Abstract
“‘I Had Peopled Else’: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race” explores representations of queer natality in four plays by William Shakespeare. This chapter suggests that the queerest child is the child who is altogether absent; thus, representations of anti-natalism and queer natality in these plays reveal the essentially precarious, tenuous nature of reproductive futurity. In so doing, I argue, they also expose the racialized assumptions underwriting the central figure of futurity, the child. If The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice emphasize figures of foreign hyper-fecundity and miscegenation amidst depictions of barrenness and lineal disruption, Titus Andronicus highlights the dangers of legible natality, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream prompts audiences to interrogate the persistent fictions around the promise of natal futurity.
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Notes
- 1.
I follow Lee Edelman ’s theorization of a queer resistance to reproductive futurity and to temporalities determined by heteronormative natality (2004).
- 2.
The state of temporal limbo and discontinuity that Caliban evokes might also be read as a queer refusal of the imperatives of straight, normatively natalist time . But to some extent, one might argue, the natalist imperative always takes the form of a presumption, only to be revealed as a fantasy. The legibility of natality, as I discuss later in this chapter with regard to Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream , is thus always a fiction.
- 3.
Although Sycorax is not herself from the island, we note that it is Prospero who explicitly underscores her African provenance and her “criminal” past : “This damn’d witch Sycorax,/For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing, from Argier/Thou know’st was banish’d” (1.2.263–266). Prospero thus dismisses her claim to territorial sovereignty, which relies on the logic of colonial appropriation: that new arrivals who gain mastery of the island and its inhabitants can command it. Yet, this is the logic that Prospero himself deploys in order to dispossess Caliban of his claimed inheritance . But if Sycorax is a ruler , she is also a refugee, “banished” from Algiers to seek refuge elsewhere. One is reminded that in the present day, several nations have adopted immigration policies that tie citizenship to “bloodlines ” (ius sanguinis), sometimes placing the children of immigrants and refugees in national limbo, while also tacitly endorsing a primarily white natal future .
- 4.
Wilson (2012). Indeed, Wilson begins his essay by musing that “an heir is a peculiar sort of person” (53) because the heir is always an impossibility: the heir cannot come into being until his predecessor is dead, at which point he is no longer an heir. The temporality of the heir thus always straddles the line between potential and past ; there is never a “current” heir. The figure of the heir, therefore, must always elide and obscure a temporal moment, as do Caliban’s spectral “Calibans.”
- 5.
By “the Child ,” I refer principally to Edelman ’s use of the term: “That Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (Edelman 2004, 3). The key word here, I suggest, is “fantasmatic.” “The Child ,” that is—as opposed to a child—represents the idealized vision of not only a reproductive but also a communal future , the fiction of “the Child” who cements the public good but is also its rhetorical—and real—beneficiary.
- 6.
“What is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here” (Edelman 2004, 31). José Esteban Muñoz, however, underscores the centrality of potentiality and utopianism alike to queerness (2009, 1, 26). Muñoz also emphasizes that “the future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity . Although Edelman does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white ” (95).
- 7.
Melissa Sanchez glosses another dimension of Caliban’s relationship with Prospero after his banishment from Prospero’s cell: “Caliban charges that Prospero has forced him into servitude , but the very language in which he describes their meeting fuses sexual and geopolitical conquest in a single erotic terrain” (2008, 61). This reading further troubles the (hetero -)normativity of Caliban’s natalist vision. Hiewon Shin offers an alternative reading of the play by focusing on the politics and cultural place of early modern adoption alongside The Tempest , considering the ways in which Caliban and Miranda perform forms of labor that both match and defy structurally gendered expectations (2008). Although it was common practice for early modern apprentices to marry into their masters ’ families, as Mark Albert Johnston ’s chapter in this collection notes, I concur with Shin that Caliban is situated as an adoptee rather than an apprentice (377), rendering his desire for his mistress , tutor , and surrogate sister transgressive as much for its incestuous overtones as for its racial ramifications.
- 8.
Since “the future is kid stuff” (Edelman 2004, 1), a barren future fundamentally queers the presumption of straight—and fertile —futurity . I would suggest, however, that Prospero’s warning also underscores the contingency of the naturalized assumption of reproductive futurity, which emerges as always already precarious in the disruption, in this play, of an idealized comedic resolution—consisting in marriage , children, community, and dynastic futurity—by the chilling threat of “discord” and “barrenness .”
- 9.
When Ferdinand first meets Miranda, he promises her that “if a virgin ,/And your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you/The Queen of Naples” (1.2.448–450), tying her maidenhead —and thus, obliquely, her potential for authorized natality —to his marital interest.
- 10.
