Black theology is an academic movement calling for the reevaluation of Christian thought based on the claim that God sides with the oppressed – or, put more vividly, that God is Black. From the perspective of Black theology, many virtues turn out not to be virtuous at all but rather practices that secure white supremacy. What are commonly dismissed as vices may, from the perspective of Black theology, turn out to be virtues: practices essential for survival and flourishing in the face of racial domination. The Tempest is, in part, a meditation on domination, and this chapter explores what it would mean to approach the play from the perspective of Black theology. The apparent virtue of Miranda and Ariel turns out to be white virtue, habits that claim objective goodness but that actually affirm and naturalize arbitrary rule. Caliban, attuned to primal enchantment and desiring liberation from arbitrary rule, exhibits habits that appear vicious but that may be read as virtuous from the framework of Black theology.

“Kindness” is gentleness, consideration, care for others. It is related to “kinship”—the genetic and affective bonds among parents, children, brothers, and sisters. By way of “kind,” meaning “species” or “breed,” it expands the reach of those bonds to what Montaigne (in Florio’s translation) calls “the general throng.” The word “kindness” incites us to think about how human virtues, which usually stand apart from the natural world, might be rooted in our kinship with all the other animals. The Tempest is a key text for thinking about the history and the great utility of kindness as a transspecies virtue in the twenty-first century. This chapter makes its case for animal virtue by telling the story of the key arc of action in the play itself and by recounting a story about how the author of the chapter, at a workshop with actors and scholars, was terribly unkind toward Caliban and what he learned from his own lack of animal virtue.

Chapter 6 shows The Tempest dispersing instances of the aesthetic-utopian and instrumental political power throughout until a remarkable ending imposes a tragicomic aesthetic over all other materials in the play. In describing the disenchanted early modern world with fantasies of enchantment, in representing instrumental reason as magical manipulation of natural spirits, and in manifesting the power of aesthetic representations to heal, restore, and regenerate a fallen humanity, the play is one of Shakespeare’s consummate examples of the aesthetic-utopian. At the center of the play is the master–slave pair Prospero and Caliban. Each is a deposed sovereign in a narrative of betrayal, forming the center of two (fragmentary) dramas that are each an essential part of the larger play. And in the play’s implied after-time, both are restored to their former polities as sovereigns. And both see something of the foolishness of the political struggles in which they had lived so long. As such, they are important parts of the aesthetic-utopian in the play’s conclusion, which does not so much defeat the political as declare it irrelevant to the play’s ultimate aesthetic-utopian vision.

Shakespeare shows how violence can be prevented by replacing retribution, or revenge, with “restorative justice”: renouncing punishment toward others and the self, thus transcending both shame and guilt ethics, and giving violent offenders the opportunity and means to restore to the community what they had taken from it, thus reconciling with their community. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio conducts a psychological experiment showing how the “retributive” apparatus of the state produced an attempted (judicial) murder and rape, whereas the Duke’s approach prevented all violence, by individuals and the state. The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale illustrate the same principles and outcome. The Merchant of Venice, however, shows how severely restorative justice is compromised when the primary cause and constituent of violence is ignored, and attention is paid only to its symptom or consequence (Shylock’s anger at Antonio’s anti-Semitism).

As an artist working in multiple fields, I am suggesting in this chapter, which is also a reader’s memoir, that paying homage to Cormac McCarthy’s work in paint and in performance is also a form of reading McCarthy. In proposing this expanded view of what it is to read and thus to grapple with a masterwork, I am positing a wider of view of the pleasure and purpose of reading, and I am allowing that responding to McCarthy’s work in this way – because it entails the responsibility to grasp at least something of what is intrinsic about the work – also constitutes a form of criticism, a notion I have explored in all three of the books I have published on McCarthy. Painting a series called The Lost Blood Meridian Notebook entails challenges and confusions in many ways comparable to trying to write compellingly about that novel, and performing the part of White in The Sunset Limited is equally as demanding as writing about it, for the actor is the word made flesh in the act of becoming one of McCarthy’s characters and thus of becoming both the reader and the read.