Wake up Miranda! (Shake it off!) and, off to see Caliban (1.2.306-314) #StormTossed

PROSPERO     [to Miranda] Awake, dear heart, awake; thou has slept well.

Awake.

MIRANDA                  The strangeness of your story put

Heaviness in me.

PROSPERO                             Shake it off. Come on,

We’ll visit Caliban, my slave, who never

Yields us kind answer.

MIRANDA                                          ’Tis a villain, sir,

I do not love to look on.

PROSPERO                                         But as ’tis,

We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,

Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices

That profit us. (1.2.306-314)

 

So Prospero wakes Miranda, lovingly, from her enchanted sleep: is he commenting that she has slept well, or telling her that she has, as a hypnotist might? Whatever, he is in control, and she seems not to have any sense that time has passed (Prospero has exchanged more than one hundred lines with Ariel, who appeared and vanished while Miranda was asleep). Moreover, she attributes her heaviness, her sleepiness and lengthy nap to the strangeness of Prospero’s story, rather than to any enchantment. Shake it off, he says, wake up. (It seems highly unlikely that this phrase was borrowed by Taylor Swift for her chart-topping hit of the same name in 2014; the reverse also seems implausible, unless the wilder shores of authorship have really jumped the shark, to mix metaphors…)

The version of Caliban here seems, briefly, more benign, but also less human, although that’s perhaps because it sounds as if Prospero is proposing a visit to see a favourite animal in a zoo (an association which would be anachronistic for Shakespeare’s audience). He (and I will refer to Caliban as he) is explicitly Prospero’s slave (for all his bullying, Ariel is mostly addressed as a servant), and part of Caliban’s attraction, or at least his interest, seems to be that he never yields us kind answer – he’s surly, contrary, like an animal who reliably lashes out when he’s poked through the bars of a cage. Caliban can be teased, bullied – and laughed at. He’s entertainment, as well as a necessary slave (we cannot miss him, do without him), lighting the fire and carrying the wood. (Wood-carrying is about to become important.) Miranda doesn’t like Caliban, though, although she’s cagey as to the reason: he is a villain I do not love to look on. Not a beast, not a bad person, but a churl, a servant, a social inferior. Miranda the duke’s daughter has only just learned of her true rank, but she still has ideas about class and social hierarchy. And I don’t like the way he looks. Prospero may be powerful, but he still needs someone to clean up after him, to serve in offices that profit us, do necessary things. And this could be literal: offices are duties, but in early modern usage, a house of office is a toilet. Caliban carries the wood and tends the fire; perhaps an early modern audience might also assume that he maintains the island’s sanitation. Ariel is the servant to Prospero’s mind and art; Caliban is the slave to his master’s physical needs. Air and earth.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *