From Caliban to Lucifer: Native Resistance and the Religious Colonization of the Indies in Baroque Spanish Theater

Of all the dramatic works written in seventeenth-century Europe, William Shakespeare's The Tempest has received the most attention from writers and intellectuals in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although The Tempest takes place on an unknown Mediterranean island, the play has generated this kind of interest in the New World because it is considered to be Shakespeare's most American work. The play was inspired by the written testimonials on the disastrous voyage of the Sea-Adventure, which was shipwrecked off the coast of Bermuda in 1609, and as a result there are numerous references that link The Tempest to the Americas. For example, Caliban twice mentions his mother's god Setebos (1.2.372, 5.1.261), who according to Charles Frey is a "great devil" of the Patagonian Indians mentioned in the accounts of Magellan's and Elcano's circumnavigation of the globe (29). In addition, Ariel indicates that Prospero sends him to fetch dew from "the still-vexed Bermudas" (1.2.229), while Stephano wonders if Caliban "put[s] tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind" (2.2.57).¹ Moreover, Caliban reveals that he often dines on the marmoset (2.2.164), a small monkey found only in the Americas, and Miranda famously remarks, "¡O brave new world, / That has such people in't" (5.1.183-84).²

More important, three of The Tempest's main characters – the aerie spirit Ariel, the grotesque monster Caliban, and the right Duke of Milan Prospero – not only find an echo in the cultural life of Latin America and the Caribbean, but they also come to personify the political and economic relations between the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, writers such as Rubén Darío and José Enrique Rodó employ Shakespeare's characters in an effort to oppose the imperial expansion of the Calibans of the Colossus of the North. Even though all Latin American nations have illiteracy rates of over 50% at the turn of the century (UNESCO 192), Darío and Rodó assert that Hispanic America has inherited the cultural values of its civilized European colonizers, while the United States is a rough and uncouth nation that is only interested in the ignoble and mundane aspects of modern life. For this reason, Darío and Rodó conclude that the noble Ariel is the symbol of Spanish America because he embodies the most elevated part of the human spirit, while the lowly Caliban typifies North American vulgarity and material desires. As Darío writes about Americans in an essay entitled "El triunfo de Calibán" (1898),

Son enemigos míos, son los aborrecedores de la sangre latina, son los Bárbaros. Así se estremece hoy todo noble corazón, así protesta todo digno hombre que algo conserve de la leche de la loba … No, no puedo estar de parte de ellos, no puedo estar por el triunfo de Calibán … ¡Miranda preferirá siempre a Ariel; Miranda es la gracia del espíritu; y todas las montañas de piedras, de hierros, de oros y de tocinos, no bastarán para que mi alma latina se prostituya a Calibán!

(569, 570, 576)

While Darío celebrates his perhaps tenuous cultural ties to an earlier empire, a half-century later a new generation of writers begins to analyze the modern colonial relations that exist in many developing nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The postwar world forgets about Rodó's and Darío's idealized yet simplistic interpretation of Shakespeare's aerie spirit, as Prospero and Caliban now become the characters most representative of the relations of power and dependency typical of the colonial condition.³ The first writer to present this viewpoint is Octave Manoni, who uses the figure of Prospero to analyze the psychology of the French colonizers in Madagascar in the late 1940's. Although Manoni employs The Tempest as a point of reference when he studies European colonial society, by the early 1960's George...