Pitying Caliban: Race, Reprobation, and Feeling in The Tempest

The University of Queensland's School of Communication and Arts invites you to attend our 2025 Lloyd Davis Public Lecture.

The Lloyd Davis Fellowship was created in memory of Associate Professor Lloyd Davis and aims to bring a major world scholar to UQ each year, to teach and share their scholarship on Shakespeare.

About the lecture

A persisting question about the endurance of the European slave trade has been why so many White Europeans who called themselves Christians were not moved to end the suffering of enslaved people; the persistence of the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples seems to evince the pitilessness of most White Christians. In the United States, the pitilessness of enslavers was understood by Solomon Northup (author of Twelve Years a Slave) as produced by the ordinariness of enslaved peoples’ suffering, by the fact that Whites, since they were children, and from generation to generation, had seen the enslaved suffer. But in the early modern period, the enslavement that led to the suffering of Black Africans and Indigenous peoples was not yet normalized, and early modern Christians had to learn how to feel about a new form of slavery built upon emerging ideas of racial difference. This lecture will consider how The Tempest may have shaped how early modern English audiences felt about the enslavement of Caliban. Britton proposes that the play employs a Calvinist language of reprobation not only to suggest that Caliban is enslaved because his race makes him a reprobate, but also to suggest that hating what God hates is an act of Christian piety.

About the presenter

Dennis Austin Britton is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, co-editor with Melissa Walter of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, and co-editor with Kimberly Anne Coles of “Spenser and Race,” a special issue of Spenser Studies. He is currently working on a book entitled “Shakespeare and Pity: A Literary History of Race and Feeling” and a new edition of Othello for Cambridge University Press.

Event details

Date: Thursday 3 July 2025
Time: 3:15pm for 3:30–4:30pm. Followed by a reception from 4.30pm–5:30pm.
Venue: Room 227, The Atrium: Brisbane City, 308 Queen Street, Brisbane (view map)
Getting there: Located in the heart of the city at 308 Queen Street, we recommend travelling via public transport. Central train station is a short four minute walk, and bus stop 59 Queen and 149 Creek are right outside the building.
RSVP: Monday 30 June 2025

Enquiries

engagement@hass.uq.edu.au

Banner Image

Thomas Rowlandson, Scene from the Tempest: Caliban, Prospero and Miranda, 1783–87.
Etching, 23.7 x 32.8 cm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, purchased with The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1953.

Available to view: Thomas Rowlandson | Scene from the Tempest: Caliban, Prospero and Miranda | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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