Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet. Edward Wilson-Lee

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      Stanley in later life, here with the members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Stanley is seated in the centre with Emin Pasha to his left, and Dr Parke is seated second from left. (Photo by De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images)

      The sting in the tail of Stanley’s story is that, like so much else in his life, it was a fabrication. As the modern editor of his Herald despatches notes, the account of this episode in his expedition diary has Stanley handing over no more to satisfy the furious natives than a sheet of paper upon which he had scribbled; this detail was subsequently revised for the newspaper account.25 Stanley’s instincts as a storyteller, as well as his finely honed sense of what he needed to do to fit in, told him that the mythic balance of the tale required the sacrificial victim to be Shakespeare. And the story itself is eerily reminiscent of the episode in Shakespeare’s Tempest in which the savage Caliban plots to overthrow the magician Prospero with a band of drunken accomplices:

      CALIBAN:

      Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him

      I’th’ afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him,

      Having first seized his books; or with a log

      Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,

      Or cut his weasand with thy knife. Remember

      First to possess his books, for without them

      He’s but a sot as I am, nor hath not

      One spirit to command – they all do hate him

      As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.

      The Tempest (III.ii.81–9)

      It seems that Stanley and the other early travellers arrived in Africa expecting to find superstitious and violent natives who demanded that they burn their ‘magic’ books, for this image of the ‘savage’ had resided at the heart of English culture for centuries.

      We are unlikely ever to be able to sort the truth of these accounts from the fantasies derived from the books that the explorers carried with them. Yet the truth of these stories is very much secondary to the purpose Stanley and others evidently expected them to serve. Instead of being straightforward accounts of what had happened in Africa, these stories form a kind of argument for how the ‘Dark Continent’ and its peoples should be understood. If Shakespeare is the universal genius of man, and his worth is evident to all humans, then those who do not appreciate him are, by extrapolation, in some sense not human. This insidious logic was nothing new; indeed, much the same tactic had been employed in Shakespeare’s time to suggest that the inhabitants of the New World could not be human because they broke the deeply embedded European taboo of cannibalism.26 Shakespeare’s characters are themselves not immune to these chains of reasoning: it is constantly asked in The Tempest whether Caliban, whose name has not moved far from ‘Cannibal’, is fully human or not, and it is clear that the answer to this question will determine how he is treated by the European colonizers. When Prospero and Miranda call him a ‘slave’, they are not simply describing Caliban’s status as a captive but accusing him of a moral impoverishment which justifies the removal of his freedom and his rights. He was (Prospero claims) treated ‘with human kindness’, and Miranda ‘took pains to make [him] speak’; and yet despite his aptitude for language, his ungrateful assumption that he was their equal (and could thus look on Miranda with desire) proved that their ‘human kindness’ – that quality of empathy which is both the mark of the human and only granted to other humans – was misplaced.

      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.

      The Tempest (I.ii.357–61)

      Caliban, according to this argument, should look upon his enslavement as an act of mercy, after his criminal lust for the colonizer’s daughter had earned him a worse fate. His savage hate of books – which Stanley echoed in his account of the Dark Continent – was an inescapable counterpart to this same unredeemable incivility.

      This was, it must be said, a depressing place to start my quest to understand Shakespeare’s universal appeal – with that very universalism being used as a tool to exclude from the bounds of the human. But though attempts to define what it is to be human have often been used in this way – to lever one group of people apart from the rest and deprive them of the right to be human – this does not characterize all thinking on the subject. It doesn’t, in fact, even characterize all thinking on the subject in The Tempest. Indeed, Caliban’s second appearance in the play (II.ii) sets about parodying and upending the righteous judgements earlier levelled against him by Prospero and Miranda. The castaway Trinculo, coming upon a Caliban who is pretending to be dead, engages in an extended forensic analysis of the creature at his feet.

      What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish. Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man, and his fins like arms. Warm, o’my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.

      The Tempest (II.ii.24–34)

      Trinculo’s speech moves from lampooning the kind of judgement that decides on the essence of a thing by a few trivial external features (Caliban is a fish because he smells like a fish, he is dead because he is lying down) to turning the judgement back upon Shakespeare’s audience. Trinculo’s daydream – in which he takes Caliban to England to exhibit him to paying crowds – is, of course, a direct reflection of The Tempest’s audience, who themselves have paid to see this ‘spectacle’ of Caliban. It is clear that exotic peoples are made ‘monsters’ in England because there’s money to be made from it – indeed, the word ‘monster’ means ‘something to be shown to a spectator’ – and this was as true in Stanley’s day as in Shakespeare’s. But it’s also clear that it is the leering crowd that is in danger of СКАЧАТЬ