GONZALO       Had I plantation of this isle, my lord—

ANTONIO       He’d sow’t with nettle-seed.

SEBASTIAN                                                    Or docks, or mallows.

GONZALO       And were the king on’t, what would I do?

SEBASTIAN    ’Scape being drunk, for want of wine.

GONZALO       I’th’ commonwealth I would by contraries

Execute all things, for no kind of traffic

Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty

And use of service, none; contract, succession,

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard—none;

No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil;

No occupation, all men idle, all;

And women, too, but innocent and pure;

No sovereignty—

SEBASTIAN                            Yet he would be king on’t.

ANTONIO       The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. (2.1.144-159)

Gonzalo is indefatigable, but he’s hit on a different strategy here: distraction, rather than trying to console Alonso directly. As is well known, this passage draws heavily on Montaigne’s essay ‘On cannibals’; it relates more generally to utopian texts, not least Thomas More’s Utopia. This moment is often central to discussions of the play’s investment in colonialism and empire. But what’s it doing here, and how does it work? This is a thought experiment. If Gonzalo were to be in charge of the plantation, that is the settlement, the colonisation of this island, what would he do? (Antonio and Sebastian pretend to misunderstand, taking plantation to mean planting, sowing seed – hence nettles, docks, and mallows – Gonzalo would sow weeds, like an incompetent farmer, they sneer.) What would I do? (Not be able to get drunk, because there’s no wine! Wine, and getting drunk, is going to become important later in the play. Perhaps Sebastian is a drunk with the shakes; it could explain a lot.) Gonzalo specifically terms his island a commonwealth, a word that’s common in early modern political discourse. It refers not to a place, but to a community, a nation, a body politic. The word is becoming detached from its literal meaning even here, but Gonzalo’s choice is, perhaps telling: the commonwealth, the common weal, the common good. It’s going to be an upside-down place, though; everything will be done by contraries. (More’s Utopia is a model here, but so is a larger tradition of carnival, the world upside-down; Shakespeare has a stranger, more surreal version of this in the Fool’s prophecy in King Lear, too; the Folio text is probably quite close to Tempest in date.) There won’t be any traffic, business, commerce, trade. There won’t be any magistrates – no courts, no law. No letters, writing, no ‘book-learning’, it might be said. (Shakespeare had a more violent version of this very early in his career, too, when the rebel Jack Cade and his gang promise to ‘kill all the lawyers’, and reserve their particular hatred for those who read and write, especially in the service of the law. Cade also promises that ‘all the realm shall be in common’. 2 Henry VI, 4.2.) There won’t be riches or poverty, no one will be in service, hired or in bondage as a servant. There won’t be any legal contracts, or inheritance; there won’t be any borders, or boundaries to land. And – getting more extreme – neither will there be agriculture, specifically tilth, ploughing, tilling, digging, the hard labour of farming. There won’t be vineyards. There won’t be metal, which here might specifically mean precious metals, especially gold (More’s Utopians have golden chamber pots, so little do they value it). There won’t be wine or oil, which seems pretty harsh. Gonzalo seems to be imagining a return to a kind of golden age, before agriculture and wine were invented: Renaissance mythographies attribute their invention to ancient gods, like Demeter and Bacchus, sometimes suggesting that they were historical figures who ended up being worshipped as gods because of these inventions. This will be a place without labour, no occupation, all men idle, all; and women too: it will be a place like Paradise before the Fall, because work is a consequence of original sin. But it will be good idleness, innocent and pure, the state of otium, positive inaction, leisure, contentment praised by classical writers and Renaissance humanists. (Negotium – business, busyness – is a negative state.) There won’t be any sovereignty, in fact, no king, no leader – and Sebastian does point out the contradiction here, that Gonzalo has already named himself as king. Antonio adds that he’s got carried away and has forgotten the beginning of his thought experiment, his fantasy. And Gonzalo has got carried away, in this imagining of another way of living, some of which seems absurd, but most of which has in fact been described and praised, in various forms, by political theorists, by ancient writers, and in the bible. It’s a fantasy of starting over, of remaking the world in a different way. It’s a very theatrical fantasy: on this island, on this stage, anything is possible. And, naturally, Gonzalo hasn’t finished yet…