Excerpt from A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Tempest It is interesting to note the uniformity of the estimate of Caliban's character by the critics. While all acknowledge his power and his attractiveness, scornings, loathings, and revilings are nevertheless heaped on him; indeed, I can recall but one solitary voice really raised in his favour: 'in some respects, ' says coleridge, 'caliban 'is a noble being.' It has become one of the commonplaces in crit icisms on the Play to say that Caliban is the contrast to Ariel (some times varied by substituting Miranda for Ariel), and that as the tricksy sprite is the type of the air and of unfettered fancy, so is the abhorred slave typical of the earth and of all brutish appetites; the detested hag - seed is then dismissed blistered all o'er with expressions of abhorrence and with denunciations of his vileness, which any print of goodness will not take. Is there, then, nothing to be said in favour of Caliban? Is there really and truly no print of goodness in him? Kindly Nature never wholly deserts her offspring, nor does shake speare. We may be very sure that he, who knew so well that there is always some soul of goodness in things evil, would not have abandoned even Caliban without infusing into his nature some charm which might be observingly distilled out. Why is it that Caliban's speech is always rhythmical? There is no character in the play whose words fall at times into sweeter cadences if the Eolian melodies of the air are sweet, the deep bass of the earth is no less rhythmically resonant. We who see Caliban only in his prime and, a victim of heredity, full grown, are apt to forget the years of his childhood and of his innocency, when Prospero fondled him, stroked him, and made much of him, and Miranda taught him to speak, and with the sympathetic instinct of young girlhood interpreted his thoughts and endowed his purposes with words. When Caliban says that it was his mistress who showed him the man in the moon with his dog and his bush, what a picture is unfolded to us of summer nights on the Enchanted Island, where, how ever quiet lies the landscape in the broad moonlight, every hill and brook and standing lake and grove is peopled with elves, and on the shore, overlooking the yellow sands where fairies foot it featly, sits the young instructress deciphering for the misshapen slave at her feet the features of the full-orbed moon. With such a teacher, in such hours, would it be possible for Caliban, even were he twice the monster that he is, to resist, at the most impressible age, the subtle influence of the atmosphere of poetry which breathed in every nook and corner of the Enchanted Island? The wonder is not that he ever after speaks in rhythm; the wonder would be if he did not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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What does it signify when a Shakespearean character forgets something or when Hamlet determines to 'wipe away all trivial fond records'? How might forgetting be an act to be performed, or be linked to forgiveness, such as when in The Winter's Tale Cleomenes encourages Leontes to 'forget your evil. / With them, forgive yourself'? And what do we as readers and audiences forget of Shakespeare's works and of the performances we watch? This is the first book devoted to a broad consideration of how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. A wide-ranging study of how Shakespeare dramatizes forgetting, it offers close readings of Shakespeare's plays, considering what Shakespeare forgot and what we forget about Shakespeare. The book touches on an equally broad range of forgetting theory from antiquity through to the present day, of forgetting in recent novels and films, and of creative ways of making sense of how our world constructs the cultural meaning of and anxiety about forgetting. Drawing on dozens of productions across the history of Shakespeare on stage and film, the book explores Shakespeare's dramaturgy, from characters who forget what they were about to say, to characters who leave the stage never to return, from real forgetting to performed forgetting, from the mad to the powerful, from playgoers to Shakespeare himself.