The affinities between them are at least initially underscored by Prospero when he says dismissively of Ferdinand, “To th’most of men this is a Caliban” (1.2.481). But the racial difference between them allows them also to register their labor differently. The distinctions of rank , lineage, provenance, and nation between them—one is noble, Neapolitan, legitimate , and white , while the other is low-born , (presumably) half-Algerian, a bastard , and visibly “othered” —inform their natalist (or anti-natalist ) orientations: whereas Caliban founds a fantasy of reproductive futurity in impossible, aberrant fecundity , Ferdinand articulates a vision of family that is cemented by homosocial kinship ties. They thus outline quite different notions of lineage and family. If Caliban imagines a future and genealogy of cloned “Calibans,” Ferdinand, as I will discuss, turns away from the prospect of dynastic futurity in the very moment of an idealized comedic resolution.
- 11.
The fiction of social re-incorporation that obtains through Ferdinand’s plausible performance of willing servitude not only renders Ferdinand a part of Prospero’s family , as I will discuss, rather than allowing him his own mode of familial futurity ; it is also unavailable to Caliban, whose apparent adoption ends precisely when he attempts to include himself within a natalist —and indeed future -oriented—economy.
- 12.
I am therefore persuaded by the Arden editors’ comments on the “wife ”/“wise” crux in 4.1.123, following Peter Blayney. “Biblical definitions of heaven excluded marriage (Mark, 12.25; Luke, 20.35); rather, it can be argued, Ferdinand’s sense of paradise may have been (however implausible to modern sensibilities) inhabited exclusively by himself and his seemingly omnipotent, omniscient new father -in-law (Katherine Duncan-Jones, private communication) ” (2011, 137).
- 13.
One might also observe that when Ferdinand articulates Prospero as a “second father ,” he simultaneously and implicitly situates Miranda in the structural position of a surrogate sibling. If Caliban’s purported attempt upon Miranda constitutes both a racial and a quasi-incestuous transgression, Ferdinand’s rhetoric appears to comprise a sanctioned, albeit primarily discursive, departure from the imperative to exogamy, an acceptably incestuous proposal.
- 14.
Caliban’s “Calibans” are also threatening, as I have argued, precisely because they denote excess as well as absence . The specter of cloned, monstrous “Calibans” queers natality in multiple ways: by replacing normative natality with an aberrant twin; but also in representing an instance of abnormal, disturbing fecundity .
- 15.
The English food shortages and poor grain harvests of the 1590s haunt this exchange, as Kim F. Hall points out (1992, especially 91).
- 16.
Although the central problem here is bastardy (the burden that illegitimate children place on the “commonwealth”), the practice of miscegenation and the impregnation of a member of Portia’s household compound this problem: how to explain the “getting up of the Negro’s belly”? After all, if the specter of the Child secures the future , that child—and that future —must, I suggest, always register as white .
- 17.
“The only immediately fertile couple presented in the play, Launcelot and the Moor , are excluded from the final scene. Her fecundity exists in threatening contrast to the other Venetians’ seeming sterility, particularly as it is created with Launcelot Gobbo, the ‘gobbling’, prodigal servant whose appetites cannot be controlled” (Hall 1992, 104). The pun on “Moor” and “more” also “supports [the] image of the black woman as both consuming and expanding” (92).
- 18.
Since no suitor of Morocco ’s “complexion ” can ever be permitted to “choose [Portia] so,” Belmont will be preserved from lineal miscegenation . But these failed black suitors will then be forbidden from ever marrying ; thus, they will also be forced to forego their own natal and lineal futures .
- 19.
Although the casket test is supposedly impartial, Bassanio is, of course, the only suitor we see receiving musical cues and clues from Portia’s train, as he does in 3.2.63–65.
- 20.
It has, of course, long been a critical commonplace to gloss these rings as connoting female genitalia, and to read the rings in terms of authorized female sexuality (and, potentially, natality ) more broadly. See Karen Newman’s now classic essay “Portia’s Ring : Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice ” (1987).
- 21.
See OED 1a. “To come to harm, suffer misfortune, perish; (of a person) to meet with death; (of an inanimate object) to be lost or destroyed. Obs.”
- 22.
Salerio laments that “in the Narrow Seas that part/The French and English, there miscarried /A vessel of our country richly fraught” (2.8.28–30), while in his final letter to Bassanio, Antonio himself admits that “my ships have all miscarried , my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low” (3.2.315–317).
- 23.
2 Henry IV , 5.4.9. Mistress Quickly, in turn, “pray[s] God the fruit of her womb miscarry ” (5.4.12–13).
- 24.
“Three of your argosies/Are richly come to harbor suddenly,” Portia assures Antonio in the last lines of the play (5.1.276–277).
- 25.
OED 5a. “Of a plan, business, etc.: to go wrong; to fail; to come to nothing , prove abortive.”
- 26.
The Arden Third Edition of The Merchant of Venice (2010) glosses 3.5.43 (Riverside) and 3.5.40 (Arden) (“play … word”) as follows: “manipulate the meanings of words, but also suggesting that this is symptomatic of a more general promiscuity.” See also OED 2 for “miscarry ”: “To go wrong or astray; to do wrong, misbehave. Also refl. Now rare.”
