RESEARCH ON CALIBAN

THE TEMPEST

The Tempest belongs to the genre of Elizabethan romance plays. It combines elements of tragedy (Prospero's revenge) with those of romantic comedy (the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand), and it poses deeper questions that are not completely resolved at the end. The romance genre is distinguished by the inclusion (and synthesis) of these tragic, comic, and problematical ingredients and further marked by a happy in which all, or most, of the characters are brought into harmony.

The play was composed by Shakespeare as a multi-sensory theatre experience, with sound, and especially music, used to complement the sights of the play, and all of it interwoven by the author involving exotic, supra-hum.an, and sometimes invisible characters

The richness of The Tempest as theatre is matched by the extraordinary thematic complexity of its text. Among all the themes chise by Sheakespeare, The Tempest  mainly focuses its attention on the opposition between reality and illusion and the tandem subject of the theatre itself. There are, in addition, numerous interpenetrating polarities in the play, most notably between nature and civilization or Art. Nevertheless, from one angle on the text, The Tempest asks a single question, one that Shakespeare had posed in many and divers of his other plays: What is a human being?

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Source: eNotes Publishing, ©2012 eNotes.com, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.enotes.com/tempest/

CALIBAN

What’s in a name?

A lot of literary critics say that Caliban's name is an anagram or at least a play on the word can[n]ibal, a term derived from "carib" (as in the Caribbean), which became a European term used to describe flesh-eaters. If this is the case, then Caliban's name associates him with the kinds of "savage" man-eaters that Europeans were reading about in travel literature when Shakespeare wrote the play.

It's also possible that Caliban's name may be a play on the Romany word "Cauliban," which means "black" or something associated with blackness. This makes some sense, especially given that Caliban is associated with darkness throughout the play.

In any case, the character’s name reveals a condition of inferiority to the European man.

What’s his role?

Caliban in The Tempest is an original inhabitant of the island and is the bastard son of the evil Sycorax. He is a base and earthy slave who mirrors and contrasts several of the other characters. Regarding him as a "beast" and a "poisonous slave, got by the devil himself' upon Sycorax, Prospero has forced Caliban into servitude (IV.i.140; I.ii.319).

How is he described?

The character is often referred as "a savage and deformed slave", a “monster”, "hag-born", "whelp," not "honoured with human shape", "Demi-devil", “Poor credulous monster”, "Strange fish" by the other characters. By contrast, Caliban considers himself mistreated and overworked. In addition, the audience catches his ambiguous idenity. On one hand, his grotesque appearance and misguided decision-making make us side with Prospero. However, our sympathies are manipulated by his passion for the island and his desire to be loved.

How does he appear?

One has to respect Caliban’s proud refusal to serve Prospero, perhaps a true sign of power in The Tempest.

All in all Caliban is a complex and sensitive character whose naivety leads him into foolishness but his authentic nature makes him a man. Such a character is functional to present the problematic question of being a man rather than a monster.

How interpret him?

For this reason, lot of critics interpret Caliban as  a symbol of what happened to victims of European colonization in the centuries after Shakespeare wrote The Tempest.

Caliban stands for countless victims of European imperialism and colonization. Like Caliban (so the argument goes), colonized peoples were disinherited, exploited, and subjugated. Like him, they learned a conqueror's language and perhaps that conqueror's values. Like him, they endured enslavement and contempt by European usurpers and eventually rebelled. Like him, they were torn between their indigenous culture and the culture superimposed on it by their conquerors. (Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History, 145)

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http://shakespeare.about.com/od/thetempest/a/Caliban-tempest.htm

Source: Shakespeare for Students, ©2012 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved: http://www.enotes.com/tempest/caliban-character-analysis

http://www.shmoop.com/tempest/caliban.html