![]() ![]() ![]() Prospero at first befriends Caliban, but when the creature tries to rape Miranda, Prospero enslaves him with the aid of his magic. They land on an island, already inhabited by a savage creature called Caliban, the son of a dead witch, Sycorax, and the air-spirit Ariel, who was imprisoned by Sycorax in a pine tree. ![]() It is the story of a magician and former duke of Milan, Prospero, set afloat with his infant daughter Miranda after being deposed in a coup by his treacherous brother Antonio and Alonso, the king of Naples. Michael Clark as Caliban in Propero’s Books (1991) Photograph: Allstar/Channel 4 The Wizard of Oz is only pretending to be a real magician: really he’s a fraud. And illusionists always have a dubious side to them. All of these figures are illusionists, as artists are. In my book about writers and writing – called, oddly enough, On Writers and Writing – there’s a chapter on the artist as magician and/or impostor called “Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co”. I’d thought about The Tempest before, and written about it as well. It contains a great many unanswered questions as well as several very complex characters, and the challenge of trying to answer the questions and tease out the complexities was part of the attraction. ![]() In honour of his 400th anniversary the Hogarth Shakespeare project has invited a number of authors to choose a play and revisit it in the form of a prose novel. And I too have redone Shakespeare, also with odd results. People have been redoing Shakespeare for a long time, often with odd results. ![]()
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