Caliban is the name of a deformed creature in The Tempest by William Shakespeare. In this work, Caliban represents the idea of a primitive wildman, enslaved by the protagonist, Prospero, and represents the most material and instinctive aspects of the human being, compared to Prospero's other servant, Ariel, who represents the elevated and spiritual.
He has been reused by later literature, reinterpreting him as a symbol of Rousseau's idea of the "natural man", of materialism versus idealism, of the social classes oppressed by capitalism or of colonized peoples.
Origin[]
Caliban is half human, half monster. After his island is occupied by Prospero and his daughter Miranda, Caliban is forced to become a slave. Although he is called a "moon-calf," (in English a term used to refer to an abortive calf and monstrous), is a freckled monster and the only human inhabitant of the island that, otherwise, "no human had graced." (Prospero, I.2.283). In some traditions, he is represented as a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast-man, or sometimes a mixture of fish and man, a dwarf or even a turtle.
According to what Prospero tells in The Tempest, Caliban is the son of the witch Sycorax and a devil. Expelled from Algiers, Sycorax takes refuge on the island where the entire play takes place, where she gives birth to Caliban and where she died before the arrival of Prospero, who raises him and makes him his slave. Despite his inhuman nature, Caliban clearly loved and idolized his mother, referring to Setebos as his mother's god, and appealing to her powers against Prospero.
Prospero explains his harshness towards Caliban because, according to him, when he treated him naturally and humanely, he tried to rape his daughter, Miranda, something that Caliban himself hilariously confirms when he states that, if he had not been interrupted, he would have populated the island with a race of Calibans. Prospero then traps Caliban and torments him with harmful magic if he does not obey his orders. In revenge for this inhuman treatment, Caliban adopts Stephanus, one of the castaways who arrive on the island at the beginning of the play, as his new god and lord, after tasting his wine. Caliban tries to goad Stephanus into killing Prospero; However, at the end of the play he will recognize that Stephano is neither a god nor someone equal in importance to Prospero, and he will agree to serve his former master again.