Place as protest against sovereignty
Shakespeare's "brave new world" nails the Virginia colonists’ lust for power
Then the king will say to those on his right, “You have my Father’s blessing; come, take possession of the kingdom that has been ready for you since the world was made. For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger, you took me into your home; when naked, you clothed me; when I was ill, you came to my help; when in prison, you visited me.”—Matthew 25:34-36 REB
In June of 1609, around five hundred colonists in nine ships set sail from Plymouth to reinforce England’s struggling, two-year-old colony at Jamestown.1 Soon after they leave, the fleet’s smallest ship springs a leak and returns to England. Many on the remaining ships die of calenture or yellow fever in the Atlantic’s summer heat. Then a two-day tempest divides the ships. Two ships, including the flagship—the Sea Venture carrying Virginia’s interim governor, Sir Thomas Gates, and its admiral, Sir George Somers—are never seen again. Storm-damaged and (in one case) plague-stricken, the six surviving ships limp into Virginia in August.2
Without the colony’s promised leaders, Gates and Somers, Virginia descends into political chaos. The tempest has “separated the head [Gates] from the bodie” (i.e., the colony’s remaining political leadership), according to a London Company report circulated the following year. This political decapitation leads the captains of the newly arrived ships to feud with the colony’s president, Captain John Smith.3 Smith tries to make peace with his fellow leaders—and to put space between them and him—by permitting them to establish new outposts. One captain, John Martin, leads a party that fails in its negotiations with the Nansemonds to purchase their sacred island. Martin’s party then takes the island by force, ransacking the tribe’s temples and pillaging their dead kings’ corpses. The Nansemonds become the young colony’s implacable foes.
While Martin is away, the other leaders plot assassinations. The captains have Smith’s powder bag set on fire as he sleeps, nearly killing him. The captains follow up with a second plot to kill Smith in his sleep, according to historian James Horn, but “thinking better of it deposed him instead” and exile him from the colony.4 George Percy, the president who replaces Smith, accuses him of desiring “to rule all and ingrose all authority into his own hands”—in other words, of “aymeing at A Soveraign Rule.”5
The fall of 1609 turns to winter, and the Powhatans and the angered Nansemonds lay siege to Jamestown. The colony’s “starving time” begins. A party of colonists venturing outside the fort for food is later found “slain, with their mouths stopped full of bread.”6 Unable to hunt, forage, or beg for food, the colonists dig up their dead and eat them. By spring when the Powhatans and Nansemonds return home to plant, Jamestown is reduced to around 75 colonists.7
As the colonists starve, however, the Sea Venture’s passengers and crew feast on fruit, birds, fish, turtles, and wild hogs. Jamestown doesn’t know that the tempest has blown the Sea Venture hundreds of miles off course to the Bermudas, where just before it founders, it shipwrecks without the loss of any life.8 The castaways discover that “The Devils Ilands,” as seafarers have long called the archipelago, are a paradise9—“the richest, heathfullest, and pleasing land . . . as ever man set foote upon.”10
The Sea Venture’s leaders, however, aren’t present to paradise. Gates and Somers—Virginia’s land and sea chiefs, respectively—feud and end up physically dividing the castaways into “opposing camps.” Recounting the feud, Horn concludes that “Even on an island paradise the English could not escape the bitterness of factionalism.”11
In its 1610 report on the shipwreck and on the state of Jamestown, the London Company uses the tempest as a metaphor to describe Virginia’s own factionalism:
[Gates’s absence] made a greater shipwrack in the continent of Virginia, by the tempest of dissention: every man overvaluing his own worth, would be a Commander: every man underprising an others value, denied to be commanded.12
In this political tempest, the report suggests, every man values only himself. Every man wants what Smith wants—“Soveraign Rule.”
Above: Robert Dudley’s Scene from Shakespeares The Tempest, 1856-1858.
In September of 1610, William Shakespeare likely reads the Virginia Company’s report and other firsthand reports of the Sea Venture’s miraculous shipwreck. The news of the wreck and of the passengers’ survival provides him with the setting for his final play, The Tempest, which is first performed the following year.
