No.202422[Reply]
In the Shakespearean play The Tempest, when the wizard Prospero is banished to an island, he finds there a man named Caliban of whom he makes a slave using his wizardry.
In most productions, including the one I watched back when I was still in high school, Caliban is a Black man and it's a metaphor for English Colonialism or some shit.
In the production I watched, the very same Black actor played both Caliban and Ferdinand, so that it wouldn't appear that Prospero's daughter Miranda had fallen in love with the first White man she met.
This is clever on the part of the director, but the thing that's wrong about it is… Caliban isn't Black, not in Shakespeare's eyes.
You see, while Caliban did indeed grow up on the island, he's actually the son of a European witch named Sycorax who was banished there exactly like Prospero was.
He can't do any real magic, though, since Sycorax died when he was very young.
So, being the son of a European witch, it's logical to assume that Caliban is a White man, and any uncouth nature to his speech is only the result of being orphaned at a young age on a deserted island.
And there's really no logical basis by which to accuse Shakespeare of having been a racist who believed that Black men exist to be slaves to White men based on the contents of The Tempest, because, well… Caliban was never Black.
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