, "When thou cam'st first, / Thou ... / ... / ... [did] teach me how / To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day or night" [1.2.332–33, 334–36], an obvious allusion to Genesis 1.16.) However, now Prospero's seemingly complete control of his surroundings, a control brought about by his mastery of magic and consequent power over Ariel and the other spirits of the island, allows him to even control the weather and manipulate the actions of his usurpers and the others on their ship. Prospero's use of magic, though clearly abetted by the magic of the isle itself and often used for ostensibly benevolent purposes, certainly alters his spiritual perspective.<sup>18</sup> The fact that sorcery is explicitly condemned within the occult "abominations" of Deuteronomy 18:9–1419 suggests some explanation for Prospero's movement away from a more Christian framework in order to understand his present situation and his relationship to the events at hand. Nonetheless, even if Prospero chooses not to acknowledge the workings of Providence in bringing his enemies near his shore, Shakespeare's "Jacobian audience" would recognize "the stirring of God's hand" (Tiffany 2000, p. 435; Calvin 1960, p. 210) in orchestrating their arrival—an arrival that paves the way for the restoring of not only Alonso's but also Prospero's soul.

Prospero's rhetorical preference for a pagan presentation of life's unfolding is again evident in the previously discussed scene in which the disguised Ariel confronts Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. Significantly, Ariel begins his speech as follows:

<sup>17</sup> In light of the documented influence of the book of Isaiah upon *The Tempest* (Esolen 1997), Prospero's pagan diction recalls the 1610 Douay-Rheims Bible's translation of Isaiah 65:11: "And you, that haue forsaken the Lord, that haue forgotten my holie mount, that set a table for fortune ... " (Douay-Rheims Bible 1635). This translation appeared just before or during the time Shakespeare wrote *The Tempest*, generally held to be 1610–11.

<sup>18</sup> Egan asserts that the "assumption of godlike powers and responsibilities by one [Prospero] who is in no way superhuman" brings about "the central problem of the play," for Prospero's powers, "being capable of great evil as well as great good, place him in a perilous position." Egan notes, "We need only remind ourselves that "*prospero*" is the Italian for "*faustus*" (Egan 1972, p. 175). Anthony Harris argues that Prospero, by finally abjuring his "rough magic" (5.1.50), admits "the damnable nature of his art" (Harris 1980, p. 136). One need not go as far as Harris (see [Cornfield 1985] for a more moderate position) to recognize that Prospero's mastery of magic and control of spirits leaves him less dependent on the Judeo-Christian concept of providence. John D. Cox suggests that recognizing the parallels between Prospero's and Shakespeare's art—particularly with reference to Prospero's bewildering claim to have raised the dead (5.1.48–50)—defuses the notion that Prospero exercised "demonic power" (Cox 2007, p. 214).

<sup>19</sup> See particularly Deuteronomy 18:10 and 14, which specifically forbid "sorcerer[s]"; note also that Caliban describes Prospero to Stephano as "A sorcerer" (3.2.43).

You are three men of sin, whom destiny— That hath to instrument this lower world And what is in't—the never-surfeited sea Hath caused to belch up you . . . (3.3.53–56, emphasis added)

A bit later, as the company attempt to draw their swords, Ariel says, "You fools: I and my fellows / Are ministers of *Fate*" (3.3.60–61, italics added). Ariel's speech was dictated by Prospero, who, invisible, watches the scene and says to Ariel "Of my instruction has thou nothing bated / In what thou hadst to say" (3.3.85–86). Ariel's use of the words "destiny" and "Fate" are especially important here. Although earlier I emphasized the spiritually restorative nature of Ariel's speech, we now ought to recognize that here Prospero—even as he offers through Ariel's words what Hooker might consider a paganized nod toward a larger providential design—does not actually credit a Providence beyond himself. Rather, unbeknownst to Ariel's listeners, Prospero implicitly portrays himself as "destiny" and "Fate," as well as "The pow'rs" who, because of the trio's "foul deed" against Prospero and Miranda, have now "Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, / Against your peace" and have specifically "bereft" Alonso "of [his] son" (3.3.73, 72, 74-75, 76, 75). Indeed, Prospero, through his sorcery, is playing God here, assuming the role of divine justice even as he misleads and tortures Alonso with false information regarding Ferdinand, and although the effects of this scene ultimately bring Alonso to repentance, we may rightly question Prospero's benevolence here and ask if his intentions at this point are in fact reconciliation with his enemies or, rather, the dubious satisfaction of vengefully watching them suffer at his hands. He glories in his victory over his oppressors, saying, "My high charms work, / And these, mine enemies, are all knit up— / In their distractions: they now are in my pow'r" (3.3.88–90). His words here do not reflect Psalm 23's divine shepherd. Viewing Prospero in the fullness of his character and recognizing the conflict between his benevolent intentions and his lingering bitterness, we may see the godlike Prospero for what he is: a man who, as may be expected of a victim of betrayal, is torn between a longing for reconciliation and a desire for vengeance.20

Yet, providentially, Prospero's efforts bring about a good that transcends the bitterness that mitigates his charity. Indeed, if we may cynically suggest that, on one level, Prospero's initial words regarding Ariel's speech—"a grace it had, devouring" (84)—speak ironically from Prospero's immediate perspective concerning the "grace" one says before "devouring" a meal,<sup>21</sup> we understand, nonetheless, that Ariel's words do indeed work grace to restore Alonso's soul, convicting him of sin and leading to the repentance and reconciliation of the play's final scene. Moreover, even if the acts of nature on and near the island have been and are being directly orchestrated by Prospero, Alonso himself "apprehends Providence through its secondary agent, nature" (Hunt 1993, p. 295), which not only speaks the name of Prospero and exposes Alonso's sins but has also worked to wreck his ship and seemingly drown Ferdinand as belated justice for Alonso's crimes. Nonetheless, we must recognize that, if this scene were left only to Prospero's own design, Alonso's restoration might never have come about. Strikingly, Alonso's final words in this scene declare his intention to commit suicide, not pursue forgiveness. Convinced that Ferdinand is drowned, Alonso declares, "I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded / And with him there lie mudded" (3.3.101–2). In addition, Prospero in this scene indicates no desire for restoration.22 Rather, in exiting, he states, "And in these fits I leave them ... " (3.3.91), departing before Alonso speaks his horrified words.

<sup>20</sup> R. A. D. Grant writes that "Prospero's residual and quite understandable resentment and tetchiness prior to the great forgiveness scene do not qualify or diminish his goodness, but are rather a constant reminder of what must be conquered or sublimated in order to achieve it" (Grant 1983, p. 241). Grant's comment is easier to agree with in light of the whole of the completed play than at the moments when Prospero, in his resentment, tortures others and even endangers another's life, as he does here. I would add that Prospero's overall goodness has been tainted by his treatment of Caliban.

<sup>21</sup> Holland's notes for (Shakespeare 1999) indicate that here "devouring" means "making the banquet disappear" (p. 59).

<sup>22</sup> Hunt writes, "For the moment, Prospero's eagle-like desire for vengeance overwhelms his angelic, Christian intentions" (Hunt 2003, p. 227).

It is not Prospero but, rather, Gonzalo who, providentially, works here to save Alonso from self-destruction in this "valley of the shadow of death."<sup>23</sup> Seeing that Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian "are desperate" because of "their great guilt" (3.3.104), Gonzalo, once again displaying "grace" (Grant 1983, p. 249), beseeches his younger companions to "follow them swiftly / And hinder them from what this ecstasy / May now provoke them to" (3.3.107–9). Here, as in his saving of Prospero and Miranda twelve years earlier, Gonzalo—who has just before inquired of Alonso "in the name of something holy" (3.3.94)—acts with charity toward Alonso and the others, recognizing their emotional and spiritual desperation and the potential deadliness of their situation. Although Antonio and Sebastian here pursue violence toward others, Gonzalo correctly discerns Alonso's danger of self-harm. Although Ariel presumably works Prospero's charm on the king's company not long after the scene's end, Alonso's being alive at that point can be credited to Gonzalo and the workings of a Providence that transcends whatever charity Prospero intended to grant Alonso amid Ariel's speech.<sup>24</sup> Indeed, the restoring of Alonso's soul in this scene works itself out both through and beyond Prospero's actions.

