Word: caliban
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...
Reaction in the U.S. and abroad ranged from dismay to a kind of shocked ribaldry. JACKIE, HOW COULD YOU? headlined Stockholm's Expressen. "Nixon has a Greek running mate," cracked Bob Hope, "and now everyone wants one." Said a former Kennedy aide: "She's gone from Prince Charming to Caliban." In a more sober vein, French Political Commentator André Fontaine wrote in Le Monde: "Jackie, whose staunch courage during John's funeral made such an impression, now chooses to shock by marrying a man who could be her father and whose career contradicts?rather strongly, to say the least?...
...Connecticut Newspaper Editor Charles Dudley Warner in 1850, when he wrote: "True it is that politics makes strange bedfellows." He stole it from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act II, Scene 2), in which Trinculo, forced by a storm to seek refuge under a sheet with the abhorrent Caliban, says: "There is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows...
...Schmidt's casting of Raymond Singer as the venemous fool Thersites, a character at once completely repellent yet perhaps the only moral person in the play. Singer is young and attractive, and therein lies the original job of reinterpretation. But again after awhile, the novelty of Thersites as a Caliban-cum-Puck wears thin as we desire something more substantial...
Still, at the ambiguous center of The Merchant of Venice is Shylock. No one knows exactly what to do with this embittered Jew, and Claudio Buchwald is no exception. Kenneth Tynan once described this character as "sort of a capitalistic Caliban." If that is the case, Buchwald is more a capitalist and less a Caliban. Yet though he misses much of the humor in Shylock. Buchwald's creation will be a tough one to forget. Wringing his hands and shakily glancing over his sagging shoulder, he fails to miss a physical or vocal nuance for his chosen portrayal. His feet...