Food, Money, and Sex as Colonial Appetites and Inversions from The Tempest toThe Sea Voyage Cliff Musial, Hamilton College In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s island offers a fantastical vision of art, colonialism, and political power somewhat removed from reality. Prospero’s island, while endowed with fantastic magic and spirits, offers a hypothetical, allegorical vision of colonialism. Gritty political concerns of betrayal, power, and subjugation drive the plot, but the material and practical desires that underlie those rarely come to the surface. As Gonzalo points out, even the simplest reality of the wetness of the ocean dissipates on the island, when the beached crew’s garments become inexplicably dry and “new-dyed” after being “drenched in the sea” and should have been “stained with salt water” (2.1.59-61). The Tempest eschews such pragmatisms in favor of lofty, ideological concerns. However, just over ten years after Shakespeare likely wrote The Tempest, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger borrowed and manipulated elements of Shakespeare’s play to imagine an island quite unlike Prospero’s in their 1622 play The Sea Voyage. As in The Tempest, a ship full of Europeans from nobility to lower class become stranded on a deserted island after a heavy storm. Yet the island of The Sea Voyage has no magical powers that dry clothes, or draw attention away from basic needs and desires. In The Sea Voyage, appetites for money, food, and sex overcome all else. Furthermore, Fletcher and Massinger use these appetites to invert norms of the time, creating a play that engages with their contemporary thinkers, following Thomas Mun and Michel de Montaigne and challenging Robert Burton, by sharply contesting the political status quo. The appetite for wealth joins with Mun by showing the worthlessness of precious metals without trade and the consequences of English privateering in the war with Spain. The appetite for food draws on accounts of starvation in Jamestown to, like Montaigne, challenge the European notion of superiority over the “cannibals” of the New World. And finally, the appetite for sex challenges patriarchy and the notion of inherent male superiority popular among Renaissance thinkers such as Robert Burton by reversing the sexual roles of men and women, making them equally beast-like in their desires and the resolutive marriages concluding the play unconvincing to undermine patriarchal hegemony.
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