• 1  Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest of the World, from Antiquity to the Pr (...)

2The two disputants were Sepúlveda and Las Casas respectively. Anthony Pagden, who has carried out extensive recent research into the context and background of this dispute, and the personalities involved in it, fills in much of the detail.1 The two men probably never actually met, he claims, and their dispute was held over a prolonged period with statements and counter-statements from each side adjudicated by a panel of judges. Las Casas spoke for five days, refuting passionately not only all that Sepúlveda had written, but also everything that had ever been written against the native Americans. Sepúlveda replied with twelve objections; Las Casas countered with twelve refutations. It was only when the president of the panel, Soto, intervened that the debate drew to an inconclusive close.

• 2  Tyrannie et cruautez des Espagnols perpetrees es Indes Occidentales, qu’on dit Le Nouueau monde, B (...)

3Despite the lack of formal pronouncement in his favour, Las Casas emerged as the moral victor. His brief account of the destruction of the Indies became a bestseller and he included in it a record of his debate with Sepúlveda. A French translation of this work was made by Jacques de Miggrode and published in Antwerp in 1579 at the behest of the Dutch States General who commissioned the work as a warning against Spanish imperialism.2 Las Casas’s work, and his committed defence of the native inhabitants of the Americas, raised persistent and thorny problems, of justice particularly: should natives be treated equitably, and if so, how? What rights could they be said to have? And a related issue, not directly raised or contested by Las Casas: in what sense, if any, could European monarchs claim jurisdiction over the New World? What was the basis of their authority apart from the brute exercise of power?

• 3  For the definition of justice in the Renaissance and its background in classical and humanist thou (...)

4The resonances of this heated debate reverberate elsewhere in the literature of the period that touches on the question of the New World. The Tempest is no exception to this rule. In particular, the close of the play throws up issues of special interest that claim our attention, notably in relation to questions of distributive and commutative justice.3 The mood is one of reconciliation and Prospero is prompted to it by Ariel:

• 6  Cf. Langer, Vertu du discours, p. 128-29.
• 7  The Norton Shakespeare, p. 3053.

14Distributive justice, then, in the case of Caliban. But where is the commutative justice? It might be argued that in declining to exact vengeance on Caliban, Prospero effectively renounces commutative justice – since vengeance, “an eye for an eye”, was an acknowledged form of commutative justice.6 Yet the issue goes deeper. If Caliban has been a conspirator against Prospero’s life, it is because Prospero has been a usurper of Caliban’s isle: as the creature says at the beginning of the play, “this island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,/which thou tak’st from me” (i.ii.334-35). Greenblatt draws the appropriate inference: “…across the vast gulf that divides the triumphant prince and the defeated savage, there is a momentary, enigmatic glimpse of a hidden bond: ‘this thing of darkness’, Prospero says of Caliban, ‘I/Acknowledge mine’ (v.i.278-9). The words need only be a claim of ownership, but they seem to hint at a deeper, more disturbing link between father and monster, legitimate ruler and savage, judge and criminal”.7

• 8  Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-Texts of Th (...)
• 9  Deborah Willis, “Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism” in William Shakespeare: ‘ (...)
• 10  Willis, “Shakespeare’s Tempest”, p. 264.
• 11  So David Scott Kastan, “‘The Duke of Milan/And his Brave Son’: Old Histories and New in The Tempes (...)

15Even before Greenblatt had written those words, critics had not been slow to understand the implications of this situation for colonialism and colonialist discourse. The seminal articles by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, and by Paul Brown, have offered penetrating assessments of The Tempest in terms which illuminate its relationship to modern day colonialist and political theory as well as to Elizabethan and Jacobean conceptualisations of the same.8 The postcolonialist line that these articles adopt has, however, met with strong challenge in recent years. Deborah Willis specifically takes issue with Brown’s article in particular, arguing that the play “is more significantly engaged in arousing desire for, and displaying the power of, a ruler at the core who can contain a tendency toward oligarchy and division”9, and that it is Antonio who represents the real threat since his “evil is conceived as an innate quality” and “cannot be banished decisively by retributive justice”.10 Other critics offset the postcolonialist argument by an emphasis on “the play’s engagement with its own historical moment” and thus the dimension of early seventeenth-century European politics they see the play as embodying.11 It is with this debate in mind that we can situate The Tempest in respect of its dispensation of justice. Prospero stands right with Sepúlveda in believing implicitly that native peoples have no claims of legitimacy to their own lands compared with the more substantive claim of European monarchy backed by the exercise of God-given power. By contrast, it is Caliban himself who articulates his own right to the island, not through canon law as Las Casas was to attempt to do on the natives’ behalf, but through inheritance from his mother; against the distributive justice by which Prospero gives the island to himself, Caliban sets natural justice which he sees Prospero as flouting. And as Meredith Anne Skura justifiably points out, the play allows Caliban the extensive airing of his views and of the injustices he suffers:

• 14  Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare, “Re-Reading Literature”, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, p. 94.