Shakespeare’s castaways include political leaders as conspiratorial and murderous as those in real-life Virgina. Antonio, the King of Milan, encourages Sebastian to kill Alonso, the king of Naples, and to take his throne. Antonio cites himself as a model: a dozen years before their shipwreck, Antonio usurped his brother Prospero’s throne and, afraid that murdering Prospero would upset Milan, sent Prospero into exile.13
Conveniently for the conspirators, Alonso is sleeping, and so is Gonzalo, the party’s garrulous and good-hearted companion, both put under by Ariel, the island’s “airy spirit.” But in another sense, Alonso and Gonzalo begin the scene under the island’s spell: before they sleep, they point out the island’s beauty and its magic amid their companions’ witty mockery. Even with Ariel out of view, the island seems like the scene’s fifth character, invisible to the conspirators but alive to their would-be victims. When Alonso and Gonzalo fall asleep, however, the island seems to disappear. The scene’s long conversation between the conspirators leading up to the attempted murders seems spoken in a space void of setting.
Antonio and Sebastian’s political machinations over who will be sovereign seem out of place in another sense. Just before he sleeps, Gonzalo daydreams about the political life the enchanted island suggests. Alive to the place, Gonzalo describes an island commonwealth, one with no private property (“all things in common”)14 and “No sovereignty.”15
Gonzalo’s intuition is reciprocal, even symbiotic: every place invites us into political life, and political life nurtures a place and everyone in that place. Our search for personal sovereignty, though, turns place into space, and our would-be “island” disappears. When we wish to rule without others, we wish for space, which theologian Walter Brueggemann defines as “an arena of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority.” Brueggemann contrasts space with place:
Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and identity across generations. . . . Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. Place is indeed a protest against the unpromising pursuit of space. It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom.16
While seeking space—the “elbow room” where each feuding leader can exercise his own sovereignty—Captains Martin and Smith destroy the Nansemonds’ sacred island, a place in Brueggemann’s sense with “historical meanings” that provides “continuity and identity across generations.” Martin and Smith become like Shakespeare’s Antonio and Sebastian, whom English Professor Robert Langbaum calls “merely destructive” to Shakespeare’s “Garden of Eden.”17
Langbaum’s comparison of The Tempest’s island to Eden is apt. Adam and Eve are “merely destructive” for the same reason Martin and Smith are: the couple wants to “be like God.”18 They want what God reserves to himself—sovereignty. Consequently, Adam and Eve lose their place in Eden and are consigned to exile, to space. But Eden remains a living hope, and Ezekiel says that the possibility of moving from the ruin of space to the ordered life of place remains:
Everyone will say that this land which was waste has become like a garden of Eden, and the towns once ruined, wasted, and shattered will now be fortified and inhabited.19
Eden, which symbolizes the earth as God’s sacred temple, will become a temple again.20 And ruined and wasted spaces will become political places again.
Shakespeare’s “Eden” is alive, too. Just as generations of Nansemonds had done to their own sacred island, Shakespeare makes The Tempest’s island a place, an unexpected character able to, in Brueggemann’s words, “protest against the unpromising pursuit of space.” In fact, just as Antonio and Sebastian draw their swords to kill the sleeping Alonso and Gonzalo, the island asserts itself. Ariel wakes the two up, putting off the conspirators’ plans until they later make a second unsuccessful, murderous attempt to establish sovereignty.
Ariel, always invisible to the party, is in the employ of Prospero, Milan’s deposed king, who unbeknownst to the castaways has made the island his home in exile. Earlier in the play, Prospero reveals his past to his teenage daughter Miranda and to us, blaming himself for the loss of his throne. In Milan, he says, he dedicated himself to seclusion “and the bettering of my mind.” There he neglected “worldly ends” and left Milan’s management to Antonio, who betrayed him.21
Prospero’s neglect of “worldly ends” for the life of the mind nicely summarizes Plato’s political philosophy. Prospero before his fall represents what Hannah Arendt calls “the liberation of the few, who enjoy the freedom to philosophize by ruling over the many—[which] is what Plato proposed in the form of the philosopher-king . . .”22 Between Prospero and Antonio, Milan suffers a kind of Platonic philosopher-king: after Prospero gives himself up to his studies, Antonio puts Milan under tribute to Naples.23 Like Prospero, Plato’s students at his Academy “had to be freed from politics in the Greek sense in order to be free for the space of academic freedom.”24
The political place—Athens’s polis—gives way in Plato to “the space of academic freedom.” For Plato, Prospero’s neglected “worldly ends” have no place. “Worldly ends” wouldn’t be proper ends at all but means to eternal ends—to forms, to what philosopher Peter Kreeft in discussing Plato calls “real essences.”25 Plato’s political philosophy famously focuses on sovereignty, attempting to answer the question “Who should rule?”26 Under Plato, to make space for the philosopher’s search for eternal ends, politics is reduced to mere sovereignty over others.
