1. Cf. Frye, ed., The Tempest , 22-23, and Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances , 178. For a bibliography of criticism touching on The Tempest's relation to the New World, see Frey, "The Tempest, " and also Skura, "Discourse."

2. The off-remarked analogy in the play between Aeneas's interrupted imperial voyage and the diverted travels of both Alonso and Gates is similarly obtruded and dismissed during the Court party's debate over "widow Dido" (2.1.71-97). Kermode has said that "nowhere in Shakespeare, not even in his less intensive work, is there anything resembling the apparent irrelevance" (Kermode, ed., The Tempest , 47) of the passage.

3. In his most recent examination of The Tempest , Greenblatt too notes that "the swerve away" from colonial allusions in The Tempest "is as apparent as their presence" (Shakespearean Negotiations , 154), a paradox he ascribes to the fact that, in Shakespeare, "the aesthetic space—or, more accurately, the commercial space of the theatrical joint-stock company—is constituted by the simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from the discourse of power" (159). Yet even if this view of Shakespearean aesthetics is accurate, it is not clear why a simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from a certain "discourse of power" could not help to establish another such discourse (even, I will eventually argue, almost the same discourse). Greenblatt forestalls this option by abstracting colonialism into "the discourse of power" generally.

Other recent critics insist that The Tempest is "fully implicated" in "the colonialist project" of its day (Brown, "This Thing," 64, 48), or that "the discourse of colonialism" is "the articulatory principle of The Tempest's diversity" (Barker and Hulme, "Nymphs," 204); but they too transform Jacobean expansion into a monolithic "discourse" abstract enough to escape the restrictions of practical counterevidence>Other recent critics insist that The Tempest is "fully implicated" in "the colonialist project" of its day (Brown, "This Thing," 64, 48), or that "the discourse of colonialism" is "the articulatory principle of The Tempest's diversity" (Barker and Hulme, "Nymphs," 204); but they too transform Jacobean expansion into a monolithic "discourse" abstract enough to escape the restrictions of practical counterevidence. In response, these historians of discourse might claim that Shakespeare "euphemizes" (Brown) or "represses" (Barker and Hulme) the relation of his play to America—an argument similar to the one I will shortly offer but their own broad treatment of colonialism itself mystifies the "moment of historical crisis" (Brown, "This Thing," 48) they set out to explain.

4. Cf. 5.1.172-73. As I have argued, Spenser continually warns his readers that "wemens faire aspect" has "wondrous powre . . ./ To captive men, and make them all the world reject" (FQ 5.8.2).

5. Carlton to Chamberlain, 15 January 1604 (quoted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 3:279).

6. Cf., e.g., the Captain of the Gypsies in Jonson's masque The Gipsies Metamorphosed (performed 1621) as he steps back from the heterodoxy of telling James's fortune:

But why do I presume, though true,
To tell a fortune, Sir, to you,
        Who are the maker here of all,
Where none do stand, or sit in view,
But owe their fortunes unto you,
        At least what they good fortune call.
                                                           (334-39)

7. The dress of the "Indian" knights suggests that they are American: "In their hats each of them [had] an Indian bird for a feather with some jewels" (Carleton in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 3:280).

8. Quoted in Strong, Henry , 8. For Henry's cult and its heavily Spenserian cast, see Yates, Majesty , passim; Strong, Cult , 187-91; Strong, Henry , passim; and Helgerson, "Land," 69-71.

9. Dugdale, Time Triumphant , B3v; quoted in Schmidgall, Shakespeare , 252 n. 26.

10. Cf. Schmidgall, Shakespeare , 259, and Gilman: "Prospero's undermined masque becomes a delicately subversive maneuver staged in the enemy camp and hinting at the bedazzled, insulated self-regard of such entertainments" ("All Eyes," 220). The classic treatment of the notion that the Stuarts came increasingly to inhabit a theatrical dreamworld is Orgel's Illusion of Power .

