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Caliban in The Tempest : Black Magic, Brutal Savage and Reformation

Caliban: "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 Tempest

Caliban in The Tempest is a complex character. The idea perhaps first struck Shakespeare as he heard the queer tales of ship-wreck and sailors stranded in enchanted islands and confronted with fantasy beings, neither fish nor man. The fantastic yet wonderful conception of Caliban owes much to these current stories –Caliban in face is conceived as the symbol of gross earthly things and passion, the half-brute half-man. He is also contrasted with the ethereal spirit of air, Ariel. Wilson Knight considers Caliban an ugly creature growing out of the imagery of stagnant pools and earthly wood-land.

 At the opening of the play, Caliban is found to be twenty five, born in the island of a union between the foul witch Sycorax and the very devil himself. Caliban’s parentage thus shows Sycorax monstrosity, brutality, ugliness, deformity and a natal connexion with black magic. According to Prospero, he is a foul and unnatural monster. Reference to such wild beings are available in Horace and Shakespeare was trying to find out an intermediate link between brute in Shakespeare the treatment is a bit between brute and man That is why Caliban is more complex than Ariel to understand –be is the servant monster, plain fish, tortoise, legged like a man and his fins like arms with very ancient and fish like smell. While Wilson asserts that these appellations confirm Caliban as primitive sea monsters, Morton Luce comes more to the point when he comments in at one half of the suggestion about the forms, features and endowments of Caliban cancel the other half. The resulting indistinctness however, is not confusion worse confounded but the real staple for the symbolist art, which conveys more than it can clearly indicate. 

Caliban is a gross, earthly brutal savage. He thinks himself as the rightful owner of the island wherein Prospero is just an intruder whom he cannot tolerate. He learns human language form Prospero only to curse his master. He wants a change of master at the very sight of the drunken sailors, Stephano and Trinculo with whom he conspires to murder Prospero. His intrigue failing, he condemns himself as a thrice-double ass who took the   drunkard for god.

Fyodor Paramonov as Caliban in The Tempest
Caliban again has the imagination of an artist, he has the ear for music and he feel that the “isle is full of many noises, sounds and sweet airs that delight and hurt not”, to quote his own words. In his very earthiness, he is foil to Ariel and he is endowed with a soul which Ariel has not. The real secret of his character lies in his sensuality, his physical deformity symbolizing his mental abnormality. This thing of darkness, Caliban has remarkable personality that singularly lacks intellectual judgment. He converses in half picture, half music and thus creates a poetry that is more musical than cerebral. All these indicates that this half brute, this thing of darkness endowed with a soul and a passion for poetry and music, however sensual, is not without the chance of redemption in the hands of his creator, Shakespeare who ultimately feels that it would be too offensive to look at him in all his deformity. He is after all the natural man ridden with just and lethargy, foul cursing and cons piracy. He is again superior to many corrupt civilized being like Stephano, Antonio or Sebastian. He has a sense of beauty, and music and poetry comes naturally to his sensuous nature. Shakespeare who originally conceived him as a detestable deformed monstrosity, a mere converse of Ariel, ultimately decides to save the soul of this half formed creature as he falls in love with his own creation out of his known and native kindness. A few Shakespearean touches bring about this grace and we find at the end of the play Caliban sincerely praying for Prospero’s forgiveness. He wins it and wins also our sympathy despite all his bestiality which is far outweighed by the other qualities he is endowed with. The thing of darkness finally sees the light of grace.   

 Key Points:

  1. Caliban is a complex and controversial character in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
  2. He is a native of the island where the play is set, and he is often seen as a symbol of the oppressed and the colonized.
  3. He is also associated with black magic, brutality, and savagery.
  4. However, Caliban is also a sympathetic character, and he is capable of great love and loyalty.
  5. His character is a reflection of the complex attitudes towards race and colonialism in Shakespeare's time.
Ardhendu De

Ref: Image Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_tempest

British Library. (n.d.). British Library. https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/character-analysis-miranda-in-the-tempest

Mandal. (2014, May). Subaltern Voice in Shakespeare: A Study in The Tempest. International Journal of Computational Engineering Research (IJCER), 4(5), Article 2250 – 3005. http://www.ijceronline.com/papers/Vol4_issue05/version-3/G04503063067.pdf

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