Historian Rediker on the Sea-Venture
The Sea-Venture, a ship owned by the Virginia Company of London and a vessel of English colonization in the New World, was sailing to the struggling infant colony of Virginia when it was wrecked on the island of Bermuda, the dreaded “Isle of Devils,” in 1609. William Shakespeare, who was interested in and quite possibly an investor in the company, heard the sailors’ yarns about the wreck and wrote The Tempest for a royal court performance in 1611. Soon after the wreck, the Sea-Venture’s sailors led a revolt against the company gentlemen, seeking to stay in the island paradise of mild weather, abundant food, and ease of life, and to avoid Virginia, a place of hardship, starvation, and coerced labor. The leaders quelled the protest, executed two of the rebels, and built two new vessels to continue the voyage.
This is the historical background to The Tempest. Shakespeare ingeniously created a drama of conquest through the character of Prospero, the enlightened colonizer, along with a host of “high” characters, arrayed against Caliban, the indigenous “savage, deformed slave” whose name was a play on “cannibal,” and other “low” characters, Stephano the sailor and Trinculo the court jester. In the end Shakespeare neither endorsed nor rejected colonization. He foresaw an imperial future of conquest, dispossession, cultural domination, and resistance, leaving his audiences, in his own day and in ours, to wrestle with the moral and political legacy of Prospero's rule over Caliban and the island.
- Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh
