What an amazing week. The sun returned at last, Sarah’s birthday, my book came out, I watched my students graduate, and (of course) the Olympic Opening Ceremony last night. Already at least one Shakespeare expert has questioned the use of Caliban’s speech from The Tempest. The conclusion from USA Today that “at least [the words] sounded nice” could be the right one – maybe it’s tempting to think that Danny Boyle just didn’t get it; that is, until you take in the whole of the spectacle of the Opening Ceremony. Could someone with such an astonishing artistic and cultural awareness simply not understand that speech from The Tempest to the extent that he would (ironically) misappropriate it and use it because it “sounded nice”? Really? The Tempest has famously been read as an emblem for postcolonial studies; so much so that it’s become the über postcolonial text. In such a reading, Caliban is the colonised original inhabitant of the magical island over which Prospero now rules – although, already there’s a layer of paradox, because in the speech we see Caliban celebrated. Caliban is the monster and Prospero is the civilising force. (Both are so much more than that, otherwise why would people still write about them, feel unsettled by them, argue about them hundreds of years later?) What’s more the meta-narrative that’s been attributed to Shakespeare could be read as an emblem of a Cultural Imperialist force, colonising culture. (But then we return to the Shakespeare of writing, directing and acting and realise that it’s ever so much more complex and much more simple than that. It makes me wish I had a time machine so I could hand the guy a Royalties Cheque.) So was it inappropriate to use the speech of a monster-ised character, from the über postcolonial text, written by an emblem of a Cultural Imperialist force in a piece of modern theatre designed to celebrate Great Britain, to show off British culture to the world? No, I don’t think so. Not in the context of the rest of the ceremony. Here was a piece of theatre about our cultural history, which avoided obvious stereotypes, which celebrated diversity in its broadest sense, which suggested that hope for the future lies in the hands of our children and young people, and which highlighted both the class system and the NHS, which was fun but also sad, which showed a deep understanding of what it means to be British now. Caliban’s speech came with its baggage – just like every other aspect of culture in the ceremony came with its baggage. The speech was appropriated to demonstrate the coloniser re-colonised, in the context of the industrial revolution and the fallen British Empire, which has left such an imprint that to ignore it is to misunderstand our culture entirely. Read like that, the speech was as perfect a celebration of the genuine mishmash of modern British culture as a walk down a London street. If Danny Boyle had wanted words that “sounded nice”, about dreaming, he could have gone for Theseus from Midsummer Night’s Dream, or he could have picked something far more patriotic.