The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s final plays, and it tells the story of Prospero, a sorcerer and rightful Duke of Milan, who was betrayed and left to die on a remote island with his daughter Miranda. With the help of his magic and the spirit Ariel, Prospero conjures up a tempest to bring his enemies to the island and seek revenge. However, he ultimately chooses forgiveness and reconciliation over vengeance. The play explores themes of power, justice, and forgiveness, as well as the relationship between nature and civilization. Its complex characters, fantastical elements, and poetic language continue to captivate audiences and inspire adaptations and interpretations in various forms of media.
Every day I comb through Shakespeare references from social media, reddit, google… and throw out 99% of them because I’ve either seen them a thousand times before, they’re irrelevant (like Shakespeare fishing rods), or they’re just plain dumb (Shakespeare memes are on the rise, and you can thank me later for saving you from most of them).
I do this because sometimes you find a gem, like this 1960 made-for-tv Tempest starring Maurice Evans, Roddy McDowell, Lee Remick and, are you ready for this? Richard Burton. I start the movie wondering, “Is he playing Prospero?” Nope, too early, Maurice Evans is Prospero. Oh, then maybe Richard Burton is Ferdinand.
Nope. He’s *Caliban*.
This production’s just crazy. The costumes are amazing (especially Gonzalo and the boys). I have no idea yet if any of the acting is any good, but it’s entertaining to be sure. Look at the costumes on Gonzalo and the boys! The rocks, the rocks! Now I want this as a video game.
Love seeing Maurice Evans, too. For someone my age he’s probably most famous as a Batman villain, and other random supporting bit parts. Nice to see him in the lead.
I may have mentioned in a previous post that my daughter had an in-class essay assignment for her Monsters in British Literature course (which we have been incorrectly calling her Shakespeare course, because although they studied The Tempest, they also studied Beowulf and Frankenstein). The assignment was to identify the monster in the story, and make your case. She chose Antonio. At the time I thought this was a one off, “Next time we have class we’re going to write an essay.” It was actually a research project. For several days her homework was to gather notes and make her case. And then, at the designated class, did they all write it up.
So that day comes, and I pick her up, and she starts with, “Just so you know, my Antonio essay did not go as well as expected.”
“Oh?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the road, while immediately thinking, “Was our premise wrong? What could we have missed?”
“Yeah, well, we had an emergency drill today,” she began. I’m guessing every school in America has different variations of those. They were always fire drills in my day. My parents had “duck and cover” drills. Our kids have lock down drills, active shooter drills, etc… She continued, “And of course it happens in the middle of her class, so we all have to stop working and lock the doors and sit and not make any noise. That ends up taking like half the class. So she tells us, ‘I understand that you didnt get enough time to finish, but there’s nothing we can do, so just write what you have time to, and I wont count it against you if you cant finish your conclusion….'”
I laughed. “Wait, so you’re angry that you didn’t have to write more, and that the standard has been lowered?” I asked.
“Yes!” came the response. “I worked hard on that, I knew exactly what argument I wanted to present!”
“Even in the time you got, you probably still wrote twice as much as any other kids.”
“Well, yeah,” she admitted.
Love my nerd. 🙂
This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. To help raise cancer prevention awareness, and some money along the way, all proceeds from this month’s advertising, merchandise and book sales are being donated. If you’d like to support the site by supporting the cause, please consider visiting my personal fundraising page linked above, where you can make a direct donation.
This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. To help raise cancer prevention awareness, and some money along the way, all proceeds from this month’s advertising, merchandise and book sales are being donated. If you’d like to support the site by supporting the cause, please consider visiting my personal fundraising page linked above, where you can make a direct donation.
Some folks may have been part of this conversation on Twitter. I’d like to expand on some thoughts here, where they feel more permanent.
For my daughter’s “Monsters in British Literature” course they’re just wrapping up The Tempest. One of the questions she was tasked with answering was (paraphrased), “Do you think Caliban is the monster of the story? If he’s not, who is?” I know that they read something else in class that basically laid out the “what is a monster” rules, but I can’t find that to reference it at the moment.