Plato’s many dialogs create this space. The dialogs feature no Gonzalo to remind the characters where they are. Instead, the settings in Plato’s dialogs quickly give way to discussions about what the essence of some abstract concept—justice or courage or friendship—really is. Kreeft explains Plato’s discussions about “what”:
The what is the essence, as distinct from the appearances or the particular examples, the instances.27
Kreeft’s summary leads him to describe what Plato’s dialogs seek to produce in us:
. . . if this dialog happens in your soul as well as your book, you have an “aha!” experience. You see. And then you know a tiny bit of heaven, for just a split second. . . . in that second you could just see the What of everything . . .28
But Plato’s vision of the “What” comes at a cost. To reach this light, the philosopher must leave the cave—the polis, the world that Arendt calls “a place fit for human appearance.”29 Plato’s politics manages human appearances so the few can discover essences. For God who loves the world, however, politics is appearance. Politics is not the means to an end. Politics is the end because appearance—actual presence—is the end. We are called to appear in public—as the book of Hebrews puts it, to encounter Jesus “outside the camp, bearing His reproach.”30
Like Plato, The Tempest accounts for “aha!” moments. But The Tempest’s moments aren’t academic experiences but public encounters that constitute appearances and, in the end, create place. In these encounters, people appear as who they really are. The “whole point of the play,” Professor Robert Langbuam writes, is “to make us feel that Miranda is right” when she says,
How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world /That has such people in’t.31
Miranda discovers a sacred place in the island’s “brave new world” at the moment she encounters the Other in each castaway.
Jacob in Genesis has place-based encounters similar to Miranda’s. In one, God appears to him in a dream. When he wakes up, he expresses the encounter as a revelation of place:
How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
Jacob takes the stone that he used as a pillow and makes it a pillar, pouring oil on it. He renames the place: the former town of Luz becomes Bethel.32 Just as Miranda discovers the world when she discovers the island she has been living on for most of her life, so also Jacob discovers the world—God’s home, his temple—when he reconstitutes Bethel. The world only appears, and it appears only in personal encounters. These encounters become local places, full of the covenants Brueggemann describes.
Plato’s experience is an eternal space, but Jacob’s encounter is a public space. Jacob’s pillow of public space becomes God’s pillar of political place, the reconstituted Bethel.
Plato’s experience, his “tiny bit of heaven,” devalues the world. As the Jewish philosopher and political activist Martin Buber points out, “Those who experience do not participate in the world.”33 Buber subordinates all such “I-It” experiences to “I-You” encounters. Buber acknowledges that he can experience a tree as an “It”—as an object, overcoming “its uniqueness” and eternalizing it as a form. But “if will and grace are joined,” he can be “drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seised me.” The bodily “instance” that Plato despises becomes the means of Buber’s encounter:
The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. . . . What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.34
This I-You encounter points to the “originally relational character of the appearance of all beings.”35 As Buber says, “In the beginning is the relation”36—not the form or the essence as it is for Plato.
The movement from Buber’s encounter—from public space—to reconstituted place is dynamic, and indigenous peoples are more sensitive to it than are white cultures. The movement from public space to political place occurs in the movement from what Buber calls “relational processes” to “relational states”:
The elementary, spirit-awakening impressions and stimulations of the “natural man” are derived from relational processes—the living sense of a confrontation—and from relational states—living with one who confronts him.37
From this perspective, Jacob moves from a “living sense of a confrontation” with God—his dream of a ladder from heaven to earth—to his children’s “relational state”—Bethel.
This dynamic between public space and political place, largely unknown to the white colonists, permits indigenous peoples the flexibility to discover new sacred sites. For indigenous peoples, if the equivalent of a pillar at Bethel is destroyed, their place in the world is threatened. But the Spirit leads these peoples into new encounters that, in turn, may lead to new sacred lands. Professor and Sioux tribe member Vine Deloria, Jr. describes this renewable dynamism between encounter and place:
Human beings must always be ready to receive new revelations at new locations. If this possibility did not exist, all deities and spirits would be dead. Consequently we always look forward to the revelation of new sacred places and new ceremonies.38
We must learn this pattern from our indigenous sisters and brothers before we can return from our long exiles to our places on the earth. Without such “relational states,” we never arrive, and we never know politics. We remain exiled and without hope. Wherever we go, we simply reenact our past, like John Smith and the captains who tried to kill him. We have the gall to call these reenactments “politics.”
