Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the Idea of Savagery

Abstract

The European response to new geographical and ethnographic information in Renaissance travel literature is explored. Using Shakespeare T s The Tempest and Montaigne T s essays, the paper also examines depictions of the savage as an individual and savagery as a social form in order to compare artistic to more avowedly empirical representations. The views of the dramatist and the essayist are related to the modern anthropological perspective .The dramatic world of The Tempest suggests rich and varied anthropological themes such as politics and rebellion, witchcraft and magic, natural design and cultural order. But perhaps of most fundamental interest is the idea of savagery and the savage, for in these primitivist concerns Shakespeare probes the very first questions which modern anthropology asked at its inception. During the course of more than a century prior to 1610, the probable date of the writing of The Tempest, sailors, missionaries, adventurers, and others brought back to Europe reports, usually fragmentary and highly sensational, of strange peoples practicing such bizarre customs as human sacrifice and cannibalism. But Europeans who never ventured to sea were not limited to travellers* accounts about people in the new lands, for even at the beginning of the voyages, kidnapped Indians and Africans were brought to Europe for kings and commoners to marvel over. For example, on the return from his first voyage, Columbus brought 7 Arawak-speaking Indians to the royal court of Spain. Montaigne, whose essay, "Of Cannibals," is an important source for The Tempest, talked with kidnapped Brazilian Indians in Rouen in 1554. In 1565, people abducted from the New World, Ethiopia, Egypt, and other places were displayed in Bordeaux in a specially constructed village outside the city walls [Hodgen 1964:112], Indeed, Montaigne may well have been present for this event, which celebrated Charles IX's visit to the city [Sayce 1972:91], In II.ii.32-34, Trinculo refers to such exhibitions when he says that in England when they will not give a doit to relieve a lane beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian [Kermode 1964). 1 And so it went through the 16th century. A growing awareness of exotic peoples, although most often based on a grotesque distortion of ethnographic and biological fact, excited the European imagination, and took shape, of course, in Caliban and the dramatic landscape of his island.But what kind of people were these inhabitants of the newly discovered lands? Were they capable of virtuous, Christian living? Were they people sharing a common humanity with Europeans, or were they instead people with their own distinct origin? Or perhaps they weren T t people at all but rather curious creatures intermediate between people and the higher animals? Although questions such as these are no longer relevant owing to the progress of the last 200 years of anthropological science, these enigmas vexed people of learning in Shakespeare T s time. As we begin to understand, through The Tempest, 16th and 17th century i...