As the play's final scene begins, Prospero is still reveling in his power and the success of his plans. His repeated use of the word "my" suggests his focus. He concluded the penultimate scene by declaring to Ariel, "At this hour / Lies at my mercy all mine enemies" (4.1.262–63), and he opens the final scene by telling him, "Now does my project gather to a head. / My charms crack not, my spirits obey ... " (5.1.1–2). At this point, however, Ariel's words break into Prospero's self-focus and control, challenging him to consider the condition of those who now stand "at [his] mercy" and to move toward compassion and genuine mercy:

The king,

His brother, and yours abide all three distracted, And the remaining mourning over them, Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly Him that you termed, sir, the good old Lord Gonzalo. His tears runs down his beard like winter's drops From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em, That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. PROSPERO

Dost thou think so, spirit?

ARIEL

Mine would sir, were I human. (5.1.11–20)

Prospero's response to Ariel's prodding is to empathize with his captives' sufferings, bid Ariel to "release them," and commit to "restore" "their senses" (5.1.30, 31). He states, "They being penitent, / The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown further" (5.1.28–30; see 20–32). Upon Ariel's exit, Prospero also vows to "abjure" his "rough magic" and to "break [his] staff" and "drown [his] book" (5.1.51, 50, 54, 57; see 33–57). After Ariel returns with Alonso and his company, all still under Prospero's charm, a deeply emotional Prospero speaks his forgiveness to his oppressors and promises to Ariel to free him presently (5.1.58–87). Renouncing vengeance and illegitimate forms of control, Prospero enters into the risks of relationships as he prepares to return to Italy.

Hunt has written persuasively about Ariel's role as "a grace-giving Spirit" in this scene, noting that Ariel's words "providentially" provoke "a Christian-like pity within Prospero" (Hunt 2013, p. 65). Hunt goes on to discuss the theological importance of Ariel's prompting Prospero to empathy:

<sup>23</sup> Grant correctly asserts that Gonzalo "is in his limited way a direct human representation of the Providential power that lies behind the play." He "imitate[s]" and "embodie[s] the action of Providence" (Grant 1983, p. 249).

<sup>24</sup> The observation by Tiffany concerning *Pericles* and *The Winter's Tale*, that "it is not human rituals but God's grace, working through Providential time, that effects resolution and miracles" (Tiffany 2018, p. 2), is applicable to *The Tempest*, especially as we read "human rituals" as signifying Prospero's imperfect machinations.

Empathy for another's suffering, especially in association with forgiveness, is notably a principle of Judeo-Christian doctrine. Generally humankind's emulation of a deity whose compassion and forgiveness for humankind is singular moves men and women to the conversion Prospero experiences. (Hunt 2013, p. 66)

In any event, if Prospero's original intention toward Alonso was, from the initial tempest in the opening scene, to prod his conscience and offer him the opportunity for repentance, it has been threatened by Prospero's flirtation with vengeance and his exultation in seeing the suffering of his erstwhile oppressors, demonstrating within himself "an ambivalence that would seem well to be described in Romans 7" (Cox 2000, p. 39).<sup>25</sup> Ariel's words prompting Prospero to forgiveness and reconciliation come providentially from without, acting to restore Prospero's soul, offering a shepherding guidance, and eliciting but not demanding Prospero's change of heart.<sup>26</sup> Having "deftly exposed" Prospero's "moral gaps," "Ariel offers a contingent vision of Prospero's better self, opening a gap into which Prospero can choose to step" (Gibbons 2017, pp. 326, 327).

With Prospero's own decision to respond with charity in mind, we ought to briefly consider another spiritually restorative decision in Act 5 and its influence on Prospero. We have already discussed at length Alonso's decision to repent for his wrongs against Prospero—a decision that, significantly, he makes before Prospero reveals to him that Ferdinand is living and engaged to Miranda. By contrast, Antonio and Sebastian, also objects of Prospero's charity and forgiveness, decidedly reject their opportunities for repentance and reconciliation. However, perhaps most significant in light of the play's remarkable Epilogue is Caliban's repentance before Prospero after he and his spirits foil Caliban and his newfound associates, Stephano and Trinculo, in their pathetic attempt to murder Prospero. Responding to Prospero's merciful requirement that he merely clean Prospero's cell in order to gain his "pardon," Caliban replies, "Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace" (5.1.295–96). Caliban's confession—significantly, something that is *not* under his master's control—is most remarkable in that it ironically provides an example of repentance that Prospero will soon imitate. For if Ariel's gentle challenge has prompted Prospero's Christlike empathy and forgiveness, Caliban's desperate plea for mercy exemplifies what Prospero must do to obtain reconciliation with the Providence he sought to displace amid his practice of complete control. Indeed, even as Antonio's callous refusal to repent demonstrates for Prospero the ultimate limitations of supernatural power to coerce another's free will, Prospero's own clemency toward Caliban, coupled with his implicit admission of longstanding wrongdoing against his slave—"this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine" (5.1.275–76)—elicits a declaration of repentance rich in theological significance. Strikingly, Caliban couples his resolution to "seek for grace" with a renouncing of the pagan worldview that sought to manipulate his surroundings through his worship of the "dull fool" and "drunkard" Stephano, whom he took for his "god" (5.1.298, 297).<sup>27</sup>

<sup>25</sup> See Romans 7:7–26, especially Romans 7:21: " ... when I wolde do good, euil is present with me." Hunt writes that Prospero is "conflicted by his desire to both destroy and to forgive his enemies" (Hunt 2013, p. 63). Although I suggest that Prospero's intentions from his initial conjuring of the tempest incline toward benevolence, Hunt's statement well captures the internal moral warfare that takes place within the mind of one whose recollections of his betrayal and usurpation have tortured his mind for the past twelve years.

<sup>26</sup> Prospero's decision to renounce vengeance here, Alonso's and Caliban's subsequent decisions to repent, Antonio's and Sebastian's decisions *not* to repent, and, certainly, Prospero's final repentance during the Epilogue all speak to Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's observation that the English church contemporary to Shakespeare, in its modified Calvinism, "reserve[d] some role, however ambiguously stated, for human response to divine grace" (Lewalski 1979, p. 20). (Hunt 1993) and (Hunt 2004) apply the perspective of Hooker's and other English divines' "centrist Reformational theology" (Smith 2018, p. 3) to Shakespeare's plays.

<sup>27</sup> Discussing the role of Providence in *The Tempest*, Lois Feur writes that the play does not depict "passive humanity, led by a puppet-master," but rather "human and divine actions conjoining to produce the final, benevolent result" (Feur 1997, p. 281). Considering optimistically Ferdinand and Miranda's future life in Naples, Brian Sutton writes that "the play suggests that Prospero's earlier misfortunes were part of a larger divine plan" for Alonso's and Prospero's "descendants" (Sutton 2008, p. 228).