The Tempest, as a kind of tragicomedy, is full of these reenactments. The entire story comes “either by narrating the past or by re-enacting samples of it,” as literary scholar E.M.W. Tillyard points out. Antonio and Sebastian don’t just try to kill the king of Naples; they re-enact Antonio’s earlier attempt to kill the king of Milan in a sacred place just as if they were back in Milan.39 The sensitivity of Miranda, Prospero, and Gonzalo to the magical island, the setting of the reenactments, provides a foil to spotlight the other castaways’ disconnection from the present and its possibilities.
Because The Tempest’s essential actions are re-enactments, the play explores the repetitious, vacuous nature of I-It relationships that Buber describes:
The I of the basic word I-It, the I that is not bodily confronted by a You but surrounded by a multitude of “contents,” has only a past and no present. In other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his moment has no presence.40
Buber’s observation explains Antonio and Sebastian’s reenactments. Because Antonio and Sebastian avoid confrontation with the You of the island, getting along with only their power and wit, they live in the past. They can’t be present to the island.
Though The Tempest is a play of reenactments, it’s also a romance, a play of recognition. For instance, when Alonso, in the last act, sees his son and Prospero, both of whom he gave up for dead, “he recognizes their magical preciousness and thus really sees them for the first time,” Langbaum observes. Romance works like that:
For romance deals in marvelous events and solves its problems through metamorphoses and recognition scenes—through transformations of perception.41
Miranda reenforces the effect of recognition: she has seen no human but her father all of her life, so the wonder in her encounters is entire. By the last act, many of the other characters share at least some of her wonder, so they also see one another for the first time. Finally present to the island, they are ready to return from exile to their true places.
Jesus’s account of his kingdom in this post’s epigraph also involves recognition and place. Those from the nations who have served—or have not served—the strangers, the poor, and the prisoners suddenly recognize them as the Messiah’s sisters and brothers. Those acts of service thereby constitute I-You encounters. These recognitions in public spaces lead to political place—the kingdom of God come to earth.42 Like Prospero, those who have served the strangers are ready to “take possession of the kingdom that has been ready for you.” This movement from recognition to political place makes Jesus’s version of the Bible’s overarching story a romance. Because “the kingdom of God is among you,”43 we can, “if will and grace are joined,” recognize the Other and move into political place now. The promise of Eden—of God’s encounter with the world—is fulfilled in these local places.
To be in the garden of Eden is, Langbaum says, “a matter of perception.”44 There’s no road to Eden, possibly because, as essayist Wendell Berry points out, roads themselves are efforts “to translate place into space.” Our roadbuilding “is destructive, seeking to remove all obstacles in its way.”45 With new eyes, our obstacles might cease to be mere objects and become like Buber’s tree or Jesus’s stranger—someone to encounter and to lead us to political place among all that place’s peoples, including its fauna and flora.
Our life of objects and experiences make us placeless people. Our consumer culture, Berry says, “is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.” The materialism of many of our ancestors means that, in a real sense, our ancestors’ voyage to America never happened:
Having left Europe far behind, [the colonists] had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it in a way that would produce the intricate knowledge of it necessary to live in it without destroying it. Because they belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America.46
Because we haven’t encountered others, we haven’t recognized where we are. We still haven’t come to America, to the sacred place many First Nations call Turtle Island. If we wish to come there, we must come, as T.S. Eliot says, “at night like a broken king.”47 We must come like Prospero, having learned the magic of our exile.
Discussion questions
1. Beginning in 1973, Schoolhouse Rock’s music video “Elbow Room” taught a generation of American children that Europeans settled America for “elbow room.” When Americans ever run out of elbow room again, the song concludes, they can resettle on the moon. Play the “Elbow Room” video. Do you think the song is being celebratory or critical? Do you think the song accurately summarizes the settlers’ overriding longing for space? Has this longing changed since the nation’s westward expansion? What is the legacy of this longing?
2. Do you find Walter Brueggemann’s and Wendell Berry’s distinction between space and place helpful? Does our culture’s materialism make us placeless people? What does “placeless” mean to you?
3. Is there a fundamental problem with sovereignty that makes Plato’s question “Who should rule?” improper?
4. Political theorist and physicist Karl Popper seeks to replace Plato’s “fundamental problem of politics”—his “Who should rule?”—with what Popper sees as politics’ fundamental problem: “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”48 Is Popper’s question a better statement of “the fundamental problem of politics”? How would you frame a question that gets at what you see as politics’s fundamental issue?
