In One Person

cheap stove timer, and (in the margins of her copy of the play) she noted the approximate percent of the characters’ actual time onstage. The value of my mom’s calculations seemed questionable to me, though both Elaine and I enjoyed the fact that Ferdinand was onstage for only 17 percent of the play.
    “What about Miranda?” Elaine made a point of asking my mom, within Kittredge’s keenly competitive hearing.
    “Twenty-seven percent,” my mother replied.
    “What about me?” I asked my mom.
    “Ariel is onstage thirty-one percent of the time,” she told me.
    Kittredge scoffed at this degrading news. “And Prospero, our peerless director—he of the
much-ballyhooed
magical powers?” Kittredge inquired sarcastically.
    “Much-
ballyhooed
!” Elaine Hadley thunderously echoed.
    “Prospero is onstage approximately fifty-two percent of the time,” my mother told Kittredge.
    “Approximately,” Kittredge repeated, sneering.
    Richard had told us that
The Tempest
was Shakespeare’s “farewell play,” that the bard was knowingly saying good-bye to the theater, but I didn’t understand the necessity for act 5—especially the tacked-on epilogue, spoken by Prospero.
    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 approximations 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?”