11. For beating as a description of the pulse, see 5.1.103 and 114; for a mind beating, see 1.2.176, 4.1.163, and 5.1.246; for beating in the sense of literal affliction (ad fligere ), see 2.1.115, 2.2.156, 3.2.85, 86, 111, and 4.1.173, 175. For the tide as a figure for mentality, see 5.1.79-82.

12. Nashe maintains that if a state cannot "exhale" its potentially rebellious population in foreign wars, "it is very expedient they have some light toys" like the theater "to busy their heads withal" (Works 1:211). Cf. Heywood, Apology , 31.

Perhaps the most explicit treatment of the theater and its self-consumption as able to cure expansionist distraction appears in Richard Brome's Antipodes (acted 1637). As the play begins, Peregrine has grown "distracted" (1.1.21) by reading Mandeville, and "a fantastic lord" (Dramatis Personae) named Letoy undertakes his cure by staging Peregrine's play-voyage to the antipodes. The moment at which Peregrine fully enters Letoy's illusion—his unscripted attack on and conquest of some "Antipodean" stage props—foreshadows both his ultimate repudiation of such distracting toys and the play's self-repudiating conclusion:

                                           Wonder he did
A while it seem'd, but yet undaunted stood;
When on the sudden, with thrice knightly force,
And thrice, thrice puissant arm he snatcheth down
The sword and shield that I play'd Bevis with,
Rusheth amongst the foresaid properties,
Kills monster after monster, takes the puppets
Prisoners, knocks down the Cyclops, tumbles all
Our jigambobs and trinkets to the wall.
Spying at last the crown and royal robes
I'th' upper wardrobe, next to which by chance
The devil's vizors hung, and their flame-painted
Skin coats, those he remov'd with greater fury,
And (having cut the infernal ugly faces
All into mammocks) with a reverend hand,
He takes the imperial diadem and crowns
Himself King of the Antipodes, and believes
He has justly gain'd the kingdom by his conquest.
                                                                         (3.6.14-31)

Ann Haaker notes that Peregrine's violence recalls the "habit" among London apprentices "of attacking and demolishing" whorehouses and playhouses on Shrove Tuesday (Brome, Antipodes , 69); The Antipodes turns such antitheatricality into the play's self-conquest.

13. Stephano suggests a continuity among these wooden vehicles when he tells Trinculo that he "escap'd upon a butt of sack which the sailors heav'd o'erboard," that he has transferred some of the sack to a bottle "which I made of the bark of a tree," and that to drink from this bottle is to "kiss the book" (2.2.121-30). Part of Prospero's temperate attack on the notion that the body resembles either the rock in which Caliban is stied or the bags back on which Ariel flies consists of turning rooted trees into uprooted logs and then making the freedom of those logs depend on the pains a body takes in moving them.

14. More precisely, Prospero represents the masque as a failed distraction from distraction. The masque begins with the assurance that the gods who helped plot Proserpine's abduction by Dis (89), Venus and Cupid, have fled the scene; but it ends with Prospero having become Distempered and Dis-made (145, 147).

15. The notion that the theater could physically affect its audience is also a common theme in the antitheatrical literature, though the antitheatricalist would say that the effect is to inspire lust. For a recent celebratory version of the view that Shakespeare "more than any of his contemporaries" exploits the power of the theater to arouse its audience physically, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations , chap. 3.

16. Sir John Beaumont connects dew to tobacco causally: "from [tobacco's] fumes, ascending to the skies, / Some say the dews and gentle showers arise" (Poems , 318; cf. James I, Counter-blaste , B4r). The relation between dew and smoke as figures of ephemeralness is established in Hosea 13.3: "Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud, & as the morning dew that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with a whirlwind out of the floor, & as the smoke that goeth out of the chimney."

17. The earliest caution about North American gold that I have found in the practical expansionist literature is Roger Barlow's in "A Brief Summe of Geographie" (MS c. 1540-41):

What commodity is within this land as yet it is not known for it hath not been labored, but it is to be presupposed that there is no riches of gold, spices nor precious stones, for it standeth far aparted from the equinoctial whereas the influence of the sun doth nourish and bring forth gold, spices, stones and pearls. (180)

18. The connection between America and Solomon's navigations seemed plausible enough to be authorized by the Bishops' Bible: "Ophir is thought to be the island in the West coast, of late found by Christopher Columbo, from whence at this day is brought much fine gold" (note to Psalm 45; quoted in Opfell, Translators , 25).