In his deeply theological Epilogue that immediately follows his freeing of Ariel, Prospero, now utterly bereft of the magic spells and the command of spirits that allowed him to control the island, freely admits that his remaining "strength" is but "mine own" and "is most faint" (Epilogue 2–3). Without his magic and spirits, Prospero is no more a god than Stephano, and he would himself be a "dull fool" were he to depend on his own power. Yet, providentially, Prospero's "cup runneth ouer" with spiritual guidance from a most unlikely source who aids in his soul's restoration into "the paths of righteousness" (Psalm 23.3). Similar to Caliban, Prospero must himself now turn away from any pretense of a pagan manipulation of Fortune and, similar to Caliban, seek grace.<sup>28</sup> His most spiritually meaningful words, replete with "Christian overtones" (Hunt 2013, p. 69),29 conclude the play:

And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (Epilogue 15–20)

Much can be said regarding the "specifically Christian significance" (Cox 2000, p. 39) of these lines, and John D. Cox rightly observes that the Epilogue's final couplet "urges a specifically Christian response to Prospero based on the fourth petition of the Lord's Prayer: 'Forgiue vs our dettes, as we also forgiue our detters (Matt. 6:12)" (Cox 2000, p. 40; cf. Esolen 1997, p. 247). Indeed, in these lines the once-spiritually isolated Prospero reenters the community of the faithful, seeking grace as he begs the audience's charity through spiritual intercession. However, for the purposes of this essay, we do well to emphasize Prospero's request that he be "relieved by prayer" so fervent that "it assaults / Mercy itself." Prospero's use of the word "Mercy" as metonymy for the Christian God recalls to us the final verse of Psalm 23 and its speaker's promise that "kindenes, & mercie shal follow me all the dayes of my life." Prospero's humble appeal to Mercy here stands in stark contrast to his previous self-glorying boast: "At this hour / Lies at *my mercy* all mine enemies" (4.1.262-63, italics mine). As we consider the workings of Providence in Prospero's life throughout *The Tempest*, we may suggest that Prospero, having renounced his religion of paganized self-sufficiency, now understands his need to pursue the Mercy that has been, beyond his recognition, pursuing him.30

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** This essay recently developed out of work begun years earlier during a sabbatical leave. I deeply thank Calvin University for its support.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Adams, John C. 1938. The Staging of *The Tempest*, III.iii. *The Review of English Studies* 14: 404–19.

Beauregard, David N. 1997. New Light on Shakespeare's Catholicism: Prospero's Epilogue in *The Tempest*. *Renascence* 49: 159–74.

<sup>28</sup> As Tiffany observes, in Shakespeare's late romances, "Human participation in God's comedy requires characters to turn away from 'pagan' works to Christian faith" (Tiffany 2018, p. 2). The respective efforts to "seek for grace" that we see in Act 5 and the Epilogue by Alonso, Caliban, and Prospero recall Matthew J. Smith's recent suggestion that "Shakespeare unites his characters through patterns of action ... that demonstrate a shared experience of religion as a desire for salvation beyond the law" (Smith 2018, p. 2).

<sup>29</sup> Prospero's Epilogue has been examined from different theological perspectives within Christianity. (Tiffany 2000, p. 439) suggests Calvinist dimensions, whereas (Beauregard 1997) and (Beauregard 2008, pp. 145–56) argue at length for its Catholic underpinnings. Following the basic thrust of (Hunt 2004), I believe that an understanding of Shakespeare's apparent sympathy for the "middle way" of Richard Hooker's theology can allow us to profit from both Tiffany's and Beauregard's arguments.

<sup>30</sup> My reading of Prospero's supplication stands in stark contrast to the skeptical reading offered by (Sanchez 2008, p. 81).


Grant, R. A. D. 1983. Providence, Authority, and the Moral Life in *The Tempest*. *Shakespeare Studies* 16: 235–63.


Smith, Matthew J. 2018. "At War 'Twixt Will and Will Not": On Shakespeare's Idea of Religious Experience in *Measure for Measure*. *Religions* 9: 419. [CrossRef]

Stelzer, Emily E. 2019. Lear, Luke 17, and Looking for the Kingdom Within. *Religions* 10: 456.

Still, Colin. 1921. *Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of "The Tempest."* London: Cecil Palmer.


Tiffany, Grace. 2018. Paganism and Reform in Shakespeare's Plays. *Religions* 9: 214. [CrossRef]

Walter, James. 1983. From Tempest to Epilogue: Augustine's Allegory in Shakespeare's Drama. *Publications of the Modern Language Association of America* 98: 60–76.

© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

### *Article The Tempest* **and Black Natural Law**

#### **Julia Reinhard Lupton**

School of Humanities, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA; jrlupton@uci.edu Received: 8 December 2018; Accepted: 28 January 2019; Published: 1 February 2019

**Abstract:** Vincent Lloyd's 2016 book *Black Natural Law* presents four case histories in which African American intellectuals used the natural law tradition to mount defenses of the rights, capacities, and dignity of members of their communities. This essay uses the discourse of black natural law as reconstructed by Lloyd to reread Caliban's political arguments and social and aesthetic project in *The Tempest*. Although the natural law tradition became increasingly secularized during the century of revolution, black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. drew on the religious renditions of natural law that were alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reading Shakespeare with black natural law is not simply an audacious leap into our troubled present, but also brings new focus on the forms of scripturally-inspired pluralism that natural law theory supported in Shakespeare's age.

**Keywords:** natural law; black theology; *The Tempest*; Richard Hooker; Thomas Aquinas; James Cone; Vincent Lloyd

We are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be.

1 John 3:2a, cited by James Cone, *A Black Theology of Liberation,* 1970 (Cone 2010, p. 24)

In his 2016 *Black Natural Law*, Vincent Lloyd describes the African American church imagined by W. E. B. Du Bois:

The church of his dreams would include 'a cooperative store in the Sunday school room; with physician, dentist, nurse and lawyer to help serve, and defend the congregation; with library, nursery school, and a regular succession of paid and trained lecturers and discussion ... a credit union, group insurance, and a building and loan association.' There would be preaching, but it would not be limited to the Bible. It would also include the words of Shakespeare, Confucius, Buddha, and John Brown (Lloyd 2016, p. 84).

Shakespeare appears here as part of a broadened religious program that begins with the Bible but spirals out to works of secular literature, eastern wisdom, and black history, as part of a church re-envisioned as a community center designed to support the flourishing and build the capacities of its congregants. Lloyd notes that the vocabulary of Fredrick Douglass, too, was "thoroughly soaked in the Shakespearean" (Lloyd 2016, p. 5). I have taken the presence of Shakespeare in Lloyd's powerful treatise as an invitation to consider the extent to which Caliban's claim to embody a creaturely humanity in opposition to the punitive actions of Prospero can be captured within a natural law tradition that culminates in the African-American discourse on human dignity that Lloyd reconstructs in *Black Natural Law*. Lloyd, a scholar of religious studies and a historian of black theology, tunes into the Scriptural strain that stamps black natural law, whose writers took the idea of humanity created in the image of God as the basis of dignity and equality for all people. The received history of natural law thinking is one of progressive secularization, in which the monotheistic synthesis of classical philosophy with Scripture effected by the great medieval Aristotelians Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas eventually shed its theistic imagism in the works of Grotius, Hobbes and Locke in order

to become the modern doctrine of rights. Black natural law, unapologetically theological, is thus in some ways a return to the scholastic tradition that stretches from Aquinas to Hooker and to which Shakespeare can be seen to belong. Black natural law is not simply natural law *radicalized*; it is also natural law *theologized*: natural law with its creaturely soul rendered bare and trembling, open and heaving. Thus, reading Shakespeare with black natural law is not simply an audacious leap into our troubled present, but also brings new focus on the forms of scripturally-inspired pluralism that natural law theory supported in Shakespeare's century, and might support again.2

#### **1. Natural Law,** *Imago Dei***, Pluralism**

Natural law in the West stretches from ancient philosophy to the century of revolution, where its impact is visible in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Despite the sublimity of those documents, the difficulty of establishing genuinely shared norms in a modern world distinguished by competing moral and legal codes eroded the credibility of natural law, which ceded to legal positivism in the nineteenth century. After World War II, legal philosophers such as Alexander Passerin D'Entrèves began reconsidering the value of norms, and natural law plays a role in various post-war enterprises, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. D'Entrèves provides a conceptual history of natural law and presents natural law itself not as an anti-historical discourse but as a mode that incorporates elements of adjustment and adaptation into moments of judgment that occur in time and space. The same can be said of both Lloyd, who pluralizes natural law by articulating a distinctive political discourse in African-American letters, and Shakespeare, who participates in a broadly Hookerian understanding of natural law but opens that tradition to a distinctly subaltern vocalization through the person of Caliban.

In his effort to revive natural law jurisprudence, D'Entrèves pointed to the very different functions of natural law in classical, Christian, and post-Reformation settings. For Cicero, "Mankind is a universal community or cosmopolis. Law is its expression" (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 25). *Ius naturale* (natural law) and *ius gentium* (the law of nations) were distinguished by Justinian in his famous code, but often blend together and share many attributes, above all the insight that different nations and groups arrive at similar maxims concerning human relations from their own regions of custom and thought. Furthermore, Cicero posited the equality of men: "'For those creatures who have received the gift of reason from Nature have also received right reason, and therefore they have also received the gift of Law, which is right reason applied to command and prohibition'" (D'Entrèves 2017). Despite these bold pronouncements, D'Entrèves argues that Roman law was concerned not with transcendental and eternal rights, but with "the intrinsic character of a given situation" (p. 32). Natural law is thus coordinate with Ciceronian decorum, making it much more adaptable, flexible, and intrinsically historical than is commonly understood, but also less revolutionary. In D'Entrèves' gloss, *ius naturale* was "not a complete and ready-made system of rules, but a means of interpretation ... it played a decisive part in the process of adapting positive law to changing conditions and in elaborating the legal system of an international or rather super-national civilization" (p. 33). This also means that there was nothing revolutionary in the Roman conception: "Being in itself merely 'a reflection upon the existing law', it was not meant to give 'legal sanction to what was not otherwise law'" (D'Entrèves 2017, citing Zulueta: p. 33). Reason for Roman lawyers was not the opposite of experience so much as a synonym for it (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 51). Cicero did, however, defend tyrannicide, a fact not lost on his Renaissance readers (Dzelzainis 2009).

The natural law of Thomas Aquinas looks a lot like the Roman theories upon which it builds. Aquinas, like Cicero and Aristotle, affirmed that human beings are capable of discerning the teachings of natural law through the use of reason. Yet creaturely life—sinful, historical, unreliable,

<sup>2</sup> For a related reading of Shakespeare's Scriptural pluralism, see (Smith 2018). On the *imago dei* in *The Tempest*, see (Urban forthcoming).

and passionate—distinguishes the post-classical subject of natural law from its classical counterpart. When Aquinas argues that "Grace does not abolish Nature but perfects it", he at once preserves the rational order of nature so important to classical science and philosophy and refigures nature as the zone of creation: made by God in a deliberative temporal process and then thrown into disarray by the event of original sin (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 44). In the words of Jewish natural law theologian David Novak, "Like all creation natural law is made in time", a maxim derived from the first book of the Torah and foreign to the eternity of the cosmos posited by Aristotle, Plato, and the Stoics (Novak 2014, location 167). If for Aristotle the good was the telos of all actions, for Augustine and his heirs the human will has been deformed by sin, driving the arrow of virtuous intention away from its promised end towards darker sticking places tainted by lust, aggression, and envy.3 Although for Aquinas, the soul as *imago dei* participating in God through reason secures access to natural law, fallen human beings require both the help of God (in the form of grace) and the coercive power of positive law (in the form of punishment) to act upon those precepts. But because positive law was itself made by creatures, natural law could be used to judge human law, making some room for resistance to tyranny and injustice (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 45). In the words of Walter Benjamin, the sovereign is "the lord of creatures, but he remains a creature" (Benjamin 1988, p. 85).

The creaturely horizon of the monotheistic synthesis also meant that natural law could be changed over time when transformations in ways of life required it (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 46). D'Entrèves asserts that "a deep feeling for history" pervades Aquinas' account of natural law (D'Entrèves, p. 47), a claim developed by Pamela Hall (Hall 1994) in *Narrative and Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomist Ethics*. Hall demonstrates how for Aquinas natural law must be discovered, both in history and over the course of individual lives, through the highly situational and temporally reflective operation of prudence (Hall 1994, p. 40). For Aquinas, different moments in God's covenanting with humanity articulate natural law over time, a philosophical-historical understanding of the relation between reason and revelation that would continue to develop in the natural law writings of Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden. In this evolving juridical hermeneutics of history, the Creation, the Noahide laws, Babel, Sinai, and the New Testament were conceived as events in the discovery, adaptation, and supplementation of natural law within the saeculum of human history (Hall 1994, pp. 45–64).4 The Noahide laws are of special interest to the development of a pluralized natural law jurisprudence; although they are based on Genesis 9, when God re-covenants with his creation after the Flood, they were only formalized as a law code by the rabbis in the Talmud. Thus the adaptation of Noahide laws by Christian natural law thinkers required active engagement with post-biblical Jewish legal texts and methods, convening a plurality of sources in the articulation of laws shared by all peoples.5 Meanwhile, for the Jews, the Noahide laws are conceived as "the law of the *other*," providing the bare rudiments of civil life for gentiles but lacking the soul-shaping, people-founding power of the revelation at Sinai (Wilf 2008, p. 4).

D'Entrèves canonizes Shakespeare's contemporary Richard Hooker (1554–1600) as the Elizabethan inheritor of Aquinas. Like Aquinas and against Calvin and his hardline Augustinianism, Hooker affirms the power of human reason to discern shared truths concerning social and political life, maxims discovered by human beings seeking the good within concrete situations.6 Like Aquinas, Hooker acknowledges the insufficiency of reason alone to order human communities and hence the need for positive law, which adapts natural law to the realities of human nature and to different historical

<sup>3</sup> "Every art, and every inquiry, and similarly every action as well as choice, is held to aim at some good" (Aristotle 2011, 1094a). For a nuanced and integrative account of Augustine's lifelong dialogue with classical virtue, see (Wetzel 1992).

<sup>4</sup> (Wilf 2008, p. 3) refers to "the legal foundations of the generation after the Tower of Babel" as another instance of legal re-founding.

<sup>5</sup> (Rosenblatt 2006, p. 10) makes this point and notes that "discussions of Noachide law appear in the work of Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, Isaac Newton, Henry Burton, John Lightfoot, Henry Stubbe, Jeremy Taylor, James Harrington, Edward Stillingfleet, John Toland, Samuel Pufendorf, and Lancelot Addison (father of Joseph Addison)."

<sup>6</sup> For Calvin, "the purpose of natural law is 'to render man inexcusable" (Koetsier 2003, p. i).

scenarios: "The case of man's nature standing as it doth, some kind of regiment the law of nature doth require; yet the kinds thereof being many, nature tieth not to any one, but leaveth the choice as a thing arbitrary" (Hooker 1883, 1.9.5.) Explaining why "even in good laws [there is] so great variety," he suggests that "the sundry particular ends whereunto the different disposition of that subject or matter, for which laws are provided, causeth them to have special respect in making laws" (Hooker 1883, 1.9.5). Hooker's allowance for the situational adaptation of natural law recalls the Ciceronian link between natural law and decorum.

But what if nature, both human nature and the physical world, is perfect on its own, and needs to be neither abolished nor perfected by grace? For Thomas, natural law was organized around the order of the cosmos and the dignity of the human soul as a reflection of God, all united by reason (Kent 2017). The modern innovation was to remove God from the picture by affirming the self-sufficiency of human reason; centering the legal discussion around the rights of the individual rather than the laws of nature; and entertaining the possibility of revolution (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 51). Human dignity, derived by the three monotheisms from the *imago dei* and radiated by the doctrine of grace, separated out from this theological matrix to become an independent value, though not without retaining a sublime charge (Debes 2017). Hobbes inherits the pessimism of Tacitus, Augustine, and Luther, while Locke develops the humanism of Cicero, Aquinas and Hooker, but each sets natural law off on its path towards rights, and also, arguably, towards legal positivism. Yet the creationist element does not disappear completely, as we see in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are *created* equal ... " (emphasis added). *Created* introduces a temporal gap between an originary foundation, historical realities, and future projects that allows for both normative judgment and historical reasoning while keeping on call the reference to a divine maker (Wills 1978, pp. xviii–xix).

