The fused discourse of Indians, vagrants, and Irish in the Tempest and other literature: Discursive appropriation of the other and resistance in seventeenth-century England

The Tempest by Shakespeare portrays the social construction of power relationships with reference to early seventeenth-century American Indians, vagrants, and Irish. Renaissance self-fashioners in the new age of capitalism and colonialism figured their anxieties and projected their disowned traits onto social inferiors. Particular passages in The Tempest involving Caliban represent fused discourse of Indians, vagrants, and Irish in metaphoric equation according to the Renaissance master trope of resemblance. This analogical linking of Indians, vagrants, and Irish is repeated in other literary and travel literature texts, and represents a discursive appropriation of property through wonder as a legitimation process. The Tempest stands out from all other texts, however, because it represents the possibility of resistance by showing power relations are arbitrary and invertible. Its four centuries of reinscription show how the truth can change and how Indians, vagrants, and Irish differentiated with the emergence of an elementary ethnography in 1700.