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Caliban the Bestial Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The character of Caliban continues to be a source of speculation to readers of The Tempest, but gradually we are learning those elements of sixteenth-century thought which suggested him to Shakespeare. Some years ago Mr. Morton Luce pointed out that Caliban can be viewed in three separate ways: 1) as a hag-born monstrosity, 2) as a slave, and 3) as a savage, or dispossessed Indian. The second of these ways may be explained by the third, since the English could read many accounts of the manner in which the Spaniards had reduced the Indians to slavery. But, while Caliban worships a Patagonian god, he is the child of an African witch from Argier (Algiers). This would seem to indicate that Shakespeare is not trying to represent primarily a red Indian from the New World but has broadened the conception to represent primitive man as a type. The name Caliban, a metathesis of canibal, supports this view, for contemporary voyagers, as well as early travelers from Homer and Herodotus to Mandeville, had found cannibals in many different quarters of the world.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 Tempest, Arden ed., Introd., pp. xxxii-xxxix.
2 Vide infra, note 9.
3 For discussion and additional documentation of these points, see my essay “On Ghosts” in The Character of Hamlet and Other Essays (University of North Carolina Press, 1941).
4 R. R. Cawley, “Shakspere's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” PMLA, xli (1926), 721-722. For resemblance to Spenser's Hag and Churl (F.Q., iii, vii), see Alwin Thaler in SAB, x (1935), 203, and J. A. S. McPeek in PQ, xxxv (1946), 378-381.
5 See Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Nicholson, p. 512.
6 Cf. Tempest, iii.iii.44-47.
7 Purchas His Pilgrimes, ii.ix.1556. Cunliffe's note is an annotation to Tempest, ii.ii.35, in Brooke, Cunliffe, and MacCracken's Shakespeare's Principal Plays.
8 Caliban's head is also reminiscent of the dog-headed men, mentioned by Pliny and familiar in maps and travel tales. See R. R. Cawley, Unpathed Waters, (Princeton, 1940), pp. 107-108.
9 Richard Eden, Historie of Travayle, quoted from Edward Arber, The First Three English Books on America (1895), p. 252.
10 See Cawley's “Shakspere's Use of the Voyagers,” already cited, which proves the indebtedness beyond a reasonable doubt.
11 Edd. Wilson and Yardley (Oxford, 1929), pp. 70, 75.
12 Essais, i.xxx.
13 Eden, op. cit., p. 251. Eden's cannibals were in the same area as Montaigne's, who were brought to France by Villegagnon, as Montaigne tells us. Villegagnon, a French missionary, had settled at Rio de Janeiro, but his fort was later captured by the Portuguese (Purchas, iv.vii.1438). It is perhaps worthy of mention that Eden has the meeting with Setebos' worshipers take place on an island, and that on p. 250 is given a description of St. Elmo's fire, much like the fires in Shakespeare's storm.
14 Cf. Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (Boston, 1938), pp. 369, 388.
15 See ibid., pp. 344 ff., for instances of the two opposite views.
16 In The Character of Hamlet and Other Essays. See particularly p. 116, n. 5, for evidence that Shakespeare had read the Ethics. For a later significant article, see George C. Taylor, “Shakespeare's Use of the Idea of the Beast in Man,” Studies in Philology, xlii (1945), 530-543.
17 Nicomachean Ethics, vii.v.2 (Loeb ed.).
18 History, ch. iv.
19 Florio's Montaigne, Modern Library ed., p. 166; Cawley, Unpathed Waters, p. 108.
20 Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, pp. 349, 357.
21 Ibid., pp. 363-364.
22 Ibid., pp. 347-348.
23 Ibid., p. 357.
24 Caliban's parentage supports this interpretation. The Catholic Church listed human copulation with demons and human copulation with animals as similar examples of unnatural lusts, applying to both acts the term bestialitas. See Montague Summers, History of Witchcraft (New York, 1926), pp. 92, 106. Caliban being the son oí a devil or incubus, his birth resulted from an act of bestiality by his mother, which might be assumed to have influenced her offspring.
25 Commentarium in De Anima Aristotelis, iii.iv.629-630.
26 Ibid., iii.vi.670.
27 Romeo and Juliet, iii.iii.111.
28 Othello, ii.iii.264, 309.
29 Hamlet, iv.v.84-86.