During the summer of 2000, The Tempest was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London. There was an implicit challenge to traditional readings of the play in the casting of Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, but her presence was as imposing and her voice as rich as any man's need have been. Perhaps this Prospero was more completely Miranda's parent, less securely the colonialist patriarch, than Michael Redgrave was at Stratford in 1951, but there was never any sense that allowances were being made. This was our Prospero, and we respected him. A cultural shift of great significance is even more evident here than in the reaction to Fiona Shaw's playing of Richard II, because the crossing of gender quickly ceased to be the audience's focus. For one thing, Redgrave's performance of the role brushed lesser considerations aside; for another, Prospero's fecundity is peculiarly genderless; and for a third, there was Caliban.

Actors of comedy and comic actors

The ability to sustain a role in a comedy was no less a routine requirement for professional actors in Elizabethan England than it is now. A genuine comic actor, though, is comparatively a rarity. We do not know who created the role of Caliban, but Shakespeare had someone in mind when he wrote it as an extreme stylistic contrast to Prospero.