The Tempest by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page A

himself was more the link between the man and the beast than this thing. It was a creature of the woods, one of nature’s spawns; it breathed of nuts and herbs, and rubbed itself against the back of trees. 6
    Charles Kean’s 1857 Caliban had similarly animal overtones suggesting “the dawn of the apish Caliban” 7 which dominated stage versions toward the end of the nineteenth century, influenced by Daniel Wilson’s
Caliban, the Missing Link
(1873) in which Shakespeare’s creation of the misshapen Caliban suggested the Bard’s intuitive grasp of evolutionary theory.
    Actor-managers Beerbohm Tree and F. R. Benson both chose to play Caliban in preference to Prospero. Benson’s wife records how her husband “spent many hours watching monkeys and baboons in the Zoo, in order to get the movements and postures in keeping with his ‘make-up,’ ” in a costume which she described as “half-monkey, half coco-nut,” noting that he “delighted in swarming up a tree on the stage and hanging from the branches head downwards while he gibbered at ‘Trinculo.’ ” 8 Tyrone Power in Daly’s 1897 production invoked the same idea. According to William Winter, the
New York Daily Tribune
reviewer, he played Caliban as a “brutish creature, the hideous, malignant clod of evil, in whom, nevertheless, the germs of intelligence, feeling and fanciful perception are beginning to stir.” 9 Beerbohm Tree’s Caliban in 1904 stressed Caliban’s humanity, arguing that “in his love of music and his affinity with the unseen world, we discern in the soul which inhabits the brutish body of this elemental man the germs of a sense of beauty, the dawn of art.” 10 The production’s most famous scene was the final tableau showing Caliban alone once more on his island as the Neapolitans sailed for home:
    Caliban
creeps from his cave and watches.…
Caliban
listens for the last time to the sweet air
[Ariel’s song],
then turns sadly in the direction of the departing ship. The play is ended. As the curtain rises again, the ship is seen on the horizon
, Caliban
stretching out his arms toward it in mute despair. The night falls, and
Caliban
is left on the lonely rock. He is king once more
. 11
    In the second half of the twentieth century Caliban has frequently been represented as black, initially by white actors in blackface. The first black actor to play the part was Canada Lee in Margaret Webster’s 1945 New York production, although in many ways his performance harked back to the monstrous representations of earlier productions: “Lee wore a scaly costume and grotesque mask, moved with an animal-like crouch, and emphasized Caliban’s monstrousness.” 12 In the past fifty years Caliban has evolved from comic grotesque to “noble savage.” Jeanne Addison Roberts described Henry Baker’s performance at the 1970 Washington Summer Festival Shakespeare production: “Baker’s black skin, his somewhat flawed enunciation, a minstrel-show mouth painted grotesquely in a greenish face, and the use of the word ‘slave’ evoked instantly for the Washington audience the American Negro.” 13

    1. Frank Benson as a fish-eating Caliban in the 1890s, represented as a creature akin to Charles Darwin’s “missing link” between ape and human.
    Baker’s Caliban refused to be cowed or subdued: “Caliban was now a black militant, angry and recalcitrant.” 14 In the same year Jonathan Miller’s production at the Mermaid Theatre drew on Octave Mannoni’s anthropological study of colonial oppression,
Prospero and Caliban
, 15 which used these two characters as emblems of the colonialparadigm. One reviewer described Rudolph Walker’s Caliban as “an uneducated field Negro” in contrast to Norman Beaton’s Ariel, a “competent, educated ‘houseboy.’ ” 16 Historians of the play’s afterlife regard the early 1980s as representing the “climax of Caliban’s politicization” 17 in productions around the world. It is perhaps as a