King Caliban: His Triumph over the Tyrant Prospero and His Courtship of Miranda
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King Caliban presents a fresh and admirable view of Caliban, who manages, with his acquired use of the colonials language, to gain his rightful kingship of the island, and Mirandas enduring love.
King Caliban is a revolutionary version of Shakespeares colonial Tempest, following the mock shipwreck, and the scattered travellers on the island. The play views Prospero as a missionary and a despot, who with his technological expertise, exploits the islands natural resources of airy spirits, using a different staff, a different robe, and a different book. While engaging in personal revenge, left and right, he works his black art under the guise of bringing civilization, language, and salvation to the native he has enslaved and maligned. His pardoning of state criminals paraded as forgiveness, has a typically sham, ulterior motive -- that of making his daughter, Miranda, Queen of Naples -- an aim that is frustrated in King Caliban through Mirandas revelation of Calibans inner worth, the injustice done to him, their shared childhood on the island, and his courtship of her.
Victor Sasson
Victor Sasson grew up in Baghdad. He is British-educated, with degrees from the University of London, and a Ph.D. from New York University. A biblical scholar, specialist in Hebrew and Aramaic Epigraphy, he has also published fiction, no-fiction, and poetry. His three verse plays, Shylock of Venice, King Caliban, and Elijah the Tishbite, were published in 2012, 2013, and 2018, respectively.
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King Caliban - Victor Sasson
Copyright © 2013 by VICTOR SASSON.
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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7732-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4759-7733-2 (e)
iUniverse rev. date: 2/25/2013
CONTENTS
Preface
Dramatis Personae
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Epilogue
Novels:
DESTINED TO DIE
CONFESSIONS OF A SHEEP FOR SLAUGHTER
DR. BUSH AND MR. HIDE
KING JEHOASH AND THE MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON INSCRIPTION
Plays:
THE MARRIAGE OF MAGGIE AND RONNIE
SHYLOCK OF VENICE
KING CALIBAN
Non-Fiction:
ESSAYS FROM OCCUPIED HOLY LAND
MEMOIRS OF A BAGHDAD CHILDHOOD
Dramatic Monologues:
CALIBAN ON LANGUAGE
SHYLOCK OUTSIDE COURT
This play, King Caliban, is fully protected, worldwide, by the author’s copyright. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, radio, television, recitation, public reading, and any method of photographic reproduction, including digital, are strictly reserved.
All inquiries should be addressed to the author at:
victor7sasson@gmail.com
They call me savage, monster on four legs,
To feed their vanity – a master race
Of whose learning and liquor I have tasted;
Two-legged gods, whose boots I licked and feet kissed,
Only to find that, beneath their fair skin,
They are as seedy as I am misshapen.
And, as any native monkey will tell you:
Learning and liquor are peanuts when bartered
For land and liberty.
And now, armed with language and skilled in cursing–
To outsmart this learned philistine whose skull
I cannot crush, nor burn can I his books–
Cursing shall be my joy till he be driven to sea,
From whence he came – and I regain sovereignty.
From Victor Sasson’s Caliban On Language,
written in August 2000, published in The Shakespeare Newsletter
(August 2004).
The reason most playwrights do not publish their plays with prefaces is that they cannot write them, the business of intellectually conscious philosopher and skilled critic being no necessary part of their craft.
And
I would give half a dozen of Shakespear’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.
From Bernard Shaw’s Preface to his Three Plays for Puritans
PREFACE
King Caliban emerged out of my dissatisfaction with Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. While his is essentially a colonial text, mine is a revolutionary one. I felt that Caliban was much mistreated by Prospero throughout the twelve years on the island, and that he was lightly and shamefully dismissed in the end, having been ridiculed for his native language, and divested of his dignity and original faith.
Any person who has experienced displacement or colonization will, upon reading The Tempest, soon realise that the play evokes thoughts that are much about such issues. It is in fact a political play. Cognizant of European colonial history – including the more recent history of political/colonial Zionism in the Middle East – I am convinced about this. The play pretends that Prospero just happened to stumble on this island, conveniently claimed to be uninhabited or deserted. This claim is not much different from that of Golda Mabovitch (Meirson), a Ukranian and a Communist at heart, who made the infamous statement that a Palestinian people did not exist in Palestine so as to justify her claim to the Holy Land.
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