Storm Magic, Climate Change and Coral Fishing: Lope de Vega’s Los cautivos de Argel and Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Abstract

Over the centuries, critics of The Tempest have pointed to Iberia, some finding parallels with romances of chivalry and even Calderón’s La vida es sueño . Rather than return to well-known intertextual connections, this article turns to a comedia that for all appearances and purposes seems to have little to do with Shakespeare’s play. Lope de Vega’s early play, Los cautivos de Argel (1599), composed twelve years before Shakespeare’s work, tells of the life of a morisco on the Mediterranean coast, rather than that of a duke exiled with his young daughter to a mysterious island. Yet, by placing these two plays together, we can come to understand how climate change creates an environment so charged that witchcraft and magic are evoked in order to seek to make sense of it. Lope’s play turns to coral fishing, a craft so important at the time, as metaphor for the battles in the Mediterranean. The Tempest allows us to go deeper into coral fishing and the marvellous material that embraces the characters. The two plays help to provide both a complementary and a divergent vision of the conflicts in the Mediterranean, the peace that pervades in the islands dedicated to coral fishing and the consequences of climate change.