Mark wrote:
<<"Castilian" or "Catalan"? A bit farfetched, I think. Were the English, in
any case, angry at Catalans?
>>
No, as I said, just speculating. As for whether the English were mad at Catalans, it's hard to say, it's a linguistically separate area of Spain that is often confused with Spain, as any Catalan will tell you, so I'm not sure anti-Spanish or anti-papist sentiment in Elizabethan England would have discriminated between the Spanish-speaking or the Catalan-speaking Spaniard. Though Shakespeare probably knew the difference. "Much ado about nothing" (1600) is placed at Messina during the kingdom of the Catalan "Prince Don Pedro of Arragon", count of Barcelona (1276-1285). Shakespeare used the term, for instance, in Twelth-Night, there's the line " My lady's a Catalan; we are politicians." Catalan was one of the minority cultures, along with Basque, Scots, etc. that Shakespeare made use of. So it's not that far of a stretch to that minority of Caliban.
<<My point being only that one can overload the play, which is more than interesting enough, there's a history of fantasy islands (forgive me, I
couldn't help myself) going way way back. The idea is the contemplation of
a society unthreatened or contaminated by the outside--a perfect social
laboratory. >>
All true enough about the history of fantasy islands, though I have difficulty viewing Prospero's Island as equivalent to "the plane! the plane!" of fantasy island, or even Utopia, or any of the other examples you mentioned. In part because the island is threatened and contaminated from the beginning, threatened as the play begins with the shipwreck that brings the arrival of Alonso, King of Naples, and his company, and contaminated because Prospero's depiction of his own presence is so couched in terms of revenge for his exile and a perilous escape by sea. When he says, "These our actors/...were all spiritis, and/ Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision," it seems to me that he is talking about much more than the idea of a fantasy island.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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