Shakespeare is the inheritor of a natural law still marked by the monotheistic merging of nature and creation, but his world-building is also enlivened by the skepticism and pessimism of Machiavelli before him and anticipates Hobbes to come. Meanwhile, his anthropology is not untouched by Calvinist convictions concerning unregenerate humanity. (Elton 1988) long ago demonstrated the presence of all of these frameworks in *King Lear and the Gods.* In *The Tempest*, Gonzalo is a kind of Hookerian, or would be with a little education, while Sebastian and Alonso are Hobbesians *avant la lettre*. The play itself unfolds in a landscape that is marked by epochal events in the history of natural law, including the Creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, all moments of what Wilf (2008) calls "the law before the law." In *The Tempest*, natural law becomes natural history, encrypted in a layered landscape alive with multiple intentions shaped by different catastrophes in the history of the human spirit. Caliban rethinks and reimagines elements of the scholastic tradition, but within an emergent framework of rights, by dint of his position not as judge but as plaintiff: the one who complains, the one who suffers. That is, he contributes to neither scholastic nor modern natural law, but to a distinct strand that links the theological and the political in a great recursive loop: what Vincent Lloyd calls black natural law.

#### **2. From Natural Law to Black Natural Law**

Lloyd's book recovers a natural law theology and politics in the works of four African-American thinkers and leaders: Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr. By asserting the humanity, equality, and dignity of black men and women, these thinkers protested the existing laws of the land, participating in "a rich, coherent style of ethical inquiry and political practice" of which, Lloyd argues, "only ruins remain" (Lloyd 2016, pp. vii, 75). Lloyd traces natural law to Aristotle, Cicero, Grotius, and Hobbes, and he acknowledges the existence of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic natural law traditions alongside "dogmatically secular" variants (his own thinking is undogmatically post-secular) (Lloyd 2016, p. vii). Like D'Entrèves, Lloyd does not see natural law as a single continuous tradition; his aim is to "pluralize" natural law by articulating this other line of black thought within and alongside it. D'Entrèves focuses on the "function", not the "doctrine" of natural law; similarly, Lloyd focuses on the "process," not the "product," of BNL (black natural law) (D'Entrèves 2017, p. 18; Lloyd 2016, p. viii). Lloyd presents his BNL thinkers as lenders as well as borrowers: "European or Catholic natural law traditions can learn much from the black natural law tradition. For example, the black natural law tradition places particular emphasis on the role of emotion in discerning natural law, a theme often neglected in European and Catholic traditions" (p. vii). Like neo-Thomist readers of natural law such as D'Entrèves, Alisdair MacIntyre (2007), and John Finnis (2011), Lloyd calls attention to the theological foundations of the concept for its practitioners, whether they are professional men of faith like Martin Luther King, Jr. or religious humanists like W. E. B. Du Bois. (Du Bois, Lloyd reminds us, lodged the word "souls" in the title of his most famous book (Lloyd 2016, p. 58.) Indeed, black natural law, as an explicitly political-theological teaching, reaches back before Hobbes to the Hookerian and Thomist understandings of natural law. That alone makes BNL compatible with a reading of Caliban. Lloyd's book ends with a stunning accountof secularism as a form of white privilege and religion as an abounding resource for communities of color.

BNL builds on the cosmopolitan and egalitarian aspects of European natural law, with special emphasis on the idea of humanity as *imago dei* put forward by the three monotheisms. By uniting reason with imagination and feeling, the *imago dei* of BNL reclaims the breadth of the human soul that Aquinas had tended to identify exclusively with reason. Moreover, for BNL, Lloyd argues, that composite soul "is ultimately unrepresentable" (p. viii), broaching "a concept of the human essentially defined by what it is not, marking what is in the world but never fully captured by it" (p. ix). The *imago dei* is an inherently creationist formulation, founded on the idea that human beings are made in God's image. Black natural law amplifies the creaturely character of the *imago dei* by emphasizing the positive role of passion and imagination in discerning natural law, and by unfixing the *imago dei* from its presumptive whiteness. BNL taps the existential stakes and inherent indeterminacy of the *imago dei* doctrine, whose promise of a reassuring likeness and mirroring coherence between God and human is undone by the cognitive rigor of the prohibition against idolatry.

Black natural law is also communitarian: its proponents appreciate "the influence communities have on individuals, and the need for political change to happen through social movement organizing" (Lloyd 2016, p. ix). This insight develops the seeds of resistance theory implicit in natural law, now understood not simply as a last resort in the face of immovable tyranny, but as an independent social good that builds the capacities of oppressed communities and might even defer precipitously violent actions. The political organizing undertaken by Du Bois, for example, aimed to create "a vibrant, complex black social and political space"; "in the process of organizing itself, [this work] provided an opportunity for the realization of human capacities" while "restraining the desire for justice to flow immediately" (p. 83). Finally, BNL "recognizes the epistemic privilege of the oppressed, the way that suffering attunes us to justice" (p. viii). Whereas much natural law theory is written by jurists and philosophers who are protected and empowered by the legal systems they consider, BNL is written from a place of heightened legal disability and enforced minority. Hooker writes that "the search for knowledge is a thing painful" (Hooker 1883, 1.7.7). Whereas Hooker means that for sinful humans, acquiring knowledge is difficult and hence best managed by experts, for black natural law the link between pain and knowledge unlocks heightened attention and a deeper kind of understanding: "where other natural law traditions see each human being as equally capable of discerning the natural law, the black natural law tradition recognizes the epistemic privilege of the oppressed, the way that suffering attunes us to justice" (Lloyd 2016, p. ix).

So, what does it mean to think about *The Tempest* as participating in black natural law? After all, Shakespeare was white, and he was writing with different questions in mind and under constraints that included a royal audience. In response, I would argue that Shakespeare created a character who has gained a life of his own in interpretation and performance. If Shakespeare has "created" Caliban, not simply written his part, this means that Caliban is his "creature," a vital composite of interpretive and performative possibilities and latent intentions. Creature Caliban is possessed of a soul, a word that captures both the ensemble of capacities that characterize his dynamic personhood

and the extraordinary afterlife, the sempiternity, of Shakespeare's golem. Ancient philosophy derived human dignity from the soul or *psyche*, the ensemble of capacities for thought, movement, perception, and emotion that are exercised and realized in virtuous action. In the assimilation of Aristotle to monotheism, the soul merges with the *imago dei*, becoming at once substantialized and virtualized as the person's immortal part while retaining its ancient sense as the animate infrastructure of mindful faculties. The soul is both *naturata* and *naturans*, a created thing that also creates. The soul makes us who we are (soul as an ensemble of resources for thought and action) and orients us towards what we want to be (soul as *imago dei*). In *The Souls of Black Folk,* W. E. B. Du Bois defines the soul as a "'marvelous universe,'" "'a reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed'" (Lloyd 2016, p. 63).7 From Dante to Du Bois, the soul as virtuous capacity and divine imprint asserts the creaturely dimension of natural law, grounded in a primal landscape and flowing into neighboring construals of *natura*, including human nature, the state of nature, and the natural world. Creature Caliban, who is also Caliban ensouled, participates in that story.

#### **3. Autonomy and Negation**

Caliban's counter-narrative to Prospero recites certain topoi of natural law:

I must eat my dinner. This island's mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first, Thou strok'st me and made 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 showed thee all the qualities o'th' isle,

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile—

Cursed be I that did so! All the charms

Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you;

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o'th' island. (1.2.331–45)8

Caliban begins with an argument from positive law (he has inherited the island from his mother Sycorax), but he ends by asserting his original self-sufficiency: "For I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own king." To be one's own king is to discover a law within oneself and by oneself, through the exercise of rational capacities shared with other human beings. This is the idea of human autonomy (from *auto nomos*, to give oneself the law, to be one's own law).9 Hooker cites Paul on the discovery of natural law by classical philosophers and jurists:

<sup>7</sup> Life in this scheme is "the rhythmic workings of the physical and social world that can be understood through the human capacity to reason" (Lloyd 2016, p. 63).

<sup>8</sup> All citations from Shakespeare are taken from (Shakespeare 2016).

<sup>9</sup> Compare Grotius: "For God created man αυτoνóμoσ, 'free and *sui iuris*,' so that the actions of each individual and the use of his possessions were made subject not to another's will but to his own." Cited by (Nijman 2017, p. 104)

The apostle St. Paul having speech concerning the Heathen saith of them, 'They are a law onto themselves.' His meaning is, that by force of the light of Reason, wherewith God illuminateth everyone who cometh into the world, men being enabled to know truth from falsehood, and good from evil, do thereby learn in many things what the will of God is, which will himself not revealing by any extraordinary means unto them, but they by natural discourse attaining the knowledge thereof, seem the makers of those laws which indeed are his, and they but only the finders of them out. (Hooker 1883, 1.8.4-5).

