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Sea Changes: Shakespeare's Tempest Revisited
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10235 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
6,207 Words |
| Author
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Sam Schoenbaum
Sam Schoenbaum is Distinguished Professor of Renaissance
Studies at the University of Maryland and director of the
university's Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies. A
past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, he
is currently the vice president of the International
Shakespeare Association. Schoenbaum's numerous publications
include Shakespeare's Lives, William Shakespeare: A
Documentary Life, and William Shakespeare: Records and Images. |
In his celebrated eulogy "To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr. William Shakespeare," prefacing the great 1623 Folio collection of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies--thirty-six plays in all (Pericles did not find a place in the volume), Ben Jonson--poet, playwright, colleague, and rival--praises one who "was not for an age, but for all time." Undeniably true, but in the almost four centuries that have passed since Jonson wrote his testament the plays have been subjected to cultural and historical transformations as they underwent revival, alteration, or neglect. Early in the present century, Hamlet was Shakespeare's preeminent tragedy. For some people it still is, but King Lear has moved to the forefront. Despite the familiar truism, the more things change, the more different they may well become. In this essay, The Tempest occupies center stage.
In a postimperial age with the Third World exercising an irresistible potency, the play has aroused special appeal. Black Calibans have become fairly common. To cite a few: Canada Lee (1945), Earle Hyman (1960), James Earl Jones (1962), and Rudolf Walker in Jonathan Miller's London production at the Mermaid Theatre (1970). In the lately published Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Ted Hughes, the poet laureate of England, includes a segment on Caliban's blackness. As Hughes would have it, "Caliban's 'blackness,' is semisupernatural (his father a devil-god) 'africa-ness'... a token of his absolute 'otherness' of his origins in the depths of what has been excluded from the ego's life." The past year has seen the publication of Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan's Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History. The Vaughans argue that the name Caliban derives from cauliban , the Romany word for black, although in the play Caliban is described as "a freckled whelp" and doesn't appear to be especially black-skinned. Never mind. The Vaughans have provided a study that manifests the powerful interest that is stirred by The Tempest for present-day students and theatergoers.
PLAY OR MASQUE?
Thunder and lightning strike. While a ship lists dangerously in heavy seas and passengers--evidently a royal assemblage--apprehensively weave to and fro, the crew go about their desperate nautical business with a will, then exit, only to return drenched to announce that all is lost. There are farewells to loved ones as the vessel splits. The mode is realistic. In this dramatized prologue, literally crackling with electricity, the playwright has, with a few bold strokes, brought forward all of the shipboard party save his jester and drunken butler. The audience has
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