18That doubleness is likewise written into the justice that power dispenses. On the one hand, justice can be enacted in such a way as to bring about reconciliation between opposing political interests and the preservation of dynastic order before power itself is voluntarily laid down by Prospero. On the other hand, justice is enacted by exclusion from the commutative system of a creature who has rights under natural law and whose lèse-majesté is forgiven only on condition that he accepts subservience in a hierarchy that is alien to him. These doublenesses, as Greenblatt also sees, derive from, or at the very least are intimately connected to, the status of art, in particular the status of Prospero’s art in The Tempest. The manifestations of the magus’s power are manifestations of high art: the ability to conjure the storm in the first place, the activity of Ariel who symbolises Prospero’s “word in action, the precise, fluent fulfilment of his desires”,14 the deft dovetailing of Prospero’s plotting of events and circumstances with the larger structural dynamic of the play itself – all these bear witness to the magician’s artifice and the effortless ease with which he organises the mise en scène of incident and character in a play that is self-consciously, self-advertisingly proud of its alluring fictionality. By the same token, justice can be indexed as a positive product of this imaginative world which invests fantasy with a value as a philosophical and indeed in this case political ideal, able to bring about the harmonisations on which the play’s dénouement depends. At the same time, however, what Prospero restores is an order of culture, owing to the supernatural control he wields. The fantasy of justice he creates is itself not a natural product, but an ideological one, premised on the assumption that art and nature can coincide. The self-reflexive nature of the play highlights just how precarious that ideological construct is: it is a dream that rounds off a sleep, an insubstantial pageant on a shadow stage.

• 15  “Gonzalo’s Books”, and his Le Cannibale. Grandeur et décadence, Paris, Perrin, 1994, p. 163-69.

22It is a purposely oppositional speech, and at a number of different levels. It is, for one thing, not a description that should be regarded as co-extensive with the island that the shipwrecked courtiers find on their arrival. The island on which they land seems “to be desert” (ii.i.35) – both infertile and uninhabited – whereas Gonzalo calls for a place where “nature should bring forth/Of it own kind all foison, all abundance”. Within the space that is demarcated by the staging of the drama, a further conceptual space is thus opened up by Gonzalo’s musings. If Prospero’s island is at a remove from any contemporary reality or setting, then Gonzalo’s commonwealth is at a greater remove still. Indeed, Gonzalo’s description of it expressly seeks “T’excel the Golden Age” (ii.i.168); it is avowedly Utopian, as Frank Lestringant has shown in this conference.15 And yet it does, despite that, pass comment on issues that prove central to the play. One might note, for example, the way sovereignty is discussed in the very presence of Alonso and Antonio, a prefigurement of the challenge that Caliban constantly presents to the legitimacy of Prospero’s power. More insistent is Gonzalo’s emphatic dismissal of the legal system – “no name of magistrate” – and with it the legislation that covers contract and succession: justice will not be maintained by distribution and commutation operating under the general name of equity, but regulated by Nature, if regulated at all. This is in striking contrast to the very dispensation that Prospero himself will enact, and a salutary reminder that this dispensation is itself the apogee of a finely tuned art that fantasises a solution to the dramatic and political dilemmas, a solution that it assumes is acceptable to Nature or is indeed indistinguishable from it.

• 16  Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, édités par Pierre Villey, réédités par V.-L. Saulnier, Paris, P (...)

23Gonzalo’s speech does not mention cannibals or Calibans; Montaigne’s essay, from one page of which the speech is adapted, names the cannibals directly, in its title, and indirectly, through the use of the term “sauvage”, which enables the essayist to deploy paradoxes and equivocations about who the “sauvages” really are – they who cleave to the state of Nature, or we who have corrupted and abandoned it. The paradoxical eulogy that Montaigne sketches near the beginning of his essay shares with Gonzalo’s encomium an oppositional stance: in the immediate context, it is intended as part of an imaginary debate between the essayist and Plato whose conception of the ideal state is, for Montaigne, bettered by native society, not least because the description of Brazilian life is based on experience. It seeks, therefore, not to open up an “ailleurs” that is remoter even than Prospero’s island, but rather to import the findings of explorers and adventurers into the ambit of Western society and in so doing to dismantle the claims of that society to cultural superiority. In particular, of course, Montaigne uses the polyvalence of the term “barbarie” in order to highlight the barbarity of the French Wars of Religion – the real cannibals are already in France, not outside it. The parallelism in the terminology at this point underscores the use of Brazilian culture as a form of critique, for the earlier sentence “Les paroles mesmes qui signifient le mensonge, la trahison, la dissimulation, l’avarice, l’envie, la detraction, le pardon, inouies”16 is partly repeated and echoed in the sentence that acts as a commentary on the cannibalism and cruelty of the Civil Wars: “… il ne se trouve jamais aucune opinion si desreglée qui excusat la trahison, la desloyauté, la tyrannie, la cruauté, qui sont nos fautes ordinaires” (i, 31, 210).

