No single reading of The Tempest can capture every angle of the play. Even when focusing on the relatively narrow idea of the native savage, different relationships reveal different perspectives on “savagery.” No one definition of “savage” will suffice. Caliban, for example, reveals the bestial aspect of the savage in his attempted rape of Miranda. Miranda, however, is also a savage in the way that she naively wonders at the newly arrived Europeans. The character of Ariel provides yet another complex interpretation of the New World “savagery.” The spirit of the air is simultaneously wild and tame-able; faithful and rebellious ; “delicate,” yet incapable of pity.

The overarching plot of The Tempest opens to a familiar type-scene of the time—perhaps most famously in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: Europeans shipwrecked on the coast of a undiscovered island and confronted with a wondrous new society. Wonder, in fact, plays on several levels in The Tempest. Both the Europeans and the natives are constantly amazed at the society of their counterparts. The island-native Miranda, whose very name suggests wonder, expresses her amazement at the European society:

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in’t!

Of course, for her father Prospero, there is nothing so wondrous about the Old World. His reply to her is, in effect, if only you knew.... The adventures of the shipwrecked Europeans suggest that while they are often in awe at the Island’s magical properties, they still view the Island as something to be dominated. The savage Caliban tells the low-class Stephano of the Island: “Thou shalt be lord of it, and I’ll serve thee.” The apposition of wonder and domination in The Tempest is yet another display of the play’s complexity. One might think that the two mindsets are mutually exclusive; Shakespeare suggests otherwise. In fact, practically every character in the play views the Island both with awe and with an eye toward domination. This is particularly true of Prospero, Stephano, and Caliban. Prospero, of course, manages to maintain rule over the island because of his magic arts. Stephano longs to conquer the island so that he can be serenaded by invisible magic strains of music. Even Caliban, the son of the witch Sycorax, desires to rule as king over the Island and its natural wonders. Even his attempted rape of Miranda seems in part to be driven by a desire to populate the Island with his descendants —a perversion of the dominion mandate God gave to Adam and Eve in the Garden. Patricia Steed notes: “Shakespeare therefore imputed to Caliban a motive for the attempted rape that reflects the specifically English colonial desire for ‘peopling.’ Caliban is rendered guilty of what were in reality English colonial ambitions.”

Having instilled the desire for dominion in most of his characters, it is interesting to note how Shakespeare sets each would-be Island-king up for ultimate failure. Caliban is punished by his foolish service to Stephano ; Stephano is humiliated numerous ways and eventually repents of wanting to be “king o’ the isle” ; Prospero himself gives up his powers at the end of the play. Shakespeare doesn’t seem to believe that nature cannot be dominated. After all, Prospero is able to command the services of Ariel, and the spirit seems to fear that Prospero will not actually free him when the time is up—implying that Prospero could have kept the spirit under his domination should he have wished to. Therefore, if nature can be dominated, there must be something else which prevents the Europeans and the natives from ruling the Island.

Several factors keep Caliban, the native savage, from being able to establish his idea of a Utopia on the Island. The most obvious hindrance is the savage’s inherently depraved character. Prospero talks of Caliban’s “vile race,” in which “good natures” could not abide. Shakespeare seems to imply that when Prospero first arrived on the Island, he intended to transform the bestial Caliban into the noble savage which so preoccupied the European mind. Caliban was in fact taught “language” by Prospero, but could not maintain the guise of civility for long.

While Prospero plies Caliban with language and learning, the European Stephano plies him with liquor. Stephano, unsurprisingly, is hardly more successful than the much wiser Prospero. For a time, Caliban gives himself to Stephano’s worship: “I'll show thee every fertile inch o'th'island; and I will kiss thy foot: I prithee, be my god.” This attitude cannot last. Caliban, as base and stupid as he is, eventually sees Stephano for the fool that he is.

In the end, therefore, Shakespeare’s play both works within and subverts the 17th century stereotypes of the savage and his native, wondrous wilderness. The stereotype which Shakespeare undermines would be immortalized in Francis Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis. In Bacon’s story, a number of Europeans are shipwrecked on a far-away island, and arrive expecting to encounter a barbaric people. However, they instead find the island-people of Bensalem—an eminently civilized community which had mastered the natural sciences and established a paradise of Edenic qualities. The Europeans continually marvel at the wonders of Bensalem, which has advanced knowledge of everything from meteorology to theology to medicine. The cause for the Bensalemites’ superior knowledge is the fact that the island inhabitants—unlike the Europeans—had been untainted by centuries of bad tradition. Further, the Bensalemites knew how “to discern ... between divine miracles, works of Nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts.” Implied throughout the work is the notion that Europe has failed to attain this utopian state because it did not have access to pure and unvarnished knowledge. The Bensalemites, who had been provided with books of scientific and theological knowledge straight from God (and therefore free of ecclesiastical taint), were true noble savages.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, while predating Bacon’s work by a number of years, interacts directly with the kind of New World utopianism which colors Bacon’s work and much of the Renaissance. While Bacon sees the savage as free of traditionalism, Shakespeare gives us the savage Caliban—a character who is bound to his own crude behavior as a dog returns to his own vomit. Savage behavior is as much a tradition as centuries of European political and religious abuse. This is an insight which proves Shakespeare rather un-Baconian.

Of course, Bacon’s longing for a pristine society—one in which the Renaissance could take root without medieval stumbling blocks—is understandable. As Montaigne rather snidely pointed out, the cannibals of the New World held the moral high ground against the Europeans: at least the savages didn’t kill and devour and torture under the “cloak of piety and religion.” The savages, for all their cruelty, were seen as the vessels of honor who would receive the pure knowledge of God and of science that the old Europeans had resisted with Gothic narrow-mindedness. The colonies of the New World held eschatological import. John Gillies notes: ”The historical ‘moment’ of The Tempest (c. 1610) coincides closely with a burst of sermons and pamphlets sponsored by the Virginia Company, promoting the colony as an object of messianic national destiny and spiritual renewal.” One of these sermons relates a “dialogue” between God, England, Europe, and Virginia in which the Almighty threatens to take away the Kingdom from Europe, but offers “faithful” England an opportunity to redeem itself by bringing the light of God to the native Virginians.

In perspective, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a subtle realist critique of the prevailing utopian hopes of the Renaissance and New World exploration. Progressives like Bacon might have seen the New World savages as the great hope of civilization; to the progressives, Shakespeare bequeathed the figure of Caliban—cursing, raping, idolatrizing, and always false. Where the mindset of men like Bacon was utopian and provincial, Shakespeare’s was psychologically complex. Where Bacon’s island is colored by Renaissance fantasies, the island which Prospero rules offers torments and humiliations along with natural wonders. In The Tempest, both the savage and the civilized prove unable or unwilling to conquer nature. In the end each is a “thrice-double ass.” And as Montaigne would phrase it, perhaps the main difference between the European and the savage is that the latter wears no pants. But this is a tenuous claim to moral superiority.