- 27.
Chakravarty (2012, 373–376).
- 28.
I discuss the etymological roots of the family in the Roman famulus, or household slave, at greater length in “More Than Kin, Less Than Kind: Similitude, Strangeness, and Early Modern English Homonationalisms” (2016, 24). As with Ferdinand’s labor , sanctioned (and particularly noble) service provides an alternative social contract and community to that engendered by natal futurity . But, given Lancelot’s presumed injunction against marriage , we note that his lower condition of service allows (if not explicitly authorizes) modes of illegitimate natality . If Belmont’s expansive performance of the preludes and precursors to marriage ironically underscores not only its own barrenness but also its effective sterilization of non-white and foreign potential progenitors, Lancelot’s engendering of a future , Moorish bastard comically raises the frightening specter of a natality, and a future , that can only be strange, low, and illegitimate , of “more” than can be reckoned with or tolerated.
- 29.
See Adelman (2003).
- 30.
Aaron’s child is, of course, also a bastard . But the problem here seems to consist in the visible register of his bastardy. This moment in Titus Andronicus raises the (dangerous) possibility that, had the child been white , he could have advanced to the empery of Rome. As Aaron notes, “where the bull and cow are both milk-white ,/They never do beget a coal-black calf” (5.1.31–32), and so a black child reveals his mixed-race ancestry. But, significantly, a white child does not. A white but mixed-race child, that is, fails to reveal its own history of miscegenation . If the white child denotes the future of natality , therefore, he is compromised by his potential racial instability. See n. 32, below.
- 31.
Francesca T. Royster notes the unsettling nature, to early modern English audiences , of the “hidden black presence within the child… Not only can black characters invade, persuade, impregnate the white female populace; they can also pass” (2000, 452–453).
- 32.
Wilson (2012). The nurse who announces the child’s birth also, of course, dies almost immediately thereafter. While the child is not himself her heir , the nurse not only structurally occupies the position of a surrogate mother but also evokes the figure of the early modern wet-nurse who would feed and nourish babies. Although a peripheral character whose principal role, it seems, is to die, the first sight of the nurse nonetheless locates her as a quasi-maternal figure who carries a baby in her arms, while her swift demise thereafter underscores the confluence of birth and death.
- 33.
We note, too, that the absent presence of this child also mirrors the way in which, as I have suggested, depictions of anti-natalism posit the queerest child as one who is altogether absent . The evocation of the missing, spectral child at once affirms natalist potentiality and reminds the audience of his—and, by extension, all children’s—chilling, non-generative absence.
- 34.
The same-sex intimacy depicted here, and the queer articulation of Titania as a quasi-surrogate parent, are striking; her “womb [was] rich with my young squire” (emphasis added). If Caliban’s progeny register, at least rhetorically, as a motherless multitude, the changeling boy’s absent father and the explicitly female pre-natal nostalgia of this moment queer the presumption of normative natality and “straight” futurity .
- 35.
- 36.
Since the household “page ” often also occupied an educational role, Titania’s “rearing” of the child may be glossed as pedagogical as well as parental . But see n. 35, above, on the changeling ’s structurally queer provenance. Titania’s potentially pedagogical function situates her as a possible analogue to Miranda, with all the attendant colonial and imperial implications. Both she and Miranda replace the biological mothers of their respective charges—Sycorax, in the case of Caliban, and the “vot’ress of [Titania’s] order,” in the case of the unnamed, Indian changeling boy. Both women rear their surrogate family members into a different society from that into which they are born, thereby enacting a form of cultural—and corporeal—colonization.
- 37.
As Mark Albert Johnston argues in his chapter included in this collection, other modes of service could also contest imperatives to productive linearity and fruitful generation . Apprenticeship, for instance, “more frequently entailed periods of queerly arrested development or backward falling than might be expected, given the system’s putatively perpetual, progressive, straightforward momentum.” And, as Johnston also notes, although labor carries the presumption of productivity, it is also in its own way quite frequently (queerly) ungenerative and barren .
- 38.
Melissa Welshans argues in her chapter for this collection that Moll’s presence on stage at the conclusion of The Roaring Girl also queers that play’s comedic resolution by challenging our assumption that “straight time ” will prevail henceforth.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Albert Johnston for their generous feedback on this chapter. I am also grateful to all the participants of the “Queering Childhood” seminar at the 2016 Shakespeare Association of America Meeting for an illuminating conversation, and especially to Amy Eliza Greenstadt, Rachel Prusko , Melissa Welshans , and Lucy Munro for their thoughtful responses to an earlier version of this chapter. All references to Shakespeare ’s plays, unless otherwise noted, follow The Riverside Shakespeare (1997) and appear parenthetically by act, scene, and line numbers.
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Chakravarty, U. (2018). “I Had Peopled Else”: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_3
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