Mooncalf

This image is another from my image morgue that has no data attached. I could make several guesses about the artist — Robert Bell, Walter Crane, John Batten, etc—but they're only guesses.

I further guess that this subject may be Caliban, from Shakespeare's Tempest, half-man, half-beast. Referred to as a mooncalf, he is forced into servitude to Prospero.

In Act 3, Scene 2, Caliban intones these words:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked

I cried to dream again.

A lovely speech by Caliban, but considering the context within the play, it was an odd choice for Kenneth Branagh to deliver within his context of the Olympic opening ceremony in London, with "absolutely no relationship" to Shakespeare or the Tempest.

As James Shapiro, a Columbia University English professor and expert on Shakespeare was quoted, "The lines are quite beautiful, and I guess they wanted to rip them out of context and talk about how magical a place the British Isles are . . . Why give him the lines Shakespeare wrote for a half-man, half-beast about to try to kill off an imperial innovator who took away his island? I don't know. You would probably have to ask the people who designed the opening Games ceremony what their thinking was."

Among other things, sez I.