Download Claribel`s story The Tempest Richard Jacobs argues that The

Claribel’s story
The Tempest
Richard Jacobs argues that The Tempest is haunted by the absent Claribel and her forced marriage.
Claribel? Who’s she? Don’t worry too much if that’s your first response to my title. Claribel doesn’t
get widely discussed in criticism of, and commentary on The Tempest. One reason for that is that the
play itself passes over her, and her story, in a rather perfunctory way. But I think she has important
things to say about the play.
Claribel is one of a number of women who are both in and not in the play. That is, like Sycorax and
Mrs Prospero, as Carol Ann Duffy would call her, Claribel is talked about but doesn’t appear on
stage. (Is The Tempest the only Shakespeare play to feature just one woman in the stage-action?) All
three of these talked-about women, incidentally, do actually appear in Peter Greenaway’s
remarkable film Prospero’s Books and Mrs Prospero even gets allocated a name (but I’ve forgotten
it).
Claribel’s story is told in Act 2 Scene 1 when Gonzalo tries gamely, and much to the contemptuous
amusement of Antonio and Sebastian, to cheer up Alonso. Gonzalo is struck by the odd fact that,
despite being ‘drenched in the sea’ during the shipwreck, all their garments are ‘as fresh as when we
put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the King’s fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis’.
After three attempts to draw Alonso’s attention to this fact, he gets this suddenly angry response:
You cram these words into my ears against
The stomach of my sense. Would I had never
Married my daughter there! For, coming thence,
My son is lost and, in my rate, she too,
Who is so far from Italy removed
I ne’er again shall see her.
Alonso is certain that he’s lost Ferdinand to the seas, a wound into which Sebastian then pours some
rather unbrotherly salt.
Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,
That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,
But rather lose her to an African…
You were kneeled to and importuned otherwise
By all of us; and the fair soul herself
Weighed between loathness and obedience at
Which end o’th’beam should bow.
Later in the scene, after Ariel has put the rest of the court party to sleep, Antonio tempts Sebastian
with his assassination plot on the grounds that Claribel, after Ferdinand, the next heir of Naples, now
‘dwells/Ten leagues beyond man’s life’ and therefore can’t possibly pose any threat to their plans.
And that’s the Claribel story. She’s only mentioned once more, in the play’s last moments, when
Gonzalo remarks on the marvel that:
in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand her brother found a wife
Where he himself was lost.
What do we make of this? One point to start with is that Claribel’s marriage is a forced marriage. It’s
made quite clear that it was only her ‘obedience’ to her father that outweighed her ‘loathness’, her
dislike of the marriage and the husband. This is the tyrannical father imposing his will on his
daughter, as threatened (but not fulfilled) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The next point is that
everyone else in the court of Naples objected to the marriage as well, though not it seems out of
sensitivity to Claribel’s feelings: the Napolitans’ objections were racist, opposed to Alonso’s plans to
‘loose her to an African’ rather than to a European. I’m struck by the word ‘loose’, as if Claribel is
being seen as a bit of sweet white meat to be tossed to a wild black animal. There’s also a
submerged pun on ‘lose’ (Alonso loses daughter as well as son). Polonius uses the word in an
equivalent context when planning to use Ophelia as decoy or bait with Hamlet: he tells Claudius that
when Hamlet is next seen reading in the lobby ‘at such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him’.
So why does the marriage happen at all? The play is silent on this but the answer is clear: Claribel is
forced into a marriage with the King of Tunis for reasons of geo-politics and/or trade. Claribel is the
commodity or prize (or bait) in an act of commercial-colonial calculation over Africa. And the reason
the Neapolitan court party is now on Prospero’s island is that they were on their way back to Naples
after the marriage in Tunis. Even Alonso himself, faced with the presumed death of his son, seems to
regret his actions with his daughter, who is now ‘so far from Italy removed/I ne’er again shall see
her’. And it’s very remarkable that Gonzalo forces us to think again about Claribel’s situation at the
very end of the play. Yes, ‘in one voyage/Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis’. But is that a happy
ending, for her?
Why is all this important? One answer is that, in this very highly patterned play, we’re being invited,
if only part consciously, to see Claribel as a version of Miranda. At first the differences seem clear:
Miranda loves Ferdinand and Ferdinand is Italian and the marriage is not forced. But it is nonetheless
an arranged marriage – Prospero very deliberately manipulates his daughter into making it possible
– and it’s also an important dynastic marriage that politically consolidates the relations between two
Italian city-states, though with the odd effect, as critics have pointed out, of consolidating and
extending the power of Naples over Milan. The Claribel story, then, gives a muted ironic edge to the
Miranda story, making us uneasily recognize that Miranda too is a commodity.
It also has an effect on the way we perceive Caliban. If the King of Tunis is the unwelcome black
suitor whom the white bride tries to resist, then that’s the Caliban story told in a different way as
well. Miranda is able to resist successfully and her father stigmatizes and punishes the transgressor;
Claribel is not able to resist and her father delivers his daughter into the black embrace. The King of
Tunis becomes the son-in-law; Caliban is the son that Prospero can only unwillingly ‘acknowledge
mine’. The Claribel story both sharpens the racist representation of loathsome Africa, home to
Sycorax and Caliban, and also underlines the questionable morality of Prospero’s European
colonizing power over Caliban, equivalent to Alonso’s ambitions with Tunis. Another pattern
positions Claribel as one of three virtuous white women – Miranda, Claribel and Mrs Prospero,
described as a ‘piece of virtue’ (‘piece’ means masterpiece) – who collectively thus further demonise
Sycorax as the ‘dark’ or ‘other’ woman and mother.
One other effect of the Claribel story is odd. It undermines Prospero’s authority and stagemanagement. In the first scene he explains to Miranda that ‘by accident most strange, bountiful
Fortune… hath mine enemies/Brought to this shore’. But it’s not an accident at all: it’s Alonso’s
decision to impose the King of Tunis on his daughter that has brought Prospero’s enemies to this
shore. Moreover, Prospero, who apparently knows everything, shows no awareness or knowledge of
the Claribel story. The effect of this is to cast another ironic note, one that makes Prospero, in this
matter at least, less often ‘all-powerful authority’ and more ‘victim of circumstance’.
And it’s that way of thinking about Prospero that I find most helpful. For all his stage-management
he’s the victim of one crucial circumstance above all: the fact that his daughter has grown up and he
has to lose/loose her to another man. And he can’t do anything about it. His ignorance of the
Claribel story is an emblem of that inability. The play explores most subtly in the area of father and
daughter and that’s why the Claribel story is so important. From the play’s first moments – and twice
in one speech – we can hear a father trying to tell his daughter that she must now at last know him
properly, now before it’s too late. In what I take to be a very poignant pun, though I don’t think I’ve
seen it commented on elsewhere, Prospero says ‘Tis time/I should inform thee farther’ and, ten lines
later, ‘Sit down. For thou must now know farther’.
Richard Jacobs
This article first appeared in emagazine 28 April 2005