Among Shakespeare's numerous stage characters, probably none has
been so variously interpreted as the 'savage and deformed slave'
Caliban in The Tempest. For nearly four centuries, widely diverse
writers and artists from around the world have found the rebellious
monster an intriguing and useful signifier. He has been portrayed
in the theatre and in literary criticism as - among other things -
a fish, a tortoise, the missing link, an American Indian, and an
African slave. He has also appeared extensively and diversely in
poems by Browning, Auden, and Brathwaite among others, and in
illustrations by Hogarth, Fuseli, Walter Crane, and other major
artists. In the twentieth century, he has been widely adopted as a
cultural icon, especially in the Caribbean, Latin America, and
Africa: first as a symbol of imperialist North Americans, more
recently as an emblem of colonised native populations.
Shakespeare's Caliban looks first at the historical, etymological,
literary, and folklore contexts in which Shakespeare created
Caliban. The authors weigh the plausible intellectual influences of
early Jacobean England and reach a tentative conclusion about what
Shakespeare may have had in mind. The rest (and far larger part) of
the book traces Caliban's evolution from his first appearance in
1611 to the present, with chapters on the major artistic genres in
which Caliban has been interpreted, appropriated, and adapted:
criticism, stage, painting, poetry, film, and sociopolitical
literature. Shakespeare's Caliban relates the monster's changing
incarnations to the cultural and intellectual forces that allowed
him to reflect major trends - including romanticism, Darwinism, the
late nineteenth-century Anglo-American rapproachment, and the Third
World liberation movements after World War II.
General
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