5. Have you ever had what Martin Buber describes as an “I-You” encounter with a plant, an animal, or a human being? How would you distinguish your encounter from an “I-It” experience?
6. Consider Jacob’s encounters as well as Jesus’s words in this post’s epigraph. Do you agree that the Bible teaches a politics that moves from recognition of the Other to political place? How would that work out for us locally?
7. Plato’s “real essences” reminds me of a form of its opposite—literary critic George Steiner’s concept of “real presences.” In his book by that title, Steiner describes how difficult it is to “try and tell of what happens inside oneself as one affords vital welcome and habitation to the presences in art, music, and literature.” He claims that “the embarrassment we feel in bearing witness to the poetic, to the entrance into our lives of the mystery of otherness in art and in music, is of a metaphysical-religious kind.”49 Do you agree? Using Buber’s term, is an “I-You” encounter possible with an artist through their book, their painting, or their dance?
8. Do you agree with Wendell Berry that “We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America”?
Above: Jacob’s Ladder by Marc Chagall. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Horn, A Land as God Made It, 157; Brown, First Republic of America, 95.
Horn, 164.
Horn, 164.
Horn, 170.
Brown, 95.
Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 51, quoting George Percy.
Horn, 176.
Horn, 160.
Horn, 160.
Horn, 160-61.
Horn, 163.
Counseil for Virginia, True Declaration, 34.
Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughn, et al. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011), 1.2.97-151; 2.1.204-99. References are to act, scene, and line.
Gonzalo’s daydream of people holding “all things in common” is lived out, of course, by the indigenous nations the colonists met in Virginia and by those who lived nearby. One missionary to the Delaware, John Heckewelder, describes their worldview: “They think that [the Creator] made the earth and all that it contains for the common good of mankind; when he stocked the country that he gave them with plenty of game, it was not for the benefit of a few, but of all. Every thing was given in common to the sons of men.” Quoted in Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 54.
Tempest, 2.1.148-65.
Brueggemann, Land, 4.
Langbaum, Introduction to Tempest (New York: New American, 1964), xxxi-xxxii.
Genesis 3:5 NNAS.
Ezekiel 36:35 REB.
Theologian Michael A. Fishbane understands the reestablishment of Eden as one way to understand the Bible’s central story: “The ageless sorrow of exile and disorientation are overcome: man returns to God, to His presence at a sacred center, to Eden.” Fishbane, “Sacred Center,” 406.
Tempest, 1.2.66-132.
Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 132. Arendt calls Plato “the father of political philosophy in the West.” Ibid.,130. She’s not flattering him: she believes Western philosophy has helped to disconnect us from public life. “Our tradition of political thought began when Plato discovered that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of human affairs; it ended when nothing was left of this experience but the opposition of thinking and acting, which, depriving thought of reality and action of sense, makes both meaningless.” Arendt, Between Past and Future, 24-25.
Tempest, 1.2.112-116.
Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 131.
Kreeft, Platonic Tradition, 24.
Popper, Open Society, 114.
Kreeft, 24.
Kreeft, 33. Italics in the original.
Arendt, Human Condition, 204. For Plato’s parable of the cave as a critique of the polis, see Arendt, “Socrates,” 29-32.
Hebrews 13:13 NNAS. We’re the servants in Jesus’s parable whom the nobleman, just before he travels to receive his kingdom, instructs to “Occupy till I come.” Luke 19:12-13 KJV.
Tempest, 5.1.182-184; Langbaum, xxxi.
Genesis 28:11-19 NNAS.
Buber, I and Thou, 36.
Buber, 58-59.
Buber, 71.
Buber, 69.
Buber, 70.
Deloria, “Sacred Lands,” 211.
Tillyard, “Tragic Pattern,” 154-156.
Buber, 63-64.
Langbaum, xxxiii.
Matthew 25:34-46.
Luke 17:20-21 REB.
Langbaum, xxxii.
Berry, “Native Hill,” 14.
Berry, 13.
Eliot, “Little Gidding,” 50.
Popper, 114-15.
Steiner, Real Presences, 178.
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, once said that place is not just landscape but ground that holds memory and identity. This essay makes the same point in its own way. Jamestown’s captains turned place into space when they stripped the Nansemonds’ sacred island of meaning. Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest lives when its characters recognize it as more than backdrop, as a presence that shapes their lives. Heaney would affirm this: place is where history and imagination root, where encounter happens, where we are called to belong. Worth reading to the end. - Thanks, Bryce: Your essay becomes quite a "place" in its own right!