Word: calibans
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...version that Edward Payson Call directed in 1971 was largely a failure, but William Ball had managed in 1960 to turn out the finest Tempest I have ever seen, thanks to a strong cast headed by Morris Carnovsky's Prospero, Clayton Corzatte's Ariel, and Earle Hyman's Caliban. And this despite the ill-advised total omission of the opening storm scene...
Prospero, so often described as omniscient, refers to Caliban as a creature "on whose nature nurture can never stick." But he is quite wrong. In the dozen years Prospero and his daughter have lived on the island, Caliban has striven to better himself and has learned how to speak well. In the course of the play he learns valuable lessons and at the end asserts, "I'll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace...
...most engrossing--and most gross--of the characters in The Tempest is Prospero's "savage and deformed slave" Caliban, the subhuman offspring of a witch and a devil. It is incorrect to regard Ariel and Caliban as polarities. They are undeniably contrasted; but they also share a number of traits, such as distaste for physical labor, a yearning for freedom, a delight in pranks, a love of nature, an appreciation of music, and a fear of their master. Ariel has some coarse language and Caliban some ethereal lines...
...name Caliban may simply be an anagram of cannibal (Shakespeare took some material for the play from Montaigne's essay on cannibals), or it may be related to cauliban, a Gypsy word for blackness, At any rate, Freedman has assigned the role here to a black actor, Joe Morton. A black Caliban is no novelty: the 1945 Webster production had the boxer-turned-actor Canada Lee, whose performance I found too monochromatic; and the 1960 mounting here had an exemplary Earle Hyman, who had been a superlative Othello here three years earlier...
Some people have complained that casting a black Caliban is a racist act and turns the play into a white-supremacist tract. They need to examine the play more carefully. For one thing, King Alonso is on his way home from marrying his daughter to an African king. More important, Caliban is far from the most evil character in the play. It is true that he has tried to ravish Prospero's daughter, but he was not born to reason or to know right from wrong; he is not immoral, but amoral. It is also true that he plans...