Sea Changes

Patrick Parrinder

• Indigo, or Mapping the Waters by Marina Warner
  Chatto, 402 pp, £14.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 7011 3531 X
• Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History by Alden Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan
  Cambridge, 290 pp, £35.00, January 1992, ISBN 0 521 40305 7

The British, a nation of Sancho Panzas, like to dream of governing an island. The majority of ideal states both ancient and modern have been imaginary cities rather than sea-girt lumps of rock, but the British Utopia is a fertile commonwealth surrounded by beaches in which, like Gonzalo in The Tempest, we would by contraries execute all things. Both the word and the island of Utopia were the teasing inventions of Sir Thomas More. More’s vision of the good place which is no place may have been inspired by the voyages of Columbus’s follower Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela and, absurdly, managed to adorn with his name both of the continents of the New World.