Shakespeare’s World AN32005BA 03; AN2113MA 05
Cultural Codes of Caliban: A Cultural Historical Overview;
Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)
Gabriella Moise
The historical, social, cultural background; literary impacts
•Elizabethan England: discoveries, travels to the New World
•1584–1587: the colonization of Virginia/Roanoke Island (Sir Walter Raleigh)
•Michel de Montaigne’s essay ”Of Cannibals” (1580) ~“savages” of the New World, despite their primitive ways, might have significant human virtues that the Europeans lacked
→ Caliban as the anagram of cannibal
The Tempest does not have an immediate literary source, yet...
• Sea Venture, the lead ship of a fleet to Jamestown (Virginia) from Plymouth (England) in 1609, separated by a storm; a year later in 1610 the ship arrived in Jamestown
→ accounts of the shipwreck and the miraculous survival were published
→ Shakespeare knew two of the leaders of the Virginia Company
• Gonzalo implicates in a speech of Montaigne’s ”Of Cannibals”
• Allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Prospero’s words
• The interlude of Act 4 (”masque”) is probably written later (for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of James I)
•
Biographical factors
•around 1610 Shakespeare left London and moved to his hometown Stratford-upon-Avon
”I’ll break my staff ,/Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,/And deeper than did ever plummet sound/I’ll drown my book.” (The Tempest, Act V, Sc 1)
~ Prospero throws his magic staff and his book into the sea and returns to Milan to regain his throne
~ Shakespeare’s farewell to London, to the stage, writing and the bustle of the city
•The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s latest works (wrote on his own)
•Pericles (1608-09), Cymbeline (1609-10), The Winter’s Tale (1610-11)
Common motifs in these four works:
- reunion of lost family members
- the reappearance of presumably dead people
- living in exile, as a recluse or hiding
- return after long years of absence
- compensation for the innocent ones
- reconciliation instead of retaliation/revenge (!)
Shakespeare’s “retirement” does not mean a total withdrawal from literary work, he collaborates with John Fletcher to write Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-14)
Generic classification
•comedy (in accordance with the era’s valuation due to its happy ending)
•romance
•tragicomedy
•pastoral comedy
•tragedy
•(wedding) ”masque” (performance extravaganzas with music, dancing, and elaborate stage machinery performed around the central figure of the king, glorifying him and his estate)
Thematic motifs of The Tempest*
•power, possession, usurpation
•imprisonment-liberation
•thirst for knowledge
•betrayal/loyalty
* NB. It is the students responsibility to give examples from the play to these thematic points, which naturally necessitates the reading and a profound knowledge of the work itself.
Film adaptations of The Tempest (Source: British Film Institute)
Caliban’s textualpresence
” PROSPERO
[...] Then was this island--
Save for the son that she [Sycorax] did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with
A human shape.” (I/2)
” PROSPERO
Shake it off. Come on;
We'll visit Caliban my slave, who never
Yields us kind answer. [...]
MIRANDA
'Tis a villain, sir,
I do not love to look on. [...]
TRINCULO and STEPHANO (II/2)
”What have we
here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish:
he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-
like smell; [...] Legged like a man and his fins like
arms! Warm o' my troth! I do now let loose
my opinion; hold it no longer: this is no fish,
but an islander, that hath lately suffered by A
thunderbolt. [...]”
”[...] I have not scaped drowning to be afeard now of your
four legs. [...] This is some monster of the isle with four legs [...]”
”Four legs and two voices: a most delicate monster!”
By this good light, this is a very shallow monster!
I afeard of him! A very weak monster!
”I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed
monster. A most scurvy monster! [...] A howling monster: a drunken monster!”
PROPERO
”Filth as thou art” (I/2)
”Abhorred slave […] A thing most brutish” (I/2)
ALONSO
”This is a strange thing as e'er I look'd on.” (V/1)
PROSPERO
”This mis-shapen knave”
PROSPERO
”He is as disproportion'd in his manners/As in his shape.”
The transfiguration of Caliban: 17th century*
*based on Virginia Mason Vaughan’s ”’Something Rich and Strange’: Caliban’s Theatrical Metamorphoses”
•In 1667, William Davenant collaborated with John Dryden and produced an adaptation of the play, titled The Tempest; or The Enchanted Island
•From the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century, The Tempest appears as a musical extravaganza
Caliban is portrayed as a lecherous drunk
his lines become dramatically cut and altered
→ the epitome of monstrousness, a non-human symbol of human evil
no longer natural man but a savage monster who reflects European fears of the non-European world
↔ Shakespeare’s Caliban is a primitive man who poses basic questions about the values and benefits of Jacobean “civilization”
The transfiguration of Caliban: 18th century
•David Garrick, actor-manager for the Drury Lane, experimented with a new operatic Tempest in 1756
•Caliban as an amphibious monster
•Garrick returned to the First Folio; by restoring Shakespeare's original text, the production was a success, it ran nearly every year until 1787
huge body, booming voice, howling on all occasions
Caliban did not suit the age’s notions of comedy. His grotesque deformities were not the proper vehicle for good-natured wit.
