Caliban and the Fen-Demons of Lincolnshire

Abstract

AbstractChapter 6 mires The Tempest in the English fens and establishes that the play generates dramatic conflict out of the furore incited by campaigns to drain them. Shakespeare’s romance glances at Ireland and the Americas but Prospero’s magical dominion over his island also mirrors the domestic colonization of England’s wetlands. This claim is buoyed by a number of sources overlooked due to the constraints of periodization and the lacunae of the print archive: medieval legends of a fen-dwelling hermit, a lost play, a manuscript ballad from a fish’s point-of-view, and oral legends of a fen-spirit who acts as a kind of Lorax for the wetlands. Invoking the fens to curse the invading Prospero, Caliban, too, speaks for the fens albeit more loudly for the fen-folk, tapping into their outrage over the confiscation of their aquatic commons and echoing doubts about the feasibility and ethics of controlling nature.