- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press (25 Oct 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0521403057
- ISBN-13: 978-0521403054
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,989,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Review
"This is a quite exceptionally sound and illuminating piece of scholarship. It takes a single revealing and well-documented piece of litmus paper, the figure of Caliban in The Tempest , and tracks it through history and geography, literary criticism, theater, book illustration and painting to give a comprehensive and detailed account of the huge changes in the ways it has been seen and interpreted. In doing so, it provides not only a piece of cultural history but a test for some of the most basic shifts in ways of thinking about mankind through the last three centuries. Its history covers not just English and American thought but Spanish American, Caribbean, and African. It is an interdisciplinary study of the best and most rewarding kind. It is a beautifully worked out and immaculate thesis, and an admirably readable book." Andrew Gurr, University of Reading.
"Shakespeare's Caliban is a major contribution to Shakespearean criticism, and more widely, to cultural history. This kind of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study ought to become a feature of writing in the humanities in the next decade." Peter Hulme, University of Essex
"This [is an] interesting and remarkably thorough study." Choice
"The Vaughans' analyses are exemplary, but what really distinguishes this book is the amount of sheer pleasure that is to be gotten from reading its elegant prose and scrupulous insights." English Language Notes
"Shakespeare's Caliban deserves a rousing welcome." Essays in Theatre
"Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan take us through the historic phases of the Rorschach that is Caliban....[A] marvellously eclectic record of stage history...." Ralph Berry, Dalhousie Review
"Shakespeare's Caliban is a major contribution to Shakespearean criticism, and more widely, to cultural history. This kind of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study ought to become a feature of writing in the humanities in the next decade." Peter Hulme, University of Essex
"This [is an] interesting and remarkably thorough study." Choice
"The Vaughans' analyses are exemplary, but what really distinguishes this book is the amount of sheer pleasure that is to be gotten from reading its elegant prose and scrupulous insights." English Language Notes
"Shakespeare's Caliban deserves a rousing welcome." Essays in Theatre
"Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan take us through the historic phases of the Rorschach that is Caliban....[A] marvellously eclectic record of stage history...." Ralph Berry, Dalhousie Review
Product Description
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.
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First Sentence
Geoffrey Bullough's massive Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare is more than a scholar's magnum upos. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Geoffrey Bullough's massive Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare is more than a scholar's magnum upos. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent historical survey from various disciplines., 9 July 1998
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (Hardcover)
This book is an excellent, and largely unbiased, discussion of CALIBAN (the character from Shakespeare's The Tempest) and traces the evolution of his perception as reflected in literary criticism, culture/politics, theatrical performance (stage and film), poetry, and visual art. An actor myself, when doing research on Shakespeare roles, the most efficient technique I've found is investigation of stage history. Most of the relevant literary criticism has at one time or another been reflected in stage history. Also, stage history is something I find more easily applicable to performance than literary criticism--for obvious reasons. In light of this bias, the only disappointment I had in the book is that I would have liked a longer chapter on stage history. Nonetheless, as the book surveys CALIBAN's history from so many perspectives, one comes away with a strong appreciation of the wide range of exploration available in playing CALIBAN. The numerous black & white figures are an added plus. Finally, any actor playing CALIBAN and hard-pressed to find research time would do well to at least read the chapter on scriptural analysis relevant to CALIBAN and the final chapter, which summarizes the entire book. Directors and designers would benefit from perusal of this text; however, the book does stick fairly close to its subject of CALIBAN, specifically, rather than The Tempest, in general. To close, Shakespearean actors would certainly benefit from more character-specific surveys like this book.
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