The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [219]
As a result of my not having paid much attention to the business end of the Shakespeare Underground’s production of The Tempest, to this day I remain not entirely sure how our audience found out about us—much less how they found out when and where the production was being staged, and so on—but find out these things they did. In thematic keeping with the name of our company, the Shakespeare Underground undertook its promotions and ticket sales in the same spirit as we began, and in which we committed all our operations: virally, secretly, in a mode of dubious legality, operating like an underground resistance movement. “Resistance to what?” you may ask. And Leon and I would answer: “Resistance to everything!” Resistance to a nation preoccupied with useless ephemera! Resistance to the slow incoming creep of the twenty-first century, resistance to that invisible poisonous gas that has been hissing up into the air from every crack and fissure in the street, which Leon taught me to smell. It is admittedly a vague thing, an invisible thing, a nebulously hard-to-define thing, but Leon and I knew it was everywhere, and that it needed to be resisted. It’s still there. I can smell it, Gwen. It’s stronger than ever, in fact. It’s right here in this room. I can smell it even in here, even in the safety and sanity of this research center, even in the tidy environs of science, far away from human society, in captivity, in a tightly secured building nestled in a remote wooded area in rural Georgia, where the stars come out at night and the birds sing their songs in the day: even here I can smell it. Don’t let your nose get used to it. When you are out walking on the street, going about your business, a part of your soul must always be crushing a handkerchief to your face.
But as I said, I funneled my energies totally into developing my Caliban. I hope that the future’s scholars of dramaturgy (if indeed such people will exist in the future) will recognize that I, Bruno Littlemore, was the first actor to realize that the role of Caliban should be played through an evolutionary perspective. While I understand The Tempest was first performed in 1612, a good two and a half centuries before the publications of Charles Darwin, on closely studying the text, I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare was not in some way anachronistically informed and even influenced by The Origin of Species. Time perhaps is not as uninterestingly linear as we imagine, Gwen. Shakespeare was at the very least a clear premonition of his future fellow Englishman. I even go so far as to imagine that the ship in The Tempest is the Beagle, and Prospero’s island, Galapagos. Examine the following, from the scene in which the drunken jester, Trinculo, discovers Caliban lying inert on the beach:
What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish! He smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell…. A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man…. Legged like a man! And his fins like arms! Warm, o’ my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer. This is no fish, but an islander.
“A very ancient and fishlike smell”—! The Darwinian undertones are clear to me. What Trinculo describes, upon seeing Caliban lying still and wet on the muddy beach, amounts to a description of evolution in fast-forward. He begins as a fish, smelling very ancient and fishlike, freshly crawled up onto the beach to leave a life in the oceans, and then becomes a monster, a strange beast—and then he grows legs, and his fins become arms! Finally, he abandons his cold blood for warm, and becomes a mammal, an