‘Miranda and Caliban’, The Love Story That Should Have Been
Jacqueline Carey’s revisionist retelling of ‘TheTempest’ gives us the star-crossed lovers we deserve today
I’d like you to imagine something. The next time you read The Tempest, put yourself in Caliban’s shoes: an orphan, a lonely young man, scorned and abused, formally enslaved because ‘he is a brute’, but actually because he represents free black labour.
Put aside, for now, the moniker of rapist and think how you would handle your own sexuality while stranded on an island, having never learned (or cared to learn!) anything about morals from your oppressors. Every day is toil and drudgery, filled with emotional and physical abuse. You have never been shown love so you do not know how to express that sentiment. At the same time, you have an urge for closeness, for comfort, for the very love you do not understand yet yearn for dearly. And the agony is perpetual because you are clever. You understand the Master’s speech, his language is your own, which leads you to reason and hope and dangerously dream. For freedom, freedom, freedom!
I think you will agree with me that in a pre-modern age, this is a set-up for disaster. And when history is told by strongmen and winners, a man at odds with the world is likely to be flattened…