Caliban did not suit the 18th century definition of a ”Noble Savage.” In an age of reason Caliban was too irrational, too inhuman.
The transfiguration of Caliban: Romanticism/19th century
•William Charles Macready revived The Tempest as Shakespeare had originally conceived it, in 1838.
• With the rise of Romanticism, the Noble Savage no longer had to be a man of reason. He could be instead a creature of emotion and sensibility. He could be seen as one who depended on intuition for a direct apprehension of nature.
•Now there was scope for Caliban’s poetic sensibilities and tragic suffering, as well as for his grotesquerie.
•Coleridge described Caliban not as a sotted monster, but as a ”noble being; a man in the sense of the imagination, all the images he utters are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical” (Coleridge in Coleridge on Shakespeare, a lecture on The Tempest; 1811-12 )
George Bennett played the role of Caliban as “the rude and uncultivated savage, in a style, which arouses our sympathies”
a strong resistance to tyranny appears in Caliban
The modern Caliban, victim of oppression, was born!
The transfiguration of Caliban: late 19th century-early 20th century
•1873: Daniel Wilson’s book Caliban; the Missing Link
•Wilson associated Caliban with Darwin's missing link; to him, Shakespeare’s monster personified the evolutionist’s theoretical “intermediate being, lower than man.”
gradually Caliban the ape man evolved on stage
•1904: Beerbohm Tree stressed Caliban’s humanity:
“in his love of music and his affinity with the unseen world, we discern the dawn of art”
•1916: Percy MacKaye’s performance in New York, symbolizes “that passionate child-curious part of us all”
•1938: Robert Atkins’s Caliban as an aspiring and frustrated Neanderthal
•1940-51: in English productions as a prehistoric figure
•The Darwinian Caliban demonstrated humanity’s capacity for continued growth and improvement.
The transfiguration of Caliban/Political overtones: 2nd half of the 20th century
•After 1945: The Tempest as a study of the colonists’ adventures in the New World
•Prospero’s enchanted island was an image of America, Caliban as the island’s indigenous inhabitant
•Shakespeare’s monster as all Third World native peoples – of whatever continent or country –colonized by Europeans (now throwing off their foreign governors and asserting independence)
They share a common fate:
-disinherited
-subjugated
-exploited
-learned a conqueror’s language and values
-endured enslavement and contempt by European usurpers
By the late 1960s: Caliban's politicized imagewas born!
The transfiguration of Caliban/Political overtones: 1960s-70s
Caliban changed from monster to vehicle for contemporary ideas.
•1968: in Peter Brook’s experimentative adaptation (Round House, London) Caliban raped Miranda, escaped from Prospero, and took over the island. The experiment continued in a mime of homosexual rape, Caliban on Prospero.
•Brook’s version clearly differed from Shakespeare’s original, but it charted the way to new interpretations of Caliban.
The role represented power more than subjugation!
The transfiguration of Caliban/Political overtones: 1980-81
•The climax of Caliban’s politicization, also the peak of his colonial image.
•Caliban represented any group that felt itself oppressed:
in New York as a punk rocker
in Augsburg as a black slave performing African dances and rituals
in Connecticutthe uncontrollable libido of Prospero
Later, Caliban returned to his monstrous origins, not being a political symbol anymore.
21st century Subversion: Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder
(the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games
•Sir Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel ~ emblematic figure of the Industrial Revolution
•he recites Caliban’s soliloquy of ”Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises” (Act III, Sc 2)
• at the top of Glastonbury Tor, a prehistoric sight (a terraced, conical hill of clay, in the county of Somerset )
•Branagh an iconic actor and director of Shakespeare’s plays, also a representative of the heritage films; often associated with roles, such as Hamlet, Jago, Henry V or Benedetto ↔ Caliban
•Caliban hears ”Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,” which conjure the pre-colonial times of the island, the era of harmony before the arrival of Prospero
↔ Branagh/Brunel histrionic performance is full of national pride, almost boastful, which glorifies and celebrates the industrial revolution, progress, and the triumph of reason (accompanied by Edward Elgar’s Enigma variations, ”Nimrod”, 1898-99)
Danny Boyle offers an ironic, multiply ambivalent, subversive, and singularly post-colonial reading of The Tempest and most prominently of the figure of Caliban. Excitingly, Boyle also shows the industrial revolution critically, from a tangibly socialist point of view, hence the Brunel-Branagh-Caliban figure is multiply subversive, since Brunel-Branagh glorifies nature, a pre-industrial scenery through the words of Caliban while the monstrous chimneys and factories are under construction.
Branagh’s performance of Caliban’s speech as Brunel: