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Perhaps it was a small measure of my becoming a writer (though never for the stage) that I believed The Tempest should have ended with Prospero's speech to Ferdinand and Miranda--the "Our revels now are ended" speech in act 4, scene 1. And surely Prospero should have ended that speech (and the play) with the wonderful "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." Why does Prospero need to say more? (Maybe he does feel responsible for Caliban.)
But when I expressed these thoughts to Richard, he said, "Well, Bill--if you're rewriting Shakespeare at seventeen, I expect great things of you!" Richard wasn't given to satire at my expense, and I was hurt by it; Kittredge was quick to pick up on someone else's pain.
"Hey, Rewriter!" Kittredge called to me, across the quadrangle of dorms. Alas, that nickname didn't stick; Kittredge never said it again, preferring Nymph. I would have preferred Rewriter; at least it was true to the kind of writer I would one day become.
But I've strayed from the Caliban character; I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become. Caliban is onstage 25 percent of the time. (My mother's app
roximations never took into account the lines spoken, only the onstage time of the characters.) This was my very first experience with The Tempest, but as many times as I've seen the play performed, I always find Caliban a deeply disturbing character; as a writer, I would call him an "unresolved" character. By how harshly Prospero treats him, we know how unforgivingly Prospero thinks of Caliban, but I wonder what Shakespeare wanted us to feel about the monster. Sympathy, maybe--some guilt, perhaps.
That fall of '59, I wasn't at all sure what Richard Abbott made of Caliban; that Richard had cast Grandpa Harry as the monster sent a mixed message. Harry had never been onstage as a male anything; that Caliban was less than human was further "unresolved" by Grandpa Harry's steadfastly female impersonation. Caliban may indeed have lusted after Miranda--we know the monster has tried to rape her!--but Harry Marshall, even when he was cast as a villain, was almost never unsympathetic onstage, nor was he ever entirely male.
Perhaps Richard had acknowledged that Caliban was a confusing monster, and Richard knew that Grandpa Harry would find a way to add to the confusion. "Your grandfather is weird," was how Kittredge unambiguously put it to me. ("Queen Lear," Kittredge called him.)
Even I believe that Harry out-weirded himself in Caliban's case; Grandpa Harry gave a sexually ambiguous performance--he played Caliban as an androgynous hag.
The wig (Grandpa Harry was bald) would have worked for either sex. The costume was something an eccentric urban bag lady might have worn--floppy sweatpants with an oversize sweatshirt, both as workout-gray as the wig. To complete the gender-unknown image, Harry had whorishly painted the toenails of his bare feet. There was a mannishly chunky rhinestone earring attached to the lobe of one ear--more appealing to a pirate, or a professional wrestler, than a hooker--and a fake-pearl necklace (the cheapest costume jewelry) over the sweatshirt.
"What is Caliban, exactly?" Kittredge would ask Richard Abbott.
"Earth and water, Kittredge--brute force and guile," Richard had repeated.
"But what sex is the guile supposed to be?" Kittredge asked. "Is Caliban a lesbian monster? Is it a she or a he who tried to rape Miranda?"
"Sex, sex, sex!" Elaine Hadley screamed. "All you think about is sex!"
"Don't forget those earplugs, Nymph," Kittredge said, smiling at me.
Elaine and I couldn't look at him without seeing his mother, with her legs so perfectly crossed on those uncomfortable bleacher seats at Kittredge's wrestling match; Mrs. Kittredge had seemed to watch her son's systematic mauling of his overmatched opponent as if it were a pornographic film, but with the detached confidence of an experienced woman who knew she could do it better. "Your mother is a man with breasts," I wanted to say to Kittredge, but of course I didn't dare.
I could only guess how Kittredge might have responded. "Do you mean my stepmother?" he would have asked, before breaking my arms and legs.
I spoke to my mom and Richard in the privacy of our dormitory apartment. "What is it about Grandpa Harry?" I asked them. "I know that Ariel's gender is polymorphous--more a matter of habiliment than anything organic, as you say," I said to Richard. "Okay, so my trappings, my equipment--the wig, the tights--suggest that Ariel's gender is mutable. But isn't Caliban a male monster? Isn't Grandpa Harry playing Caliban like some kind of . . ." I paused. I refused to call my grandfather Queen Lear, because that was Kittredge's nickname for him. "Like some kind of dyke?" was how I put it. The dyke word was in vogue at Favorite River--among those students (like Kittredge) who never tired of homo, fag, and queer, which they used viciously.
"Daddy isn't a dyke!" my mother snapped. Snapping had once seemed so unlike her; now, increasingly, when she snapped, she snapped at me.
"Well, Bill . . ." Richard Abbott started to say; then he stopped. "Don't get upset, Jewel," he said to my mom, whose agitation had distracted Richard. "What I really think, Bill," Richard began again, "is that gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us."
A lame response, I thought, but I didn't say so. Was I growing disappointed in Richard, or was I just growing up?
"I guess that wasn't an answer to your question, was it?" Elaine Hadley asked me later, when I confessed to her that the sexual identity of Grandpa Harry as Caliban was confusing to me.
IT WAS FUNNY HOW, when Elaine and I were alone, we didn't usually hold hands, or anything like that, but when we were out in public, we spontaneously reached for each other's hands, and we would maintain contact for only as long as we had an audience. (It was another kind of code between us, like the way we would ask each other, "What happens to the duck?")
Yet, on our initial visit together to the First Sister Public Library, Elaine and I didn't hold hands. It was my impression that Miss Frost wouldn't be fooled into thinking that Elaine and I were romantically involved--not for a minute. Elaine and I were just seeking a possible place where we could run our lines for The Tempest. Our dormitory apartments were claustrophobic and very public--unless we ran our lines in her bedroom or mine, with the door closed. We'd been too successful in masquerading as boyfriend and girlfriend. My mom and Richard, or the Hadleys, would have had a cow if we'd closed our bedroom doors when we were together.
As for the yearbook room in the academy library, there was the occasional faculty member at work there, and it wasn't a room with a door you could close; our voices would have been heard elsewhere in the building. (Elaine and I feared we could be heard throughout the much smaller First Sister Public Library!)
"We wondered if there might be a more private room here," I explained to Miss Frost.
"More private," the librarian repeated.
"Where we wouldn't be heard," Elaine said, in her sonic-boom voice. "We want to run our lines for The Tempest, but we don't want to bother anyone!" Elaine hastily added--lest Miss Frost think we were seeking some soundproof asylum for Elaine's aforementioned first orgasm.
Miss Frost looked at me. "You want to run lines in a library," she said, as if this were a well-fitted piece to the puzzle of my earlier wanting to write in a library. But Miss Frost didn't betray my intentions--namely, becoming a writer. (I had not yet been candid with my good friend Elaine on the writing subject; my desire to be a writer and my other desires were still kept secret from Elaine.)
"We can try to run our lines quietly," Elaine said, in an abnormally soft voice--for her.
"No, no, dear--you must feel free to run lines as they should be said, onstage," Miss Frost told Elaine, patting my friend's hand with her much bigger hand. "I think I know a place where you could scream and no one would hear you." As it turned out, the concept that there was a contained space in the First Sister Public Library where one could scream unheard was not as much of a miracle as the room itself.