• 17  André Tournon, Montaigne: La glose et l’essai, édition revue et corrigée, précédée d’un Réexamen, (...)
• 18  David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the ‘Essais’, Pri (...)

24To these well-known strategic features of Montaigne’s use of the cannibals can be added a third aspect in which the essayist’s aim is, to quote André Tournon, to “précise[r] le partage entre le probable – réalité lointaine, perçue à travers des témoignages – et le contrôlable – le sens de ces témoignages, et notre propre attitude envers les renseignements qu’ils fournissent”.17 It is this dimension of Montaigne’s essay that requires further comment. It may at first sight seem strange to evaluate what he says about the cannibals in terms of justice (the terms Montaigne explicitly proposes are those of valour), especially in “the culture that cannot pardon”, to quote David Quint’s description of cannibal society.18 Nonetheless, elements of cannibalistic customs recall forms of distribution and commutation, but arranged in such a way as to block their easy assessment in standard Western terms. Thus in respect of property and inheritance, Montaigne notes as follows:

• 19  Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I’” in Heterologies: Discourse on the (...)

25A recognisable system of inheritance is invoked, only to be qualified by the remainder of the sentence. Moreover, the cannibals all call each other “freres”, erasing or at the very least blurring as a consequence distinctions of birth and breeding. A more complex example occurs in the case of vengeance which, Montaigne reports, is the object of cannibalistic practice. We know from The Tempest that the regulation of vengeance fell squarely into the domain of justice. Yet at just this point Montaigne allows the full otherness of cannibal culture to emerge from his account. As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, the actual aim of cannibal vengeance is to force the captive into an admission of weakness; there is, says de Certeau, an economy of speech in which the body is the price.19 The ritual of cannibalism prescribes a practice that is almost contractually adhered to by its participants. And what is honoured in this contractual ritual is a commutation of bodies: the captors are eating not another essentially, but themselves:

• 20  Cf. Pierre Chaunu’s remarks in his preface to Lestringant’s Le Cannibale: “Le Cannibale, … c’est l (...)

27Montaigne’s essay shifts, therefore, from ethnographical description that brings into play Utopian elements in a standardised idealising language– a feature it shares with Shakespeare – to the reality of the Other in all its strangeness, a strangeness that the essayist does nothing to domesticate.20 In the process, characteristics that are associated commonly in Western thought with the dispensation of justice are systematically skewed and repositioned in a conceptual framework that accords them a radically different value.

• 21  De Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’”, p. 78.

29In retrospect the superabundant fertility of the New World that Montaigne highlights earlier in “Des Cannibales” is not a neutral description of a natural state; rather, it passes judgement on the inequalities of the Old World, in the same way that the lack of division of New World goods condemns Occidental distributions, however secured in the judicial system. The premises of Western equity are thereby questioned and their inadequacies revealed, as De Certeau understands: “their speech, a critique of the injustice that divides our social body, judges us”.21

• 22  Michel de Certeau, “Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries” (...)
• 23  Luce Giard, “Epilogue”, p. 317.

32It is usual to think of this section of “Des Cannibales” as providing a relativising standpoint on the issues it contains – France seen through cannibal eyes. And that is true. But the implications of Montaigne’s encounter with the cannibals, as of Shakespeare’s representation of Caliban, go further and deeper. They may perhaps be regarded as exemplifications of what de Certeau termed a heterology,22 a description of cultural practices and historical specificities proper to the Other that resist Western codifications and that create in Western texts disturbances, upheavals, anomalies. No-one remains unchanged by his encounter with the Other, says de Certeau.23 Whether Calibans or cannibals, the extent of their writing back is written into the texts of Shakespeare and Montaigne, highlighting – first – that Occidental justice is a fantasy based on class differences that accentuate disparities and inequalities; disputing – secondly – the “natural” right that European princes claim over foreign soil; contesting – thirdly – the very control they purport to exercise over their own subjects since political violence lies restlessly under the surface of apparent social order.

• 24  John O'Brien, “Si avons nous une tres-douce medecine que la philosophie”, in L’écriture du sceptic (...)

34It is a typically provocative comment, placed shortly after Montaigne’s no less provocative discussion of Pyrrho’s pig, who represents for him Sceptical ataraxia.24 Yet it is also a charming comment, a vignette of peace and innocence. In the event, the inhabitants of the New World were not long to enjoy such peace of mind. Nor was the King of France.