Caliban is a "Heathen" who "by natural discourse," that is, without the gift of revelation but through his own ratiocinative processes, was able to govern himself on the island. This self-rule was not simply animalistic survival; when Prospero arrived, Caliban demonstrated that he was able to know "good from evil" (Hooker) by "loving" Prospero and showing him "all the qualities o'th'isle" (Shakespeare). Hooker lists as maxims discoverable by reason and acknowledged by nations around the world: "God to be worshipped, Parents to be honoured, Others to be used as we ourselves would by them" (Hooker 1883, 1.8.3). All these principles are evident in Caliban's discourse and self-narration. When he refers elsewhere to Setebos, we see him practicing a kind of natural theology, and in this passage, he honors his mother and he recollects his own practice of neighbor love and reciprocal care (cf. Urban forthcoming).

Moreover, Caliban's willing and affectionate movement from self-rule in a state of nature to human sociability retraces the passage into political association that Hooker gives:

But forsomuch as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things needful for such a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man; therefore, to supply these defects and imperfections, which are in us living, single, and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek commune and fellowship with others. (Hooker 1883, 1.10.1)

Caliban was indeed able to live "single and solely" by himself, but the association with Prospero brought tangible benefits, from rather modest new recipes ("water with berries in it") to the mind-expanding resource of a language shared with others. The "dignity of man" that Hooker associates with social life encompasses the forms of love, conversation, and mutual succour that persons confer on each other in the process of producing and sharing these material and intellectual goods.

Caliban, addressed by Prospero as "thou earth, thou" (2.2.315), is associated with God's first human creature, Adam. "Adam" comes from *adamah*, earth: earth is God's plastic medium for fashioning the first man, and it also the ground, literally, of natural life in its teeming fecundity and vermicular decomposition. In naming "the bigger light and ... the less," Caliban labels the elements of God's creation in a childlike, naively concrete language, directly echoing Genesis 1:16 (Orgel 1987, p. 119n). Adam, like Caliban, is associated with a primal self-kingship in seventeenth-century political theory (Benjamin 1988, p. 85). Unlike Adam, however, Caliban must be taught this language by Miranda and Prospero rather than finding it on his own, though he was not without language when they discovered him. Upon encountering Caliban's draped and prostrate form, Trinculo exclaims, "A man or a fish?—dead or alive?" (2.2.23): amphibious Caliban swims and struts in a world after Noah and Babel, and he himself serves as a translator between worlds and tongues. Whereas Adam's naming project places him at the head of creation, Caliban's language lesson places him within creation, as one creature among others, a monster whose reflection of the *imago dei* appears inchoate and uncertain, not a birthright immediately recognized by the other human creatures on stage but rather an attribute that must be demonstrated and performed.10 This defensive and disenfranchised posture associates Caliban not simply with natural law, whose precepts he has discovered and put into practice, but with

<sup>10</sup> This claim revises my statement that "Caliban is mere creature, a creature separate (like Adam) from the Creator but (unlike Adam) not reflected back to the Creator as His image" (Lupton 2005, p. 166).

*black natural law*, whose defiant condition he embodies and begins to vocalize. Unlike Hooker's virtuous heathens, who get to do philosophy for everyone, Caliban, embattled and embittered, marks creaturely humanity as "what is in the world but never fully captured by it" (Lloyd 2016, p. xi). Caliban takes the creaturely condition that runs through premodern natural law theory and intensifies it into a point of protest: he *blackens* it. This does not mean that Caliban is exempt from the condition of fallenness, as I will soon demonstrate. It does mean, however, that Caliban as black natural lawyer understands that the depravity of all creatures (original sin) is unevenly amplified by the corruption of institutions and the blindness of privilege (social injustice).

Hooker distinguishes the undeveloped reason of a child, whose soul can "only store itself with conceipts of things of inferior and more open quality, which afterwards do serve as instruments unto that which is greater" with mature reason, which is supported by logic and language: "When once it [the soul of man] comprehendeth anything above this, as the differences of time, affirmations, negations, and contradictions in speech; we then count it to have some use of natural reason" (Hooker 1883, 1.6.3). Caliban's retort to Prospero indeed combines "things of inferior and more open quality," namely the resonant realia of the island's flora and fauna, with the tools of reason: the ability to speak in several tenses and to use affirmations, negations, and contradictions to mount an argument. His special handling of particulars indexes his creaturely knowledge, while his use of language to tell a counter-narrative politicizes rational discourse in a new, oppositional mode. Once again, what are attributes of *natural law* in Hooker, shared by a broad and theologically divided but racially unified collective, become features of *black natural law* in the hands of Caliban, who uses the "differences of time" and the power of negation to tell his own story of self-rule, neighbor-love, the joys of society—and their betrayal and destruction.

#### **4. Sex, Sociability, and Slavery**

Caliban's attempt to couple with Miranda has led to this state of affairs is. Here, too, natural law teachings abound. Although Hooker, following Aquinas, asserts participation in God as the highest good that humans can strive for, he exalts in the fact that "there are so many kinds of perfection which man seeketh," beginning with "desiring the continuance of their being": "All things therefore coveting as much as may be like unto God in being ever, that which cannot hereunto attain personally, doth seek to continue itself another way, that is by offspring and propagation" (1.6.2). Hooker implies here that all creatures, not only human ones, strive to imitate the divine, and that the desire to reproduce expresses the creature's urge to become like God by achieving intergenerational immortality. The creaturely scope of Hooker's vision recalls the great covenant God makes with all creation after the Flood: "And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you, and every living creature of all flesh" (KJV: Gen. 9:15). Elsewhere in the text, Hooker associates Adam's desire for a helpmeet with human sociability, not just human reproduction: "it is of Adam said that amongst the beasts 'He found not for himself any meet companion.' Civil society doth more content the nature of man than any private kind of solitary living" (1.10.12). In Hooker's creaturely reading of natural law, the sexual act achieves its own dignity, which humans share with other forms of animate life and transform into a vital bond of human fellowship.

So what happened between Caliban and Miranda? The event itself remains obscure and contested, dissolved in "the dark backward and abyss of time" (1.2.50). Prospero accuses Caliban of "seek[ing] to violate / The honour of my child." Caliban responds:

O ho, O ho! Would't had been done! Thou didst prevent me—I had peopled else This isle with Calibans. (1.2.349–51)

Hooker's natural law provides two ways into this exchange. On the one hand, Caliban's desire for Miranda links him to all living things, expresses his own yearning toward and reflection of the divine, and seeks to deepen human fellowship, all Adamic properties that assert the dignity of Caliban. The nonconsensual nature of his action, however, has fundamentally reconfigured not only his relationship to Prospero and Miranda, but also his management of his own passions and his linguistic and rational capacities. The Caliban who speaks these words to Prospero is no longer the loving and gracious host to the island's newcomers but an angry and unrepentant sex offender whose desires appear drained of divine aspiration. Hooker places consent at the heart of human sociability: "Two foundations there are which bear up public societies, the one, a natural inclination, whereby all men desire sociable life and fellowship, the other an order expressly or secretly agreed upon, touching the manner of their union in living together" (1.10.1). Caliban's debased and passionate language manifests his membership in fallen humanity, who "prefer their own private good before all things, even that good which is sensual" (1.10.6). Caliban's move on Miranda constitutes his own fall, expressing at once an urge towards divine and human participation in the form of a helpmeet and an affront to such participation, a turning within his own being that obscures his rational capacities and gives his passions the upper hand. Subject to what Hooker calls "the divine malediction" (1.3.3), Caliban himself speaks in maledictions.

