Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

Author:James Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

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THE TEMPEST PERFECTLY suited MacKaye’s didactic, top-down approach to art. Its four main characters—Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel—offered a framework for celebrating not only literary culture from ancient to modern times, but also Shakespeare’s greatest hits, all in the service of Caliban’s education. Like many at the time, MacKaye believed that Prospero was Shakespeare’s autobiographical stand-in, pronouncing on his own art, and at the end of Caliban Shakespeare himself enters and replaces Prospero, as Caliban crouches at his true master’s feet. When MacKaye speaks of Prospero’s art, then, he is also speaking of that of a benevolent Shakespeare, whose goal, like his own, or so he imagined, was to “liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the fetters of brute force and ignorance.” What he took to be Shakespeare’s central theme—“Caliban seeking to learn the art of Prospero”—anticipated his own mission: “the slow education of mankind through the influences of co-operative art.” When elaborating on this in a long interview in the New York Times, MacKaye adds that he saw in Caliban “that passionate child-curious part of us all, groveling close to his origin, yet groping up toward that serener plane of pity and love, reason and disciplined will.” But it remains unclear whether his Caliban is quite so universal or whether MacKaye, when speaking of “us,” is referring to only that segment of his audience and cast who, like Caliban, were of inferior racial and national origin.

While The Tempest as a story of the moral education of a brutish and illiterate creature clearly appealed to MacKaye, Shakespeare’s plot brought with it potential obstacles, the most glaring of which was that, however much progress Caliban makes, it is never enough; he remains a sexual and political threat, having sought to rape Miranda and conspire in Prospero’s overthrow. Prospero, in Shakespeare’s original, is clear about this, declaring that Caliban is one on “whose nature / Nurture never sticks.” It didn’t help that MacKaye had himself thought of Caliban as irredeemable; in October 1914 he published an antiwar poem in the New York Times, “A Prayer of the Peoples,” in which Caliban, along with the wolf, serves as a shorthand for those who are irredeemably bloody-minded:

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