> From: Peter Howard <[log in to unmask]> Save Address - Block
>
> >(Did anyone else see Vanessa Redgrave
> >as Prospero?* What did you think?)
>
> Yes, I did. I thought she did well, and the fact that she was a woman
> playing a man's role didn't seem to be relevant at all.
>
> But her role was completely upstaged by Caliban. Easy for that to
> happen in that play, unless you try hard to avoid it. And they didn'
> try at all.
I also thought it was a good performance and didn't see any strain
because the role was played by a woman. Personally though I have a
different concept of the role. I don't think she played with enough
authority: it should be clear, at least unconsciously, that Prospero is
at every point the puppetmaster in control of things, and I don't think
her performance brought this home sufficiently. Maybe the ideal
Prospero would have been Orson Wells, though I don't know if he ever
played it.
It was only on this last viewing that I realized that the lynch-pin
of the play is Prospero's incestuous attraction to Miranda. Prospero is
living out every man's fantasy of being stranded on a desert island with
a beautiful young woman, only in this case the woman is his own
daughter. He tries to deal with the guilt by projecting it on Caliban,
or you might say he creates Caliban to split off the part of himself
that lusts for Miranda: "I have used thee, filth as thou art, with
human care, and lodged thee in mine own cell, till thou didst seek to
violate the honour of my child." It doesn't work very well, and
ultimately he has to accept Caliban as part of himself -- "This thing of
darkness I acknowledge mine" -- to bring about the brave new world of
the integration of Prospero/Ariel/Caliban into an integral self, the
reestablishment of the social order through the regaining of his rank,
and the continuation of it through the marriage of Miranda, all of which
redeems him. Like so many (all?) of Shakespeare's plays it is
ultimately about fatherhood, and it ultimately enforces a fundamentally
Freudian interpretation. I'm quite aware that the foregoing will elicit
the sneers of the ignorant.
====
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it
is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
-- T. S. Eliot
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