The Shape of Patience in The Tempest

Deni Kasa

           

In his On Patience, St. Augustine warns Christians not to call a man’s endurance of pain by the name “patience” without first establishing his orthodoxy: “When therefore thou shalt see any man suffer aught patiently, do not straightway praise it as patience; for this is only shown by the cause of suffering. When it is a good cause, then is it true patience. But when that is placed in crime, then is this much misplaced in name” (528). Writing during the English Reformation, William Cowper describes patience in much the same way: “[heretics] may make a shew of voluntary Religion in not sparing the body, but seeing they haue not the truth of God, how can they haue true Patience?” (286). Although these tracts respond to two very different historical contexts, they voice the same tendency in Christian theology to limit patience only to the orthodox. It follows that whoever has the authority to decide what orthodoxy means—the clergy, the nation, theologians—reifies their own authority when they evaluate someone’s patience.

            In this paper I argue that in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this theological approach to Christian patience allows Prospero to divide his subjects into those who actively participate in sovereignty and those who do not. Prospero’s subjects are not divided into the heretical and the orthodox, but the binary structure of Christian patience divides them into essentialized classes. Ferdinand, for example, proves his worth through his patience:

            The very instant that I saw you did

            My heart fly to your service, there resides

            To make me slave to it, and for your sake

            Am I this patient log-man;                                                                              (III.i.64-67)

Ferdinand’s willingness to be patient is supposed to prove that he is, to borrow Milton’s phrase, by merit more than birthright a king and a deserving suitor for Miranda. At the same time, Ferdinand’s patience contrasts with Caliban’s notable impatience when performing the same work. This system of supposed merit and reward breaks down, however, when Prospero blames Caliban’s behaviour on his “shape”: “He is as disproportion'd in his manners / As in his shape” (V.i.291-292). Prospero thus essentializes moral behaviour along class lines by reducing it to the material “shape” of the agent: Caliban is as it were predestined to be impatient, and Ferdinand’s patience, it now become clear, was a function of his ostensibly superior “shape” all along. By reading these negotiations of patience in terms of the theological history of this virtue, I argue that Prospero adopts the power once reserved for ecclesiastical authorities in order to divide his subjects according to their shape. In the same way that the governing ecclesiastical bodies must deem a martyr orthodox in order for his patience to be genuine, so Prospero must deem his servant to be of an appropriate “shape” in order for his patience to register as such. The sovereign decision—in one case regarding orthodoxy, in the other regarding material “shape”—precedes the patience of those being judged, and yet the decision is justified as a reflection of the victim's behaviour.

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Deni Kasa is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He is writing a dissertation on the relationship between sovereignty and theology in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.