There are many curious ideas and events in Shakespeare's Tempest. Here's a trivial one that both bothers and amuses me. For what reason does Prospero keep Caliban in his service and close to home even after he has tried to rape Miranda? Here's the puzzling explanation offered by the great magus himself: "We cannot miss [do without] him. He does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/ That profit us."
The very vague "serves in offices/ That profit us" tells us that even Shakespeare had a hard time justifying Caliban, whose only occupation, it would seem, is to keep the Prosperian fireplace well stoked. He's certainly not keeping the books.
My puzzle: Prospero is a great magician. He can raise storms, put people into trances, devise supernatural banquets and shows, release spirits from cloven pines, and even (though we don't see it) raise the dead ("Graves at my command/ Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth.") If he's so supremely golldarned powerful why can't he magically gather his own firewood? Come to think of it, why does he need firewood at all? Instead of using a stove or fireplace, why does't he just command Ariel to warm things up a bit.
Now I am aware that my concern here is a little on the ridiculous side. Shakespeare is simply making up an excuse to keep Caliban around because Caliban is essential to the play. Nevertheless, it's an odd justification -- although in truth no odder than that Shakespeare feels it necessary to give Caliban a practical, down-to-earth function in such a wildly unmoored-to-reality play.
(When I was a teacher I would always run aground of the engineering student who would explain to me that Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a beetle was unrealistic because a beetle of human size couldn't be supported on insect legs and would be too large to breathe through spirochetes. "It's a story," I would respond. "A fiction. You have to suspend disbelief. You can't accept the transformation but boggle at Gregor's breathing.")
Similarly, it is foolish for me to believe, so to speak, in Caliban, and yet to worry about his log-carrying. Or about the temperature of Prospero's home.
But I think there is a point to be made about Shakespeare. He could imagine magic but he could not get his mind around practical, down-to-earth post-Baconian technology. He had no trouble making his characters fly, but he couldn't imagine a room (or a cave) being heated except by wood, magically chainsawed and laboriously stacked. In Cymbeline, impatient Imogen, in need of quick transport to Milford Haven, asks for a horse with wings, not a helicopter. Shakespeare was not a technological visionary.
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