GONZALO All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour; treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth
Of its own kind all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
SEBASTIAN No marrying ’mongst his subjects?
ANTONIO None, man, all idle—whores and knaves.
GONZALO I would with such perfection govern, sir,
T’excel the Golden Age.
SEBASTIAN ’Save his majesty!
ANTONIO Long live Gonzalo! (2.1.160-170)
All things in common is significant here; owning goods in common was central to many utopian projects (and hence to some Protestant groups; Jack Cade also suggests it as part of his anarchy and rebellion in Henry VI), but Gonzalo goes further: no labour will be necessary to produce such goods, but nature will provide. Sweat or endeavour explicitly invokes Genesis 3.19, when God tells Adam that he will have to labour after the Fall: ‘In the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate bread’. Gonzalo’s imagined island is another Eden, an unfallen place. But it will also be free of treason and felony, the politicking and betrayal and moral failing of human society, crime more generally, and of sword, pike, knife, and gun: there will be no weapons, and hence no war. (There’s an implicit over-going here of Isaiah 2.4, ‘they shall beate their swords into plow-shares, and their speares into pruning hookes: nation shall not lift vp sword against nation, neither shall they learne warre any more’, because in Gonzalo’s commonwealth, even the tools of agricultural labour will not be needed.) The land will provide, and plentifully: nature should bring forth of its own kind all foison, all abundance (another biblical echo: in the narrative of the creation of the world, the earth and the sea bring forth plants and animals and fish, ‘abundantly, after their kind’ (Genesis 1.11-25), that is, appropriate to their natures). The people, too, will be unfallen in this paradise; they will be innocent. Sebastian is sly in his undermining: no marrying ’mongst his subjects? It was a frequent criticism, or fear, of Protestant sects that they practised ‘free love’ and had multiple sexual partners, rather than marrying, and it’s this that Sebastian is probably implying, and Antonio certainly is, rather than the biblical injunction (again) that ‘in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are giuen in marriage, but are as the Angels of God in heauen’ (Matthew 22.30), that is, that there will be no marriage in heaven. Again Antonio equates idleness with immorality, but Gonzalo is adamant: I would with such perfection govern t’excel the Golden Age. This will be both a classical and a biblical paradise, an unfallen state. And so Antonio and Sebastian mock on, repeating their potentially, and ironically, dangerous allegation that Gonzalo wishes to be king – God save his majesty! Long live Gonzalo!
Direct biblical quotations here are taken from the King James or Authorized Version, which appeared in 1611. It is thus pretty much contemporaneous with the play. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare had anything to do with the AV… (But he probably knew people who knew people who did, literary London being what it was.)