But there’s only a few characters in the story, so let’s talk about all the candidates.
Prospero
On the one hand we’ve got colonizing Prospero. He shows up on an inhabited island and says, “Mine now.” Promptly enslaves its few inhabitants, possibly even killing one of them. It’s never really said what happens to Sycorax, is it? I used to think she just kind of died and left Caliban there to fend for himself, but how in the world does Prospero know so much about her if that’s true? Did he learn it all from Ariel? Caliban didn’t even know how to talk when he met Prospero, so that’s unlikely.
On the other hand we’ve got forgiving Prospero. He has his enemies in his grasp, and can smite them any time he wants. Instead he opts to forgive and forget – even his treacherous brother Antonio, who we will speak more of shortly.
Personally I don’t find him the monster. Especially when you play the “all in care of thee” card. He’s a dad protecting his daughter from the world. What dad doesn’t have a little animal instinct in him on that level? See a threat, neutralize the threat. Only put down your card if someone else is going to take your place (say, for instance, her getting married).
Caliban
The “too easy” answer. Sure he’s this base creature who would hardly be civilized if it wasn’t for Prospero. Is that so bad? Caliban was minding his business on his own island when this dude just showed up and took over. Of course he’s got some resentment issues. He’s got some issues with Prospero, sure – but remember that Prospero is in complete magical control of him, and can basically torment him with pinches and cramps whenever he wants. How can we fault Caliban for not wanting a little retaliation?
Sure, there’s the Miranda thing. He did try to “people this isle with Calibans”. Honestly I tend to lump that in with base biological instinct. He’s closer to an animal than a person. What do animals do? They eat, they mate, they fight. That doesn’t make every animal a monster. But what ultimately turned me against Caliban is the way he offers her to Stephano as a prize. Don’t forget, after you kill her father, she’ll keep your bed nice and warm! That is not the instinctive act of an animal. That is a strategic move, using another human being to negotiate a deal. Caliban’s got a lot of reasons to hate Prospero, but to take them out on his daughter? That’s a bit much for me.
Stephano
I only really put him here as a technicality, because in theory his job is to bash Prospero in the head with a log and then take Miranda as his wife. He doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with this plan, on either front. But are we really expected to ever be afraid for Prospero? Think Stephano an actual threat? I don’t think so. He’s comic relief. If I’m not mistaken (though I do not have the text readily available), I think he even shows a certain distaste for the gruesome work at hand, as if he’d rather not go through with it. Hardly a monster behavior.
Ariel
I don’t think people explore evil Ariel enough. Most of the magical work that’s done in the play is done by Ariel. Prospero’s charms appear mostly of the “prevent you from doing things” variety, have you noticed that? He binds Ariel to his service. He freezes Ferdinand, and binds him to service. Presumably Caliban is also bound to service, or why wouldn’t he flee? All of the other stuff, the shipwreck, the magical dogs, the voices … that’s all Ariel.
You get hints of dark Ariel. He’s clearly not too thrilled about having escaped the bondage of his tree, only to land in Prospero’s bondage. Don’t we think that he would have killed everybody on board if Prospero had let him? With no remorse?
One of the features of a monster, if I recall the book correctly, is that they live away from man by choice, interact only out of necessity or circumstance, and then return to solitude. That certainly fits Ariel. Desires his freedom. Minute he gets it? Gone.
Antonio
It’s easy to forget that Antonio’s even there, if you only pay attention to the marquee characters. First of all he’s the character that conspired to steal his brother’s kingdom. As far as he’s concerned, his brother (and his niece) can just go somewhere and die. Remember that it is Gonzalo that saves them.
When the opportunity presents itself Antonio is quick to attempt a move up the ladder by killing the sleeping king, too. It’s not even like the man is a manipulator who has other people do the dirty work, he’s got it in him to hold a drawn sword over a defenseless victim without hesitation.
Perhaps most importantly, in the final scene where everything is revealed, we learn that Prospero is alive and not only can he look his brother in the eye, but that he forgives him? Antonio says … nothing. Everybody else wants to hear the story of how everything seems to have turned out so happily. But Antonio? You get the feeling that before the play’s even over, Antonio is already planning when he can get his kingdom back. He probably regrets not killing Prospero in the first place.
