The Tempest and Black Natural Law

Abstract

Vincent Lloyd’s 2016 book Black Natural Law presents four case histories in which African American intellectuals used the natural law tradition to mount defenses of the rights, capacities, and dignity of members of their communities. This essay uses the discourse of black natural law as reconstructed by Lloyd to reread Caliban’s political arguments and social and aesthetic project in The Tempest. Although the natural law tradition became increasingly secularized during the century of revolution, black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. drew on the religious renditions of natural law that were alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reading Shakespeare with black natural law is not simply an audacious leap into our troubled present, but also brings new focus on the forms of Scripturally-inspired pluralism that natural law theory supported in Shakespeare’s age.

Introduction to “Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings”

“…But tension is not the only interface between the religions represented in this collection. In the case of (Lupton 2019), it is perhaps more accurate to suggest that Julia Reinhard Lupton's innovative application of Black natural law to The Tempest serves to synthesize elements of various religious perspectives. Similarly, in (Smith 2018b), Matthew Smith argues "that in Measure for Measure Shakespeare uses law to synthesize certain aspects of religious experience from divergent corners" (Smith 2018b, p. 1)-including Catholic, Calvinist, Puritan, and agnostic perspectives.…”