Remember when I mentioned on my episode of The Tempest that a political reading of the play had some validity even from the time it was written? And that we could see lines in the play directly reflected from an essay that was critical of Europeans and that defended indigenous people?

That essay was “Of Cannibals” by Michel de Montaigne, and I thought it be fun to go read that essay and pull out some of the threads from it. And also to see exactly what was lifted and made it into The Tempest.

Luckily, I’ve held onto a lot of random books from my various humanities classes in college, and my copy of Montaigne’s Essays was still on the shelf.

Further proof that you should buy another bookcase instead of finding old books to give away.

First things first. How do we know that Shakespeare is in some way commenting on indigenous people in some way? Go to the character of Caliban and rearrange the letters in his name. His name is anagram for “cannibal” (spelled with one “n” for it to fit perfectly). While Caliban isn’t a literal cannibal, I did a little poking around and it seems like the term cannibal was kind of used a shorthand to other Europeans that you were talking about indigenous and native people of other countries. The Other in this case was so other that they were automatically assumed to be barbaric to the point of cannibalism.

Montaigne in naming his essay “Of Cannibals” is setting his audience up for a bit of a rug pull. They would think they were going to read about barbaric cannibals and instead Montaigne turns the mirror back on them.

He opens his essay talking about a couple classical examples of “cultured civilizations” realizing that maybe the people they thought were barbaric might actually have some kind of culture. Well guess what, he’s heard some stories about a tribe living in Brazil and now he gets it: “I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits” (pg. 108).

This is a point he makes repeatedly throughout the essay, and his criticism and understanding that it’s better to use empathy to understand where people are coming from feels modern and relevant. A lot of times our knee jerk reactions to things we don’t understand come from a place of not understanding other cultural norms, and it is good to take a beat when you have this reaction and try to understand if it really is “weird” or if it’s just new.

While Montaigne is making a point here that indigenous Brazilians are not as barbaric as many Europeans think, in this specific case, they are also cannibals. He spends some time explaining how and why they do this. Essentially, warriors who defeat and capture warriors from other tribes will ultimately kill their enemies and then cook and eat them. Eating your fallen enemy is a sign of valor. Or so Montaigne claims.

I thought he was getting a bit too into the descriptions of killing and cannibalism and wondered if was going to make comments about the practice, but instead he surprised me. Right at the point where a lots of essayists would have pointed out how horrible the practice was, Montaigne instead writes: “I am not so anxious that we should note the horrible savagery of these acts as concerned that, whilst judging their faults so correctly, we should be so blind to our own” (pg. 113). He goes on to turn a critical eye on European torture practices and calls them out for being “more barbarous” than what this Brazilian tribe does.

Honestly, that part is great.

The essay isn’t without some problematic tendencies to the modern eyes. While Montaigne is jumping to defend indigenous people, he does wander into uncomfortable territory. He talks a lot about them being “simple” and “pure” and “innocent,” ascribing them childlike attributes and setting them up as a foil to the corrupt Europeans.

Take, for example, this excerpt, which feels particularly icky to a modern-day reader: “These nations, then seem barbarous in the sense that they have received very little moulding from the human intelligence, and are still very close to their original simplicity. They are still governed by natural laws and very little corrupted by our own” (pg. 109).

Being uncorrupted by Europeans doesn’t mean that indigenous Brazilians are “simple” or that they don’t have intelligence. And just because they don’t use the western system of living, doesn’t mean they don’t have their own form of civilization. (For the time being we won’t get into the term “civilization” itself, which is absolutely loaded.)

In my reading, Montaigne’s defense falls squarely into the “noble savage” trope.  It’s meant to uphold indigenous people and fight against the typical “barbaric” portrayal, but in the process he ends up flattening them, removing their complications and humanity, and raises an expectation of perfection.

(As a sort of hilarious side note, when I looked up this trope to link to, the Wikipedia article actually cites Montaigne as the originator of the “noble savage” trope. So, spot on, if Wikipedia is to be believed.)

All right, with all that, how do we know Shakespeare actually read this? There is one particular speech that gives away the game. After the crowd from Naples is washed ashore, Gonzalo, an advisor to the king, starts talking about how he would rule as king over an island of native people. He says:

I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty.
(2.1 147-156)

Compare this to Montaigne’s description of indigenous Brazilian society: “This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no kind of commerce, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no title of magistrate or of political superior, no habit of serve, riches or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, only leisurely occupations, no respect for any kinship but the common ties, no clothes, no agriculture, no treason, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard” (pg. 110).

Shakespeare doesn’t lift the description exactly but it’s close enough that you can tell where it came from. When I was reading the essay, I flagged this paragraph immediately.

In the case of Montaigne, he’s trying to describe this beautiful, innocent society. In The Tempest, Gonzalo is trying to describe his idea of a perfect society. Antonio dismisses this ideal, claiming it would make a nation of “whores and knaves,” but Antonio is the jerk who overthrew his own brother and later advocates for murder. Are we really supposed to be on his side?

Gonzalo is honest and loyal and was the man who saved Prospero and Miranda’s lives twelve years earlier when he was supposed to see them dead. I think he’s got to be a bit more sympathetic.

Other excerpts from “Of Cannibals” don’t make it in, and I think it’s probably too much of a stretch to assume that just because Shakespeare read this essay that he arguing for the exact kind of cultural relativism that Montaigne is. But it does lay the groundwork for that anti-colonial interpretation of the play.

While the traditional reading of Prospero as a humanist ideal also tends to come at the play from an apolitical angle, we can see that some politics were being engaged with right there at the initial writing.

A modern interpretation of the play is completely valid, but I like this connection. A little piece of historical evidence that early modern writers were grappling with difficult ideas in ways that make their words still resonate with us 400 years later.

For anyone who wants to follow along, the edition of the Essays I’m referencing is a Penguin Books edition translated by JM Cohen but you can also find it on Project Gutenberg.