In Aquinas and Hooker, the story of the Fall serves to reconcile the positive anthropology of Aristotle and Cicero, based on man's sociable and rational being, and the negative anthropology of Tacitus and Augustine, who dwell on humanity's passionate and self-interested impulses. Janne Nijman (2017) argues that Grotius used the *imago dei* to mediate between hard-line Protestant and more humanist Erasmian and Arminian accounts of human nature; in 1601, at age eighteen, Grotius wrote a play about the Fall called *Adamus Exul* that explored precisely these motifs (Barham 1839). Both anthropologies are expressed in Shakespeare's depiction of Caliban, a naturally loving rational creature who has been morally damaged by his own precipitous attempt to realize his desires violently, that is, without consent. Embodying the psalmist's confession of broken humanity, "Behold, I was shapen in inquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5 [KJV]), Caliban is not a noble savage but a creature like others. Shakespeare's Caliban is both sinned against *and* sinning. Yet what Miranda and Prospero refuse to acknowledge in this exchange is that they too are creatures. They are unable to consider Caliban's suit as a failed bid for fellowship because their own outrage blinds them to the natural law perspective, which has the potential to assert their equality with Caliban in both dignity and sin. They have replaced the sense of a law that educates and directs (natural law) with the imposition of a law that punishes through force (positive law). They negate the emancipatory potential of natural law and instead wield the rhetoric of nature to justify slavery:

But thy vile race,

Though thou didst learn, had that in't, which good natures

Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

Deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst

Deserved more than a prison. (1.2.358–62; cf. 4.1.188–92)

Shakespeare sides with Prospero when he identifies Caliban in the list of characters as "a savage and deformed slave." The poetic Creator rezones the creatureliness of his Creature from a common condition in which good and evil mingle to a state of permanent exclusion from human society, with "good natures" inside and those of "vile race" without. Yet the Creature is not fully determined by the Creator: Caliban's ability to mount a counter-narrative, to organize a coup, and to continue to develop his own virtuous capacities demonstrates the potential of natural law to yield an approach other than the one taken by Prospero, Miranda. and Shakespeare himself.

Slavery was indeed a part of the natural law tradition. Aristotle, no universalist, argued that some men were naturally slaves and others naturally masters, by virtue of their relative virtues (Dyer 2012, pp. 1–3). Aquinas did not admit slavery to natural law, but accepted it as a potentially legitimate part of positive law, if it benefitted all parties; the right of dominion, however, applied only to the service of

the slave; "in all other respects, the relationship between the two persons was one of justice and mutual rights" (Valenzuela 2017, p. 60).11 Aquinas echoes Job 31:13–14, sometimes taken as a statement of natural law (Perdue 1991, pp. 185–87). Epictetus, one of the greatest of the Stoic philosophers and an exponent of human equality, cosmopolitanism, and natural law, was himself a freed slave. In his *Diatribes*, he remarks that "all human beings have Zeus as their progenitor, and so masters have kinship with their slaves, and are related by nature" (Herschbell 1995, p. 189). Although Epictetus did not espouse the abolition of slavery, his status as a freedman writing on the rational dignity of all persons places him in the prehistory of black natural law. In *Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition*, Justin Buckley Dyer shows how natural law was used on both sides of the slavery debate in the period leading up to the Civil War, but especially powerfully by the abolitionists. Sean Wilentz makes a similar argument in his 2018 opus *No Property in Man: Slavery and Anti-Slavery at the Nation's Founding* (Wilentz 2018).

Frederick Douglass, a key figure for Dyer, Wilentz, and Lloyd, argued that slavery contradicts "not only the just and proper rules of legal interpretation, but the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and duties of civil government, and also the relations which human beings sustain to it" (Dyer 2012, p. 181). Douglass compares the slave owner to a tyrant: "arbitrary power, whether 'vested in the civil ruler' or in 'a slaveholder on a plantation,'" runs contrary to natural law (Dyer 2012, p. 180). Douglass develops the resistance theory already evident in Cicero's defense of Brutus's assassination of Caesar and that comes into play in Renaissance political theory. Caliban twice calls Prospero a tyrant, a word given new power in religiously driven defenses of resistance and tyrannicide in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Mortimer 2017, pp. 31–33). "Tyrant" is a fighting word. It is also a natural law word. In the words of Cicero, "there can be no fellowship between us and tyrants—on the contrary there is a complete estrangement—and it is not contrary to nature to rob a man, if you are able, whom it is honorable to kill" (1991: II.32). Caliban *contra tyrannos* is a brute, but also a Brutus.

One of the dogs that Prospero unleashes against the rebels is named Tyrant: "Fury, Fury! There, Tyrant, there! Hark, hark!" (4.1.249). The dogs embody Prospero's own tyrannical fury and the resurgence of his disavowed creatureliness; the hound's name was powerful enough to have carried a distinct political charge in 1795 (Taylor 2011, p. 511). The image anticipates the canine tracking of runaway slaves; in performance, the specter of the rebels chased by dogs can be quite disturbing. Prospero's tyranny motivates Caliban (though not his confederates), and raises their revolt into what Ariel suggestively calls "their project" (4.1.175). The word "project" appears more often in *The Tempest* than in any other play by Shakespeare: thrice to describe Prospero's overarching plans for the action of the play, and once to characterize the conspiracy. In *The Tempest*, resistance fails, but not before it assumes the quality of a project comparable to Prospero's own, asserting the dignity of the creature and placing Caliban in the black natural law tradition. Novak provides a creationist scaffold for human projects: "For God's purposeful creation of the cosmos is not only a datum; it is a task given (*Aufgabe* in German) to humans to imitate and further actively" (Novak 2014, location 756). Mark Taylor defines ethos as "an orientation, an attitude, a directional movement that can be found in action, particularly in law's pursuit of justice and community's pursuit of love" (Taylor 2009, p. 195). Yet Shakespeare denies his creature either an achievable or a defensible project; Caliban's desire to overcome Prospero while he is sleeping recalls Macbeth, while his continued disregard for Miranda's sexual consent reveals the limits of his understanding of political and personal obligation. Violence may be Caliban's only recourse, but it is not yet justice, and it certainly falls short of love (Schwartz 2017). If the conspiracy against Prospero were the only project that Shakespeare had given Caliban, *The Tempest* would not have yielded the rich discourse of creative political thought that has issued from it, from Mary Shelley to Aimé Césaire.

<sup>11</sup> Compare Cicero, *On Duties*: "Justice must be maintained even towards the lowliest. The lowliest condition and fortune is that of slaves; the instruction we are given to treat them as if they were employees is good advice; that one should require work from them, and grant to them just treatment" (Cicero 1991, I.41; p. 18).

#### **5. Sounds and Sweet Airs**

Caliban fashions a different kind of project in the sounds and sweet airs passage:

Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That if I then had waked after long sleep Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again. (3.2.126–34)

This passage discloses Caliban's ability to tune his soul through the art of listening (Jackson 2018). Music in the period was understood to harmonize the different parts of the soul, taken as the ensemble of faculties that lend themselves to thinking and feeling. The lutenist and song writer John Dowland, translating a 1516 treatise on music by Andreas Ornithoparcus, writes,

Humane Musick, is the Concordance of divers elements in one compound, by which the spirituall nature is joyned with the body, and the reasonable part is coupled in concord with the unreasonable, which proceedes from the uniting of the body and the soule. For that amitie, by which the body is joyned unto the soule, is not tyed with bodily bands, but vertuall, caused by the proportion of humors. For what (saith Caelius) makes the powers of the soul so sundry and disagreeing to conspire oftentimes each with other? who reconciles the Elements of the body? what other power doth soder [solder] and glue that spirituall strength, which is indued with an intellect to a mortall and earthly frame, than that Musicke which every man that descends into himselfe finds in himselfe? (Lindley 2015, p. 22)

According to Dowland, "humane Musick" modulates a series of internal divisions: the soul, itself a dynamic infrastructure composed of "sundry and disagreeing ... powers," brings order to the fluctuating but infinitely generative humors of the body. Drawing on natural reason, Dowland claims that this definition can be gleaned from simply observing the operations of music upon one's own composite self. Dowland's free translation emphasizes the created nature of the human being, who relies on the "soder and glue" of music to attach the mind to the "mortal and earthly frame of the body." Listening to music becomes a spiritual exercise, initiating an auto-affective "amity" among "divers elements" that yields a sense of sustained well-being at once mellifluous and cognizant of breaks and joints. In Caliban's musical reverie, reason, imagination, memory, perception, and emotion resonate with each other like so many strings on the lute of the soul (cf. Psalm 108:1–2). Whereas Dowland listens to human music in a human way, creature Caliban responds to natural sounds in a manner that affirms the unbearable fullness of his ensoulment while immersing him in a trembling continuum of living things. The ambient noise of the island become music through the creative-receptive hearing of the soulful auditor, who uses this attunement to build his emotional world and ultimately to calm himself.

