Caliban (character)
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Caliban is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, a deformed monster who is the slave of Prospero. He is referred to as a freckled whelp, "not honored with a human form." In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, steming from the confusion of two of the characters about what he is, finding him lying on a beach.
Caliban is the son of the witch Sycorax by (according to Prospero) a devil. Banished from Algiers, Sycorax was left on the isle, pregnant with Caliban, and died before Prospero's arrival. Caliban refers to Setebos as his mother's god. Prospero explains his harsh treatment of Caliban by claiming that after initially befriending him, Caliban attempted to rape Miranda. Caliban confirms this gleefully, saying that if he hadn't have been stopped he would have peopled the island with a race of calibans. Prospero enslaves Caliban and torments him then. In his resentment against Prospero, Caliban takes Stephano, one of the shipwrecked servants, as a god and as his new master, after being given some of Stephano's wine. Caliban urges Stephano to kill Prospero and become lord of the island. Caliban learns that Stephano is neither a god nor Prospero's equal in the conclusion of the play, however, and Caliban agrees to obey Prospero again.
Caliban was originally mostly a comic figure; however, in later years, he became a symbol for the wild, natural man. And, in more recent times, Caliban has been used as a metaphor for colonialism by anti-colonial intellectuals. The Negritude poet Aimé Césaire's play "Une Tempete" is one retelling that strongly promotes and conceptualizes this particular understanding of Caliban as a symbol for the colonized. Césaire and others saw him as an aboriginal inhabitant exploited and deprived of his culture and land by Prospero, the European colonizer. The fact that in the Shakespeare’s original, neither Caliban nor Sycorax are native to the island is often overlooked in this view.
Although referred by Prospero as a brutal savage, and treated as a figure of fun and contempt by all of the other characters, it is significant that Caliban is given some of the most moving and eloquent speeches in the play:
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 sometime 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.
-Act 3, Scene 2
The name "Caliban" is related to "cannibal" and "Carib."
Robert Browning wrote one of his dramatic monologues from the point of view of Caliban, Caliban upon Setebos, in which he views Caliban as a Rousseauean "natural man." Caliban also gives a lengthy monologue in the style of Henry James in W.H. Auden's long poem The Sea and the Mirror, a meditation on the themes of The Tempest.
Fantasy author Tad Williams retells the story of Caliban from his point of view in the short novel Caliban's Hour (1993).
Inspired both by The Tempest and Caliban upon Setebos, Caliban is revived as a monsterous inhuman beast in Dan Simmons' literary science fiction duology Ilium.
Caliban also is mentioned in the Preface of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, albeit very briefly, as quoted below:
- The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
- The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
In P.G. Wodehouse's novel Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit Percy Gorringe, a poet, is mocking the crude Stilton Cheesewright in a poem called Caliban at Sunset.
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