Crowd-sourcing question: Shakespeare Lit-Crit --

[capri0mni]

When did it become The accepted interpretation that Caliban = Native PoC, especially because "Caliban" sounds so much like "Cannibal" that that must be what Shakespeare meant?

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's a relatively modern assumption. But I'm not sure what keywords to use in Googling to verify or dispute that.

Any ideas?

Meanwhile, I'm rereading the last few chapters of Jane Austen's Persuasion, thanks to remembering that Mrs. Smith (nee Hamilton) -- the woman who reveals the truth to our heroine about the true character of her sleazy cousin -- is: "afflicted with a severe rheumatic fever, which, finally settling in her legs, had made her for the present a cripple." which gives me another entry topic for Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream. ... Any afternoon I can spend with Jane Austen is a good afternoon, in my books. And furthermore, I have it as an etext, so I can copy and paste the passages I want to cite, instead of typing them in (*Gives the side-eye to the paperback volume that wouldn't stay open, and had no paragraph breaks on any of its pages*).

So it's all good... or -- mostly good.

Comments

[spiralsheep]

Caliban: are you asking specifically about "lit-crit" or including performances and playgoers interpretations? Because English theatre at that time was accustomed to interpreting characters as non-English and/or non-white, and Shakespeare (with his Italians, and Moor, and Jew...) wasn't the only author writing those characters. Also, remember that the categories "supernatural being" and "human" (whether white or poc) weren't mutually exclusive characterisations (and still aren't).

[capri0mni]

I was thinking, specifically, of lit-crit. -- the Cliff's Notes version of understanding what Shakespeare is "About," and how it is that Caliban is now interpreted as being almost exclusively a comment on "Native peoples."

angevin2 answered this well over on the LJ side, and made it pretty clear that Shakespeare, himself, had at least both interpretations in mind.