Adapting Shakespeare for the 20th Century
Cody Scardera

Throughout the years, there have been many performances of Shakespeare’s plays as well as many plays and other forms of literature based off of them. One thing that has become common is that directors have often adapted the original forms of Shakespearian plays to become more relatable to our time. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is one work that has been through a great deal of interpretation by directors and actors alike.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest takes place on an uninhabited island somewhere in the Mediterranean. Prospero, a sorcerer, has taken the island from its one native Caliban who is said to be disfigured. Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, fled to the island when escaping an uprising started by Prospero’s brother Antonio. A ship is caught in a storm that Prospero creates and its inhabitants find themselves on the island once the storm passes. On the ship are Alonso, the king of Naples, Sebastian, his brother, Ferdinand, his son, Antonio, Gonzalo, a counselor, some lords, a jester, a drunk butler and the ship’s crew. Using his spirit, Ariel, Prospero causes mayhem on the island without anyone who was on the ship knowing he was on the island until the end of the play when Ferdinand and Miranda announce their decision to get married. All the plots in The Tempest are very common in tragedy plays and could have caused a very different ending but instead Prospero’s magic keeps the play from ending in tragedy.

Actors and directors have often tried to express Shakespeare’s characters in their own unique ways and will often read deeply into the play to find their version of a character. In The Tempest, one of the characters that is the most widely experimented with is Caliban. Caliban was often played as a monster, usually deformed and unrecognizable as a human. In 1978, the Royal Shakespeare Company put on a performance of The Tempest directed by Clifford Williams with David Suchet playing Caliban. Suchet not knowing how he wanted to play Caliban looked up previous performances of the play. He found that previous actors had played Caliban as quite a few different animals including a fish, a monkey, a snake, a tortoise, a dog with one or more heads, and a half-ape half-man with fins instead of arms, unfortunately none of these versions of Caliban seemed right to him. The previous plays unable to help him decide how to play Caliban, Suchet delved into the play analyzing every aspect of it. After much deliberation, he decided to play Caliban in a new way. In Suchet’s performance, he played Caliban as a native Caribbean islander with dark skin and a flat nose that would have been something unusual to see in England during Shakespeare’s time and would explain the deformity that everyone but Caliban notices (Brockbank). Suchet was not the only or the first actor to play Caliban in a new way. In Margret Webster’s New York performance of The Tempest in 1945, there was the first appearance of a black Caliban. Cast for the role was Canada Lee a popular ex-boxer (Cohn). A black Caliban was a very different way to portray the character however, he is still most commonly played as a white character.

Another character that directors and actors have often expressed differently is Ariel. In 1964, James E. Phillips came up with the idea that Ariel, Caliban and Prospero were epithets for the human soul. Phillips believes that Ariel suggests the spirit, while Caliban represents the body and Prospero characterizes the mind (Cengage). The Royal Shakespeare Company has played Ariel in several different ways using both male and female actors. Alan Badel played a masculine version of Ariel in 1951 and Duncan Bell played a similar version in 1988. Ian Holm, Ben Kingsley, and Mark Rylance all played a more feminine version of Ariel in 1963, 1970 and 1982 respectively. There have several female versions of Ariels also, including Margaret Leighton in 1952. It is often thought however that Ariel should either be an athletic messenger to the gods type of male or a spritely sexual female fairy. Characterized by his shape shifting Ariel has often been played by more than one actor at a time. Lee Breuer used eleven actors to play Ariel in a 1981 production. In 1989, a production in Wagga Wagga Australia directed by Des James, Ariel was casted as a woman and two men. In Silviu Purcarete's 1995 production, five musicians, two actors, and three manikins represented Ariel (Brokaw).

The Tempest also inspired playwrights to write their own versions of the play. Caliban by the Yellow Sands was written during World War I by Percy MacKaye as a celebration of Shakespeare. The play cast hundreds of characters and would ask for the participation of the crowd in the performance (Cohn). Marina Warner’s 1992 novel Indigo is also inspired by The Tempest. Warner uses many of the characters from the play to form her own characters. Sycorax, Ariel and Caliban, whose real name is Dulè, are all characters in her novel. It goes back and forth between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries from Kit Everet an explorer who founded a fictional island that his descendent Miranda now lives on. She used The Tempest to explore British imperialism at the end of the twentieth century (Novy).

The Tempest has been interpreted in many different ways over the years. The way the play is preformed depends greatly on the actors’ and directors’ ideas of the play. Shakespeare’s language is also a very key part in the interpretation of the play. The works of Shakespeare have become very influential during our time. His words have turned into famous lines that almost everyone knows but few actually know where they come from. His works have been turned in to movies that both hold to the script nearly exactly or go a completely different way with it. Many directors and actors have turned the play into their own individual version. The way the play is preformed depends to a great extent on the interpretation of the words in the play. Every person who reads the play will come away from it with a different understanding of the characters and even the play itself. Every new performance of the play brings something new and different onto the stage. Whether it is the way the characters are played or the way the scene is created, it is never exactly the same twice. The attitude of an entire character can change with just the way their lines are spoken. I think that one reason this play is so popular is because you can do whatever you want with it. You can make Prospero a loving father or an evil conniving magician. Miranda can be either naive or curious. Caliban can be either a man or an animal. Ariel can be either an overly masculine man or an overly feminine woman. I think this is one of Shakespeare’s most versatile plays. Many people also think of this play as the last of his dramas and his good bye to the stage with Prospero’s last lines,

“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have ‘s my own,
Which is most faint. Now ‘tis true,
I must be here confined by you
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In his bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”

It is these last words of Prospero to the crowd that makes some people believe that this was in fact Shakespeare’s good-bye to the theater even though after The Tempest he wrote another play that is less widely known then The Tempest.

Works Cited

Bevington, David. The Necessary Shakespeare Third Edition. United States: Pearson
Education, Inc., 2009. Print.

Brockbank, Phillip, ed. Essays in Shakespearean performance by Twelve Players with the Royal
Shakespeare Company. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Print.

Cohn, Ruby. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Print.

Cengage, Gale, Michael L. LaBlanc Ed.” The Tempest (Vol. 72) - Introduction."
Shakespearean Criticism. Vol. 72, 2006. eNotes.com. 2003. 29 Oct, 2009.
<http://www.enotes.com/shakespearean-criticism/tempest-vol-72>

Brokaw, Katherine Steele. “Ariel's Liberty”. Shakespeare Bulletin. 26.1, 2008. Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008. Pages 23-42. 29 Oct, 2009.
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v026/26.1brokaw.html>

Novy, Marianne. Transforming Shakespeare Contemporary Women’s Revisions in Literature
and Performance. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Print.