Caliban appears for the first time in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest after Prospero summons him with some vicious insults. Caliban, quite understandably, replies by leveling curses against both Prospero and Miranda. Notes: “blowing from … southeast to southwest.”:
Upon thy wicked dam; come forth!
Enter CALIBAN
CALIBAN As wicked dew as ere my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both. A southwest blow on ye
And blister you all o’er.
And, just what exactly is this malicious southwest wind that Caliban invokes against Prospero and Miranda? That is a question for which most Shakespeareans have no good answer. In his variorum edition of The Tempest (1892), Furness provides some examples of weak attempts by scholars to explain Caliban’s southwest wind by referring to southerly winds in general (68n382). Apparently, this wind must come specifically from the southwest and be blisteringly hot. Is there such a wind in England? No. How about Bermuda? Orthodox Shakespeare scholars love to incorrectly associate the island setting of The Tempest with Bermuda. So, is Bermuda famous for a very hot southwest wind? No, again.
But, if Marlowe wrote The Tempest in exile from the island of Malta, then this curse of a southwest wind by Caliban makes perfect sense. First of all, the setting of The Tempest is obviously a Mediterranean island between Tunis and Naples, and Malta fits this description. And, secondly, Malta is famous for a very hot, very dry southwesterly wind. It is called the sirocco (also spelled scirocco, sciroc, or siroc). Although the sirocco of Malta normally blows hot and damp from the southeast, it is most intense and most intolerable when it blows extremely hot and dry from the southwest. Here are some comments from William Sloane Kennedy (1897) on The Tempest and these blistering southwest winds of Malta:
A student of ‘The Tempest’ finds growing upon him, as he studies, the conviction that the scholars are right in assigning a presumably Italian source-play or novel ready to Shakespeare’s hand. I submit that we have in this Sirocco matter strong corroborative evidence to that effect. Such pieces of local realism and historical atmosphere as he found in his quarries Shakespeare usually retained. He nowhere else alludes to a blistering wind, and, if he had, would undoubtedly have spoken of it as a southeast wind. No one but an Italian of the peninsula or a Sicilian would have called the Sirocco a southwest wind. Shakespeare’s English southwest or southerly winds, as I have said, are moist winds. That he speaks once of a southwest wind that blisters shows he was following a Southern model and simply transferred it into his text, does it not?
Well, belatedly answering Kennedy’s rhetorical question at the end, my response is: that the author speaks once of a southwest wind that blisters, does not necessarily show that the author simply transferred a southwest wind from a Southern model he was following. The author may not have been Shakespeare writing from England. The author may indeed have been Marlowe writing in exile from the island of Malta where he may have personally experienced these blistering southwest winds many times.
Check out this NASA satellite photo of a sirocco blowing a cloud of dust from the Libyan desert towards Malta and Greece. As you can plainly see from the wispy yellow cloud of dust traversing the Mediterranean Sea, the wind direction is from the southwest.
Here are some more comments about Malta’s hot southwest winds (emphasis added):
1. “the south-west wind of the hot months is by far more unpleasant and hotter than the sirocco, and more disliked by the natives,” (Adams 1870, 114)
2. “The wind blowing from any point between south and south-west is characterized by heat and dryness above all others at Malta. In summer the temperature usually varies between 88° and 98° during their prevalence; but they seldom last longer than a few hours, and their disagreeable heat and dryness may be escaped from by carefully closing the windows and doors of apartments at their onset,” (Scoresby-Jackson 1862, 480)
3. “Occasionally in summer, there is a lively hot south-west or south-east wind, blowing across the sea from the heated Saharan regions, and it gives the burning sensation of a current of air proceeding from a furnace. These hot currents, if the wind happens to be blowing from the south-west are also very dry, and are therefore injurious to vegetation especially to Orange-trees, the leaves becoming rolled up and parched, and drop off after a few days” (Borg 1976, 54). Borg is describing the winds of the Maltese islands.
Here is the full definition of sirocco—minus spelling variants, word origins, and Milton’s usage—as it appears in The Century Dictionary: “The Italian name for a southeast wind. Two distinct classes of Italian winds are included by the term. One is a warm, humid, sultry wind accompanied by rain. This is the characteristic wind on the east side of an area of low pressure, and prevails mainly during the winter season. The other type of sirocco—that to which the term is generally applied in English usage—is a hot, dry, dust-laden wind blowing from the high land of Africa to the coasts of Malta, Sicily, and Naples. During its prevalence the sky is covered with a dense haze, persons suffer from extreme lassitude, and vegetation is parched and burned. No month is free from it, but it is most frequent in the spring. Its direction varies from southeast to southwest” (Century Dictionary 1906, s.v. “sirocco”).
“I opened my door … 111°F. in the open air.”:
This quotation which Kennedy has taken from Hartwig’s book Aerial World (1875, 120) appears to be a slightly modified version of the original account by Patrick Brydone (1848) of his encounter with an oven-hot sirocco at Palermo, Sicily the morning of July 8, 1770 (194). There are some minor differences between Kennedy’s quote, Hartwig’s text, and Brydone’s original account. Brydone includes a table of daily maximum temperatures at Palermo which shows that the temperature reached 112°F. on July 8. Also, Brydone relates: “Some gentlemen who were in the country, told me that they walked out immediately after the sirocco, and found the grass and plants that had been green the day before were become quite brown, and crackled under their feet as if dried in an oven” (197).
This sirocco which Brydone experienced is far from a typical humid sirocco coming in from the southeast. Unquestionably, it is the more atypical southwest sirocco blowing directly off the Sahara Desert. Parching. Blistering. This is Caliban’s wind.
Caliban’s “a south-west blow on ye”
PROSPERO Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.320-325But to our work,—the text of ‘The Tempest’! It is probably because the Sirocco is supposed to be always a southeast wind that the Shakespeare critics (all Northern men) have failed to notice that Caliban’s “a south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o’er,” undoubtedly refers to the Sirocco wind. One would have supposed that the fact lay plainly in sight, on the surface of the text; for what wind blisters the skin except the terrible winds blowing off the Sahara or the deserts of Arabia? In England southwest winds are the prevalent winds in winter; but they are warm moist winds blowing from off the Gulf Stream, and, so far from blistering, are mollifying. Shakespeare frequently expresses dislike of these foggy southerly winds (‘Coriolanus,’ ii.3.34,35; ‘Troilus,’ v.1.21); he preferred the dry bracing winds of the North. But the Sirocco, like the terrible Fohn, is often a southwest wind. Like the Khamsin, it is dry, parching, blistering,—breathing hot upon one, like a tiger with breath of flame. It is laden with the red dust of the Sahara, “blowing from the high land of Africa to the coasts of Malta, Sicily, and Naples. During its prevalence the sky is covered with a dense haze, persons suffer from extreme lassitude, and vegetation is parched and burned. No month is free from it, but it is most frequent in the spring. Its direction varies from southeast to southwest.” (Century Dictionary, s.v. “Sirocco.”) From an old note-book, I also copy this from Hartwig’s ‘Aerial World,’ p. 120; he is describing the Sirocco: “I opened my door at eight in the morning, wrote Brydone from Palermo, without suspecting there was any change in the temperature, when all at once I felt a burning impression upon my face like the air from a hot oven. I closed the door, exclaiming to Fullarton that all the atmosphere was on fire. The temperature was 111°F. in the open air.”
(Kennedy 1897, 577-78)