Caliban in William Shakespeare's The Tempest

William Shakespeare, often nicknamed ‘The Bard”, is beyond any comparison, the most towering name in English Literature. The Tempest, a masterpiece of Shakespeare, explores the consequences of European settlement in the new world. It is generally considered Shakespeare's final play as well as the last of his romance plays. 

William Shakespeare
(Picture Credit- time.com)

Most of the readers of The Tempest look upon Caliban, that "freckled hag-born whelp," as a monster creature, half-man and half-devil, a repulsive creature of brute understanding, stunted faculties, and gross, malignant, moral nature. But there is much to be said in favour of this spawn of Sycorax and the devil. What faults the moon-calf has lie in his physical grossness and in his attempt on the virtue of Miranda; yet the first of these is characteristic of Falstaff, the second is a situation familiar in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and neither is uncommon enough to elicit especial censure.

Caliban is an original inhabitant of the island and is the bastard son of the witch Sycorax and the devil. In The Tempest Caliban is a significant character contributing to the themes and dramatic effects, such as slavery, power, nature and colonialism. Caliban has many influences on the other characters in the play are perceived by the audience. Caliban embodies three ideas, first, the supernatural as he is born of the union of a witch and the devil. Hence, he is deformed. In the first and supernatural character, Caliban serves as a foil to the heavenly spirit. Many of Caliban’s actions added a variety of themes to The Tempest, and the way Caliban is portrayed can also be related to historical context during Shakespeare’s time.

In Caliban’s character in The Tempest, there are three aspects, and it is only with the second of these that he becomes a clown. As the play opens he is a serious figure dwelling rebelliously on the enchanted isle with Prospero, Ariel, and Miranda; he broods over personal injustice and yearns to be free of tyranny. According to Harold Bloom:

"Caliban’s cowardice is very funny, but political correctness pompously demands that we see him as a heroic West Indian freedom fighter! And poor Prospero, badgered stage-manager, is now a rapacious colonialist." (xii) 

Ludicrous though Caliban may be in his strange new world, he is, fundamentally, a likable character touched with Shakespeare's sympathy, and it seems not at all improbable that the dramatist intended him simply as a pathetic clown whose dramatic function in the play is to evoke sympathetic laughter.

Reading with deep attention shows us that Prospero calls Caliban “beast”, the island native is a complex and suffering human being. Caliban’s name, as some critics point out, is an anagram for “cannibal”, but it is not “cannibal”, nor does Caliban show any signs of the cannibalism seventeenth-century Europeans associated with New World natives. Prospero, who has enlisted Caliban’s services since his own arrival. Caliban’s pig-nut-digging fingers will also prove useful to shipwrecked Stephano and Trinculo, who, like Prospero before them, exploit Caliban’s knowledge and skills in their attempt to control the island. Trinculo initially imagines taking Caliban to England.

Shakespeare’s exposure of Prospero’s oppressiveness is subtler. First treated, by Caliban’s own account , as Prospero’s cherished dependent. At first we may think these penalties deserved since, as Caliban freely admits, he once sought “to violate...The honour” of Prospero’s real daughter, Miranda. Yet the feral Caliban, we soon learn, was ignorant even of language until taught it by Miranda, and could not initially have understood the abstract concept of violation, nor the even more abstract word “honour”, by which Prospero means Miranda’s virginity. Thus the attempted rape seems more likely to have stemmed from untaught natural impulse than from considered evil. According to Caliban:

"O ho, O ho, would’t had been done!

Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else

This isle with Calibans." (Shakespeare 87) 

Here Caliban tries to show his power on the island through this statement. It is true that once Caliban has become considerably more intellectually sophisticated since the attempted rape , since he regrets its failure in politic terms.

Prospero fails to Caliban’s transformation , we see the monster finally enlightened by the insight that there are moral distinctions among masters, that he has chosen badly, and indeed that choice of a master is possible. Prospero states about Caliban:

"A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurturee can never stick; on whom my pains,

Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;

And as with age his body uglier grows, 

So his mind cankers. I will plague them all." (Shakespeare, 128)

Now it is clear to Prospero that this Caliban is surely a born devil. Good education and breeding leave absolutely no mark on his innate or inherent wicked nature. All the pains that Prospero spent on him from sheer kindness have been completely wasted and he is a lost creature. As, with the passing of years, his body grows uglier and uglier, so his mind becomes more and more poisonous.

The Tempest, being a play about colonialism, deals with the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. If Prospero represents the colonizer from the civilized world, Caliban is seen as a savage beast thus in need of being civilized. He is a victim of colonial rule and exploitation. At the same time he also represents the force for striking back on the colonizer.

Caliban displays the puzzling mixture of darkness and light that is the core of humanness. It is, after all, through strict rule of the island that he shows himself capable of the governance skills he lacked in Milan. Caliban is ignorant of the ways of the outside world intelligence is brutish but simply because his experience limited. Grace Tiffany remarks:

"Caliban is apparently no more savage animal, but when sober a wily intellectual adversary." (35) 

In the political sphere Caliban is also alert. to know that he is a slave and courage enough to under the tyranny of Prospero he is surly and curses the magician for having stolen the island matter of fact, it is not civilized man that has nor is it superior intelligence or superior physical crushed him; it is the power of magic. Caliban’s situation here is akin to that of Ariel, whose harsh confinement in the cloven pine Prospero has transformed, not yet to the ‘air at freedom’, but to a more capacious servitude.

To summarize, we can say Caliban is truly a significant character contributing to the themes and dramatic effects, such as slavery, power, nature and colonialism. The Tempest condemns Caliban’s choice to serve someone, nor does the play affirm any ideal of a person liberation from all constraints. In his last speech he is no longer drunk and, therefore, no longer funny. The monster, the slave, the colonized are the three parts played by the deformed Caliban in The Tempest. He is a serious being again, analytical and disillusioned. He knows he has made a fool of himself, and it is he who tells the audience of it. It may be said that Caliban is fundamentally a serious figure who becomes a clown and the butt of jokes simply because he is taken from his proper environment and exhibited in circumstances with which he lacks the experience to cope.

Works Cited:

1. Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages : The Tempest. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008. Print.

2. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Grace Tiffany. New Delhi: Cengage Learning, 2014. Print.

3. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. New Delhi: The Arden Shakespeare, 1999. Print.

4. McCloskey, John C. “Caliban, Savage Clown.” College English 1 (1940): 354-357. Web.

University of North Bengal,

Siliguri