Did I miss any contenders? I don’t think we could really argue that Miranda or Ferdinand or Trinculo are monsters. Sycorax and Setebos might be two other possibilities, but I mean come on, they’re not even in the story. You’d be filling in 99% of their back story just to make your case.
I’ve been waiting years for my kids to reach the point in school where we can actually talk about Shakespeare because it’s their homework. My oldest is now reading The Tempest. So I get to have conversations like this:
Her: “We did get to read in class today. So, that was fun.”
Me: “And did you get a chance to actually stand up and maybe put a little something into it? Or was everybody just heads down blah blah blah’ing their way through it with no changing their delivery at all?”
Her: “I did my best. But, I have a question. There’s a word…abhor something? Abhorred?”
Me: “Abhorrent, maybe?”
Her: “No, I’m pretty sure it was abhorred. How many syllables is that?”
Me: “Sounds like two, but I’d have to look.”
Her: “That’s what I thought, because if it was three, then the line doesn’t come out right.”
…and it was at that point that I realized that while I’m just happy that she gets to read the words out loud, she went ahead and jumped to seeking out the iambic pentameter and trying to “respect the verse”. Can you stand it? So proud I could burst at times like that.
She then went on to tell me that she was annoyed by how some lines started with a capital letter, reminding me that we’ve still got so much to talk about 🙂
For the curious, here’s the speech:
PROSPERO
This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,
As thou report’st thyself, wast then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison’d thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died
And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island–
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born–not honour’d with
A human shape.
This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. To help raise cancer prevention awareness, and some money along the way, all proceeds from this month’s advertising, merchandise and book sales are being donated. If you’d like to support the site by supporting the cause, please consider visiting my personal fundraising page linked above, where you can make a direct donation.
Although this story will be old by the time it gets posted, I would not be living up to the geek part of my name if we didn’t talk about the UK student who managed to fit the complete works of Shakespeare into a single tweet. At least, that’s what the headlines would have you believe:
It contains a link to a small image of Shakespeare (Chandos style, for the curious who can’t see it) with the words UNZIP ME over the top.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a zip file is basically a compressed version of another file, or files. What Mr. Buchanan figured out how to do is make a single file that behaves both like an image and a compressed zip archive at the same time.
So if you were to take that image (right click from your browser, do “Open in Image New Tab”), and then save the image by itself with a .zip extension, and then double click on it to expand the archive, and what you’ll get is the single file HTML version of Shakespeare’s works, from Project Gutenberg.
Is it a cool technique? Absolutely. Even better is that Buchanan went on to release the source code for how he did it. So I get to do cool things like this:
This image is actually encoded with the plain text version of The Tempest (also from Project Gutenberg), in case you’d like to play with it. Save it with the extension .zip, then unzip it, and there you have it!
If you know how to read source code it’s even cooler, because the code to do it is very small (as in, just one file). It’s very neat indeed, and Mr. Buchanan deserves the credit for demonstrating the technique so vividly. This is a great example of why geeks are attracted to Shakespeare, because it represents a big body of text to play with that immediately brings a bunch of attention with it every time you touch it.
But saying that the complete works fit into a single 280 character tweet is not really what happened. The image is linked in the tweet. The image itself is 2 meg in size! That’s kind of like putting a First Folio in a room, locking the room, then handing someone the key and saying, “You’ve got the entire First Folio in the palm of your hand!” It does sound cooler that way, though.
This month’s posts are sponsored by No Shave November. If you’ve ever thought about how you can support the site, here’s your chance. This month we’re donating all proceeds from advertising, merchandise and book sales to raising cancer awareness. You can make direct donations as well at the above link. Thanks for your support!
Every day I comb through Shakespeare references from social media, reddit, google… and throw out 99% of them because I’ve either seen them a thousand times before, they’re irrelevant (like Shakespeare fishing rods), or they’re just plain dumb (Shakespeare memes are on the rise, and you can thank me later for saving you from most of them).
