Sesame Street’s Big Bird and Shakespeare’s Caliban :: Tempest essays

Sesame Street’s Big Bird and Shakespeare’s Caliban â€Å"Caliban...takes shape beneath the arc of wonder that moves throughout the play between â€Å"creatures† and â€Å"mankind,† between animate beings in general and their realization in the form of humanity. Is he man or fish? creature or person?" (Lupton, 3). â€Å"Although in The Tempest the word creature appears nowhere in conjunction with Caliban himself, his character is everywhere hedged in and held up by the politic-theological category of the creaturely" (Lupton, 3). "A freckled whelp, hag-born " (1.2.285). "Legged like a man, and his fins like arms! " (2.2.31-32). "I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster" (2.2.146-147). "A howling monster, a drunken monster" (2.2.179). "This is as strange thing as e’er I looked on" (5.1.292-293). "He is as disproportioned in his manners /As in his shape" (5.1.294-295). He is a poetic paradigm. When performed properly, he can take an audience from tears of laughter to tears of sorrow within a few paragraphs. Caliban is an actor’s dream, a scholar’s vision. Sighted as being both the missing link, but also portrayed in adaptations as more human than Prospero, Caliban is commentary, character and caricature. However, there is a question that plagues authors, directors, actors, and stressed out, indignant English professors: What is Caliban? Many books, articles, updates, adaptations, and arguments tackle this question. Together we will confront these demons, I will lead you down a path, present arguments, ideas, my own bias, but in the end leave you to answer the daunting question of Shakespeare’s man-monster: Four pictures taken from different productions and different collections of The Tempest illustrate how diverse Caliban is. Each one has a unique view of who or, more precisely, what Caliban is. They progress in an order, from pure beast, through something less to someone almost resembling a man. The pictures lead us on a progression from something entirely bestial to something else entirely. The first image demonstrates the best description of Caliban, a creature that slightly resembles a man and slightly does not. Throughout Shakespeare's text, no character refers to Caliban as a man. The other characters describe him as the indescribable. As Alonso says, "This is a strange thing as e'er I / looked on (5.1.292-293)." One of the most common terms used in The Tempest to acknowledge Caliban is moon-calf. The Oxford English Dictionary defines moon-calf as "A misshapen birth, a monstrosity.