19. The claim is at least as old as Luce; see Luce's edition of The Tempest (1902), 169-70.

20. Cf. Greenblatt, "Learning," 575. Gillies's materialism seems confused in a number of ways, most obviously in the belief that the island as Europeans see it is somehow less physical than the "unimaginable" landscape imagined by Shakespeare, but more generally in the view that a colonial interest in Ovidian topoi of temperance is somehow incompatible with "realism" and "historicity," as if beliefs were an ideally avoidable accident of perception. For Gillies, there is no better sign of the way ideas distort "hard facts" than when contemporaries of the Jamestown settlers interpret their "hard fortune" as a result of "moral failure" ("Shakespeare's Virginian Masque," 702); yet what more fitting explanation does Gillies offer, not only for the settlers' inability to secure food and treat the Indians temperately but also for their very interest in an imperialist venture?

21. According to Strachey, those Bermuda castaways who mutinously want "to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there" fear that leaving Bermuda and continuing to Virginia will force them "to serve the turns of the Adventurers" for "their whole life" ("True Reportory," 28, 31). For the accuracy of their fears, see Morgan, American Slavery .

22. See, e.g., Eden's address to Philip II and Queen Mary (1555) as, among other things, "Regi ac Reginae . . . Neapolis" and "Ducibus Mediolani" (Decades , 46). Cf. William Warner's reference (1596) to "the free-Italian States, of which the Spaniards part have won: / As Naples, Milan , royal That, and Duchy This" (Albions England 12:75); and Giovanni Botero's assertion (1589; trans. 1606) that "the chiefest parts of Italy ; that is, the Kingdom of Naples , and the Dukedom of Milan , are subject to the King of Spain" (Cities , 79).

23. Hakluyt, "Discourse," 243. Though commonplace in Renaissance England, Hakluyt's sentiments were not universally held: this particular passage is in fact lifted from George Nedham's complaint (c. 2564) about the gold Philip obtained from the Netherlands, which Nedham says are "more profitable" to Philip "than his Indies" ("Letter," 78, 68). Cf. Botero: "The custom of the merchandise of Milan , brings more money to the king of Spain's coffers, than the mines of Zagateca and of Salisco" (Cities , 51). English writers did agree, however, that whatever its source, Spain's gold fueled Spanish expansion.

24. Cf. Marnix, Exhortation , 14-25; Wernham, List 2:416; and Bacon, Works 14:478-79. Both Sutcliffe (Answer , 169-70) and Lightfote (Complaint , G3r-H2r) conjoin descriptions of Spanish crimes in Italy and the Indies. Richard Hakluyt the elder (1585) advises the English to treat the Indians well, so "that we become not hateful unto them, as the Spaniard is in Italy and in the West Indies, and elsewhere, by their manner of usage" (Taylor, Original Writings 2:334). The Spanish governor of Milan (1570) himself associates Spain's Old and New World dominions: he writes to Philip that "these Italians, although they are not Indians, have to be treated as such, so that they will understand that we are in charge of them and not they in charge of us" (quoted in Elliott, Old World , 82). Raleigh's Spanish alter ego in the pursuit of El Dorado, Antonio de Berrio, nicely embodies this connection between Spain's European and American rapacity: Raleigh explains that Berrio "had long served the Spanish king in Milan, Naples , and Low countries and elsewhere" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 15).

In a way, Spain had already invaded England by means of an American weapon first wielded against Naples—"the disease which the french call the evil of Naples ," syphilis. Guicciardini's Historie (trans. 1579) explains "that such a disease was transported out of Spain to Naples , & yet not proper or natural of that nation [Spain], but brought thither from the isles, which in those seasons began to be made familiar to our regions by the navigation of Christopher Colonnus " (128). Cf. Thevet, New Found Worlde , 70v, and Monardes, Joyfull Newes 1:29. For a bibliography of Renaissance Spanish literature on the American origin of syphilis, see Chiappelli, First Images 2:851 and 884; for Shakespeare on the relation between Naples and syphilis, see Troilus and Cressida 2.3.18-19 and Othello 3.1.3-4.

25. "Discourse," 246. Cf. out of many supporting pieces of evidence Sir Roger Williams in a letter to Burleigh, 20 November 1590: "Neither shall we nor our friends give them [the Spanish] the law as we should do, without ransacking his Indies. For his treasure comes unto him, as our salads to us. When we have eat all, we fetch more out of our gardens. So doth he fetch his treasure out of the ground, after spending all that is coined" (quoted in Wernham, List 2:296).

26. This ambivalence figures in Johnson, Nova Britannia , who never denies that gold can be found in Virginia; he only wants to suppress discussion of it. The True Declaration conventionally warns its readers, "Let no man adore his gold as his God, nor his Mammon as his Maker" (67), and reports the cautionary tale of a colonial ship that while trading for food turns piratical instead, led by "dreams of mountains of gold, and happy robberies" (37); yet the conclusion to its list of Virginian commodities coyly describes Virginia's "five main Rivers . . . promising as rich entrails as any Kingdom of the earth, to whom the sun is no nearer a neighbor" (56). Though he begins his sermon on Virginia by exhorting his listeners "to contemn riches" (Good Newes , 1), Alexander Whitaker (1613) similarly goes on to discuss mines in Virginia that provide "argument of much hope"; he adds, tantalizingly, "though I knew all, yet it were not convenient at this time that I should utter all" (38-39). Daniel Price's tangled negations (1609) nicely epitomize the confusion of these writers: "The Country is not unlike to equalize (though not India for gold, which is not unpossible yet), Tyrus for colors, Basan for woods, [etc.]" (Sauls Prohibition , F2r). Even Smith, so vehemently opposed to gold hunting, cannot keep himself from ambiguity on the subject: A True Relation (1608) mentions rocks "interlaced with many veins of glistering spangles" (Works 1:31) and an Indian who brings "a glistering Mineral stone" (95); while the later Map (1612) declares of these rocks that "the crust . . . would easily persuade a man to believe there are other mines than iron and steel" (Works 1:156; cf. 145). Most telling of all, the oldest hand at double-talk about Virginian gold, Richard Hakluyt, could simultaneously recommend and abjure the quest for gold by dividing his ambivalence between two separate and opposed works: on the one hand, the translation of Lescarbot that Hakluyt promoted (Nova Francia , vii); and on the other, a tract published the same year concerning de Soto's Floridan expedition, in which Hakluyt the translator directs the reader to those chapters describing various gold mines "within our limits" (Rye, Discovery , 1-4). The fate of this last work helps explain why the Virginia Company could not afford wholly to quash hopes about Virginian gold: of all the company propaganda published before The Tempest was produced, only Virginia Richly Valued , the one exception to a general restraint about gold talk, saw a second edition.

27. Like tobacco, even the apparently worthless dew of Bermuda can appear to represent imperialist desire: Plutarch (trans. 1579) reports "that the kings of Persia made water to be brought from the rivers of Nilus and Ister (otherwise called Danubie) which they did lock up with their other treasure for a confirmation of the greatness of their Empire, and to show that they were Lords of the world" (Lives 4:342).

28. For further evidence of Miranda's physical attraction to Ferdinand, see, e.g., 1.2.458-60 and 3.1.56-57.

29. For the royal commands, see Simpson, Encomienda , 10-12, 17-18, 39, 42, and 177 n. 3; for notices of concubinage and intermarriage, see Moerner, Race Mixture , 25-27. Moerner believes that the Crown decrees on intermarriage were more experimental and uncertain than Simpson allows: see Race Mixture 36-38.

