by Nils Peterson
Freedom, high-day!
High-day, freedom!
Freedom, high-day, freedom!
1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do with Shakespeare or something to do with drama. So, accepted into the program were set designers, costume makers, stage managers, and teachers. I had been teaching Shakespeare, by a quirk of good fortune for 20 years or so then. (As a young teacher I was walking down the department halls when the department head stuck his head out of his office, saw me, and said, “Nils do you want to teach Shakespeare next semester?” One of the regular teachers of it had just gotten a sabbatical.) So now I was going to be an actor and I was going to try out for the role of Caliban. A professional actor was going to play Prospero.
I was 6’6” then, skinny, with a voice that had done much singing. I spoke, I guess, with the lilt of an east coast academic who had spent a lot of time reading poetry out loud though now in California. I tried roughening my voice in the audition, as I did when teaching the play, and succeeded to some degree, but the role went to another man who had a wooden leg. The director had the idea that he would have the man take off his leg, walk around with crutches, and a fishtail would dangle where the leg had been. Caliban was, after all, half man half fish according to one of shipwrecked sailors who saw him. Also, the director found my voice most suitable for the court party. He also imagined a priestly quality to my bearing, so I ended up as the “good Gonzalo.” My costume was a beautiful, flowing, blue robe. I looked a little like a young Gandalf. I could have been Nils the Blue.
There were two women who tried out for Ariel and the director needed to fit them both in for there were no other roles available. He solved his problem by having them both play the part at the same time speaking the lines together but not quite in sync. That gave the words an unworldly mysterious feeling quite suitable.
In the play, the king is in a deep depression because he thinks his son has drowned in the sea during the shipwreck that opens the play. It is Gonzalo’s job to try to cheer up the king so he won’t do something desperate in his despair. The actor who played him had just come through a bad divorce. So, just as Gonzalo in the play tried to cheer up the king, so was Nils in real life trying to cheer up the actor who played him, would take him golfing in the afternoon and for a beer afterwards so he could unload his sorrows.
We rehearsed our lines in the morning. At night we went to our theater which was outdoors and open-aired. We could practice and perform at it only at night after the air had been cooled down by the daily 5 o clock rain which dried up by seven.
The main problem with our production was that the hired professional actor could not remember his lines. It seemed impossible as again and again he cried out “line” to the stage manager. Of course, he had the most lines to learn. As the opening got closer and closer it became clear that he wasn’t going to learn them, so the director turned our production into a rehearsal of the play so we could carry our scripts around and look at them as needed. (As a matter of fact I had done something of the same 30 years before when I was directing a Sunday School play and the cast had the same memorization problem. I turned the play into a radio show and had the cast speak into a microphone and dramatically drop each page of the script to the floor when they were done with those lines.)
On opening night, the actor who played Caliban fish-foot and all came down with laryngitis and couldn’t be heard. It was open seating and people sat wherever they could around or on, indeed, the area in which we were to perform. One woman sat down in the very spot from which I was to deliver my main speech and I had to find a new place from which to declaim. Well, it certainly kept one moment by moment engaged in what was going on and where it was going on. And it was enormous fun. I had a VHS of some of it once, but now can’t find it. Memory will have to do its work.
2. I wanted to play Caliban because he has the best lines in the play. Oh yes, Prospero’s big speech is famously and deservedly celebrated as Shakespeare’s final definition of the human: “We are stuff as dreams are made on/ And our little lives are rounded by a sleep.” Good “stuff” assuredly, but listen to Caliban on language.
He says to Miranda,
You taught me language, and my profit on ’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
But she also taught him the real work of language, awareness of self and praise.
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
What are Caliban’s dreams? He dreams of love (for what is love but a dream of language put upon our urge to reproduce, our itch to “people” the “isle with Calibans”); he dreams of revenge; he dreams of the kingdom he thought his mother wanted him to have; he dreams of something worthy to serve (a “brave god” bearing a “celestial liquor”); and he dreams of those riches beyond ordinary human utterance which sometimes seem to fill the universe. In short, he dreams the dreams we all dream.
When, at the end of the play, Prospero calls out “this thing of darkness/ I acknowledge mine:’ who of us can do other than sigh, yes. And when the “brave monster” says “I’ll be wise hereafter,! And seek for grace,” is he not dreaming our most human dream — for, in a way, is not Prospero is a dream of Caliban’s?
3. From the “Journals of Caliban” written after he is left alone on the island. Prospero left him books one of which was the Florio translation of Montaigne (which Shakespeare almost certainly knew. Maybe it was Miranda who taught him to write):
I. Woke from the old dream. That golden place. That shining. That “not here.” Woke to “here.” Sad not being there, though being here is not sad.
Up and out of Master’s cave, relieved myself of water against a far tree. Looked for scamels, gathered nuts, drank some water from the high spring, then back to the work of being wise. Hard work, this work. Books, books, books, but not the big book drowned deep in the water so blue it is black.
II. Should I wear clothes today. “Clothes maketh the man” says another book. So, yes. But I can’t maketh clothes. The ones the master left have holes and the shift his daughter made for me, I cannot bear to put on any more. I sleep with it under my head at night. I dream of her who taught me language, but in my dreams, it is not language she teaches me, no, not language.
III. The book says, “All moral philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life” and “every man carries the entire form of human condition.” Well, I have a common and private life. Am I a man? I say yes and, therefore carry the “entire form of human condition.”
Yes, I say, despite “my ancient, fish-like smell” which the old man said I had. Well, what wrong with “ancient” or “fishlike,” for that matter? I like fish. I like their smell. I like my smell.
It hurts my eyes to read too long. My bones aches with the sitting. So eye-ache and bone-ache are part of the human condition. Something wrong. I must look at the logic book tomorrow. What about loneliness? Is that a human condition?
I will go sit on my high rock.
IV. My high rock beetles over the sea. Beetles are also a bug. That’s why thinking is so hard. Waves seem small, sky seems close, so close I think sometimes I see Ariel shining. Why does she not want to be wise? Is the shining one a she? If so, She is not a she like the other was a she.
The sea shines like the back of a turtle. Dark below, though by the sand – blue. When I cup water in my hands, I can see my fingers through it. It is never dark or blue. Wading before I swim, I can see my feet far down. They look green. Mysterious. How can one be wise about the world when there is so much to see.
When I sit on my rock too long, my shoulders sting and my head aches. My head aches when I read too long and when I sit on a rock too long. My head never used to ache. Being wise, my head aches.
V. I have another rock, a low rock, by a low place with mud and water and green things that grow and grow. I sit there a lot. The air is fat and heavy, still. The quick shining one never came to this place. On the green leaves that float on the water, a frog sits. I wonder if he too wants to be wise. He looks as if he wants to. He looks almost like a human with green skin. His tongue is too long though. I watch as he snaps up a shiny four-winged buzzer as it flew by. How could one speak with all of that tongue rolled up in one’s mouth and how can you be human unless you speak? But why should one speak unless you have someone to speak to?
All this is very hard. I think I would be happier if I could float on a leaf all day and have the food fly right to me. I read in one of the books, “The aim of all human endeavor is happiness.” Are humans happier than this frog? Has the frog reached what humans strive for without striving at all? This is troubling. I have to think about all this, but isn’t this thinking the trouble?