Word: played
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other Shakespearean play has elicited such a range of interpretation and evaluation. If Agate declared it one of his "unfavorite" plays in the canon, Dover Wilson thought it Shakespeare's greatest work, Wilson Knight and Henry James placed it at the top of English literature, and Quiller-Couch proclaimed it the supreme work in all literature. For me, it has unsurpassed moments, but as a whole ranks below The Winter's Tale among the four late romances. Everyone agrees that the play means more than it says, but what that meaning is remains a bone of vigorous contention...
...central role is that of Prospero, the play's Grand Puppeteer, which was highly suited to the talents of Richard Burbage, for whom Shakespeare fashioned his Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Lear and other major parts. The role is more than three times as long as any other in the play, and the character has been thought to stand for God, Jesus, Fate, Justice, Art, Intellect, the Ideal Ruler, the Colonizer, the Grumpy Old Man, and a host of other things including Shakespeare himself...
...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...
...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...