SOURCE: “Marriages of State: The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra,” in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 141-60.

In the excerpt below, Hall evaluates the racial and sexual threat to imperial culture posed by Caliban and Cleopatra in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, respectively.

Colonialist readings of The Tempest have shown the text to be a fertile ground for exploring issues of race, cultural contest, and authority in English encounters in the “new world.”¹ They have been less attentive to roles of women in colonial structures. The threat of interracial desire, although only one element in the myriad contests over social control in the play, is key to the establishment of an ideal of patriarchal authority. Perhaps because of his indeterminacy (to which I shall return later), Caliban has been read alternatively as black African, Afro-Caribbean, and...