This is a new and different order of self-rule from Caliban's presentation of himself as his own king. Neither sovereignty nor resistance is the dominant motif; instead, we glimpse spiritual techniques that give the ensouled creature inner strength and a new equilibrium along with heightened cognitive and affective capacities. (This is what arts education looks like.) The overall effect is to enhance the dignity and personhood that Prospero, Miranda, and even his creator, Shakespeare, would take from him, in a manner that emphasizes his porous, sensitive being in an environment that he inhabits without ruling. For a musical analogue, we might look to composer Luciano Berio's "O King," a symphonic piece

for eight voices, first written as a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967 and then retooled as an elegy in 1968. The highly crafted and experimental piece takes the phonemes in the civil rights leader's name as sonorous fragments that merge with the instrumentation rather than float above it; the word "King" itself is sounded for new sovereignties that reside in collective processes (Osmond-Smith 2016, pp. 65–80). At once weaning and keening, Caliban's proprioceptive lullaby elaborates the psyche as a virtual lyre that meshes with somatic and environmental flows and enables new creative attunements across the island and with future auditors.

Lloyd suggests that social organizing is a key component of black natural law. Social organizing involves more than resistance; it also initiates capacity-building within the community, as we saw in Du Bois's designs for a new church. After abolition, Frederick Douglass "committed himself to cultivating the capacities of freed blacks," which meant "attending to their broader humanity, including stimulating their emotions with music and poetry" (Lloyd 2016, p. 9). Noting Du Bois's use of spirituals as epigraphs, Lloyd concludes that "Just as black life offers privileged access to natural law, black music in a sense performs the natural law ... Such songs remind us that there is a law beyond the world and that is the law by which we will ultimately be judged" (Lloyd 2016, p. 79). Caliban's psalm of self-comforting contributes to the historical performance of black natural law. His project may fail, but his soul will not break.

#### **6. Wisdom and Grace**

Caliban's final act in the play is to "seek for grace." Ordered by Prospero to trim his cell, Caliban replies,

Ay, that I will; and 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! (5.1.292–95)

Although the speech is often taken as proof of Caliban's utter submission to Prospero after the collapse of the conspiracy, his desire to seek wisdom and grace has special resonance in natural law thinking. Recall the dictum of Aquinas: "Grace does not abolish Nature but perfects it." In both his dignity and his degradation Caliban is a type of the Old Adam, living after Eden in the wake of a Flood, in the Noahide zone before the mountain-top talks of either Moses or Jesus. Is this "grace" that Caliban seeks simply a set of Christian teachings that will replace the bad natural theology that he exhibited in taking a drunkard for a god? Will grace become violent, as it did in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the English Civil War, or John Brown's military actions? Or will it involve the transformation and expansion of that capacity-building work that Caliban had practiced at the vibrant infrastructure connecting self and world in his "sounds and sweet airs" reverie? This is the direction that grace takes in Matthew J. Smith's reading of Shakespeare's anthropology of religion in this volume: for Angelo, and I would say also for Prospero and Caliban, "the assumption of responsibility for [one's] action imagines a world in which guiltiness is not predetermined"; "confession does not remove [the sinner] from the sphere of guilt, but it enacts his recognition of the need to be outside it" (Smith 2018, p. 13). For Shakespeare, grace ultimately signifies the capacity of religion to transcend its own punitive frameworks and release human beings into new forms of creative freedom, obligation, and mutual recognition.

I took as my epigram 1 John 3:2a, cited by James Cone, the founder of black theology, as he strived to communicate the emergent character of black consciousness in 1970: "'We are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be'" (Cone 2010, location 688). Cone cites the first half of the verse by itself, heightening the mood of expectancy; the full verse is *imago dei* theology through and through:

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. (KJV John 3:2)

This passage captures the mood of expectancy and creative possibility that animates (ensouls) Caliban's search for grace at the end of *The Tempest*, and affirms his radiant impress by God's image, to be realized in an encounter yet to come. To seek for grace is to approach eternity by turning one's own incompleteness into an instrument that plays the world.

And what is this wisdom that Caliban seeks? Under the punitive rule of Prospero, Caliban experienced resentment, frustration, and coercion as symptoms, in the form of the cramps, pricks, and itches that beset the creaturely edges of his being. The stinging nettles of pain triggered by the denial of personhood constitute one kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is fierce, inarticulate, and best verbalized in the curse. At the end of the play, anticipating Prospero's departure, Caliban can seek another kind of knowledge, a wisdom that grows out of pain but, like Ariel's pearls, moves beyond it towards benediction, social action, and self-care, the wisdom he has already begun to access through the art of listening. Wisdom is not simply more reflective or accepting than the knowledge that erupts immediately from pain; to the contrary, wisdom must involve the whole person, in the present moment, over time, and in the resonant spaces of dwelling. This is why wisdom is cultivated by spiritual exercises that, like Caliban's music, operate on and through the entire infrastructure of the psyche (Sterrett 2018). The fractured and flowering landscapes of romance, replete with classical, Jewish, messianic, medieval, Reformed, and New World zoo-anthropologies, provide the setting for Shakespeare's ecumenical search for wisdom and grace. In this pulsing, pluralized ecology composed of multiple virtue traditions, the creator begins to acknowledge this thing of darkness as his own, calling back the dogs of tyranny and rage in order to clear the ground for an unknown future freed from his own overbearing supervision.

In what sense does *The Tempest*, through the passion of Caliban, become wisdom literature? I began with Du Bois's library for the souls of black folk, which included works by "Shakespeare, Confucius, Buddha, and John Brown." This world canon is unified by shared values discerned by the librarian from the point of view of the community he aims to represent and to serve. Wisdom literature, like natural law, involves teachings that may be produced by and for a particular religious or cultural group but lend themselves to diffusion and translation. In the seventeenth century, John Selden understood Talmud and Torah as wisdom literature:

[I]t would seem that anyone who considers the matter carefully cannot, for the same reasons, help but place the highest possible value on this philosophy or law of the Hebrews as being the best part and sole survivor of a great treasure, i.e., of the sum total of the barbarian philosophies of the East. (Haivry 2017, p. 128)

Selden credited the Jews with transmitting a "great treasure," namely eastern philosophies such as Zoroastrianism, in the form of natural law discourses such as the Noahide laws. In placing Shakespeare next to Confucius, Buddha, and John Brown, Du Bois is doing a similar kind of comparative work. Writing from the perspective of Judaism, David Novak asserts that natural law "can save multi-culturalism from the dead end of relativism" while also protecting "natural law thinking from its all too frequent political and epistemological myopia" (Novak 2014, location 545). Writing from the perspective of black studies, Vincent Lloyd observes: "The field, born of struggle, was once centrally concerned with normative questions—What ought to be done? How ought we to live? What is a just society?—but these concerns have faded, critical inquiry replaced by dogmatic 'progressive' assumptions'" (Lloyd 2016). A similar claim could be made for Shakespeare studies, which has largely eschewed universals in favor of particulars, filtered through "progressive assumptions" that may miss what is most redeeming in the precious texts entrusted to our care. In my new work on Shakespeare's virtues, I am interested in finding a non-reductive and historically attuned place in Shakespeare studies to reevaluate and renew normative concepts such as excellence, soul, autonomy, fellowship, amity, and tradition. Natural law thinking, perfected rather than abolished by black natural law, contributes to that effort.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.

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Wilentz, Sean. 2018. *No Property in Man: Slavery and Anti-Slavery at the Nation's Founding*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wilf, Stephen. 2008. *The Law before the Law*. London: Lexington Books.

Wills, Garry. 1978. *Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence*. New York: Doubleday.

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