30. In New England, "the problem [of intermarriage] was raised in a formal way in March 1635 when the Massachusetts General Court entertained and then immediately referred a question concerning the propriety of Indian-white marriages, but it never regained the court's attention" (Axtell, "Scholastic," 155). For opposition to intermarriage in Elizabethan Ireland, see Canny, "Permissive," 24.

Michael Zuckerman also notes the singularity of English resistance to intermarriage ("Identity," 145-47).

31. Encouragement , 28. Cf. the scruples manifested in the comparatively liberal plan of the anonymous writer of "Of the Voyage": the Guianans "shall give special hostages to be sent into England, which being civiled and converted here, upon their return and receiving of others in their rooms they may be matched in marriage with English women" (Raleigh, Discoverie , 146).

32. Kupperman, Settling , 118; see Kupperman for another discussion of most of the writers on intermarriage whom I cite.

There is little reason to accept a report on Virginian intermarriage by the Marquess of Flores to Philip II in 1612, though it does seem revealing of the differences between English and Spanish colonialism:

I have been told by a friend, who tells me the truth, that some of the people who have gone there, think now some of them should marry the women of the savages of that country; and he tells me that there are already 40 or 50 thus married. (Brown, Genesis 2:572)

A century later, the governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, claims that the English distaste for intermarriage has not softened:

And as to beginning a nearer friendship by intermarriage, (as the Custom of the French is,) the inclinations of our people are not the same with those of that Nation, for notwithstanding the long intercourse between the inhabitants of this Country and the Indians, and their living amongst one another for so many Years, I cannot find one Englishman that has an Indian wife, or an Indian married to a white woman. (Quoted in Jacobs, "British-Colonial Attitudes," 92)

33. For Hakluyt's complaints about England's failure to convert the Indians, see his "Discourse of Western Planting" (1584). After noting that the Spanish "more vaunt" of their success in conversions "than of anything else that ever they achieved" there, Hakluyt adds that "I my self have been demanded of them how many Infidels have been by us converted," and a thorough examination of every English venture in America to that time only defeats him: "In very deed I was not able to name any one Infidel by them converted" (216-17). Fifteen years later, he still complains that "our adversaries daily in many of their books full bitterly lay unto the charge of the professors of the Gospel" the neglecting of conversion (Taylor, Original Writings 2:457). Cf. Crashaw, Sermon , K2r-v.

34. Cf. Zuckerman: "As the settlers spurned sexual union with the natives, so they scorned spiritual communion" ("Identity," 147).

Meredith Skura gives the most recent positive account of Prospero's final relation to Caliban. She reads Prospero's claim that Caliban is "mine" figuratively and thinks that Prospero, in acknowledging "the child-like Caliban," "moves for the first time towards accepting the child in himself rather than trying to dominate and erase that child (along with random vulnerable human beings outside himself) in order to establish his adult authority." Though Prospero may be "a long way from recognizing the equality of racial 'others,'" Skura admits, "he comes closer than any of Shakespeare's other 'Prosperos' to acknowledging the otherness within, which helps generate all racism—and he comes closer than anyone else in colonialist discourse" ("Discourse," 66). This implausibly comprehensive pronouncement caps Skura's attack on previous critics of The Tempest for not "specifying Shakespeare's precise literal and temporal relation to colonialist discourse" (57), but it is difficult to see what Skura herself imagines the practical colonialist upshot of Prospero's "acknowledging the otherness within" to be. She seems right to insist that the play "contains the 'colonial' encounter firmly within the framing story of his [i.e., Prospero's] own family history" (66), but then such containment of Caliban within the larger issue of Prospero's troubles as a brother and child looks a good deal like the attempt "to dominate and erase" that Prospero has supposedly transcended. Over the course of the play, Prospero does move from a Spanish-like colonial policy of enslavement to a more benign and English-like attitude toward Caliban—for example, where in act 4 he labels Caliban a "devil" (4.1.188), in act 5 he can reduce the charge to "demi-devil" (5.1.272)—yet at the same time the question, raised in the play's first act, of Caliban's rights to the island gets dropped entirely.

