‘We know little of the king’s fair daughter, Claribel’: The Challenge of Islam in The Tempest

In this paper, I focus on an offstage character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Claribel, the Neapolitan princess who is given to the King of Tunis by her father King Alonso in an arranged marriage. First, I emphasize the significance of this union in terms of the sexual and political dynamics of the play. Drawing attention to the exchange value of women in establishing hierarchies or alliances between groups in patriarchal societies, I argue that Claribel’s miscegenated union with the African king undermines the play’s overconfident postcolonial interpretations based on the Prospero-Caliban relationship. Reading the play against the historical and political conditions in the Mediterranean, which is the play’s topography, in the second part of the essay, I speculate on the young princess’s possible future in Tunis. Claribel’s story is suggestive of the hundreds of Christian maidens that populated the Islamic harems in this period. While most of these women were acquired through abduction, not through exogamy, their stories and the esteem and power they attained in Muslim royal families may be helpful in envisaging a destiny for Claribel.