35. See Titus Andronicus; Othello 5.2.347; Fiedler, The Stranger , 201; and Anthony and Cleopatra 1.1.6 and 1.5.28.

36. See, e.g., the "Argument" to Phaer's translation (1573) of the Aeneid (unpaginated).

37. For interesting reflections on the black-white marriage in Shakespeare, see Fiedler, who imagines the intermarriage of Claribel and Tunis as able to "succeed" by its distance "from the world in which Shakespeare had previously demonstrated its inevitable failure" (The Stranger , 203). But Sebastian's report of Claribel's "loathness" makes it hard to believe that Shakespeare views relocation so optimistically.

38. Though the first reference to Pocahontas as nonpareil occurs in Smith's Proceedings , which was not published till 1612, manuscripts of the work or rumors about Pocahontas could easily have circulated earlier; and Smith had been back in England since the end of 1609. Hamor (1615) says Pocahontas's "fame hath even been spread in England by the title of Nonparella of Virginia" (True Discourse , 4). Of course, Pocahontas's marriage occurred after The Tempest was written.

Miranda's likeness to Pocahontas was first noted by Luce (The Tempest , 169-70). Geoffrey Bullough cites the connection and then with no explanation abjures it: "To identify Miranda with Pocahontas is a tempting fancy which must be sternly repressed" (Sources 8:241).

39. Caliban is himself only a first-generation native (1.2.282), and a Mediterranean, not American, one at that. Skura rightly notes that he also "lacks almost all of the defining external traits [of the Indian] in the many reports from the New World no superhuman physique, no nakedness or animal skin (indeed, an English 'gaberdine' instead), no decorative feathers, no arrows, no pipe, no tobacco, no body paint, and—as Shakespeare takes pains to emphasize—no love of trinkets and trash" ("Discourse," 49). Yet, mysteriously, Skura goes on to claim that Shakespeare is "the first writer of fiction to portray New World inhabitants" (58). Even if Caliban were an Indian, and if Skura had said that Shakespeare was the first English fiction writer to depict a New World inhabitant, her claim would remain inaccurate: e.g., the cast of characters in Greene's Orlando Furioso (c. 1588-91) includes the Kings of Cuba and Mexico. But Greene's Americans, like the inhabitants of Cusco in Thomas Lodge's Margarite of America (1596), have names culled from European romance: the King of Cuba is Rodamant; of Mexico, Mandricard. Shakespeare's innovation as an English writer may have been to represent a more savage Indian-like figure—though again, Caliban neither looks nor speaks like the savages in New World travel literature, and he is not American.

40. One character in the play, Roselia, does mention that her island was "inhabited heretofore by warlike women, / That kept men in subjection" (2.2), but these missing Amazons only prove the point that the Europeans have supplanted the natives as natives: Roselia even adds that the Amazonian "example" persuaded the Portuguese women to become Amazons themselves.

For a report of an Indian literally cannibalized by the Jamestown set-tiers during the winter of 1609-10, see McIlwaine, Journals , 29.

41. To my knowledge, no Indian character ever appeared on the popular Jacobean stage. If it was acted, the lost Tragedy of the Plantation of America , registered the year after the massacre of 1622 (see Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage 5:1395-96), must have been an exception that proved the rule: the Indians are subsumed unless they actually murder their European substitutes. Some "Floridans" figure in The Masque of Flow ers (1614), but again, as in the masque of the magician and Chapman's entertainment, they serve as foils to "the great Sun of our firmament," the king.

Caroline plays began to allow Indians on the stage as disguises. See Massinger's City Madam (1632) and the anonymous Fatal Marriage (possibly from the 1620s or 1630s; see xi and Bentley 5:1332-33).

42. Percy, "Trewe Relacyon," 277-78. Smith's Proceedings reports a less mysterious transformation of Englishman to Indian: in order to make a rendezvous with his cohorts, one mutineer at Jamestown disguised himself "Savage like" (Works 1:259). For the threat to Renaissance English colonies posed by colonists going native, see Canny, "Permissive."