| Prospero | Malignant thingLitterDevilThing of darknessNot honoured with a human shapePoisonous slave, got by the devil himself |
| Miranda | Abhorred slaveVile race SavageGabble like a thing most brutish |
| Caliban | I loved thee, and showed thee all the qualities o’th’isle, the fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile |
| Caliban | You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse |
| Caliban | I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’th’island and i will kiss thy foot, i prithee, be my god? |
| Trinculo | A man or a fish? |
| Caliban | Knock a nail into his head… Brain him… Batter his skull |
| Caliban | Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not |
| Caliban | I cried to dream again |
| Caliban | Would’t had been done i would have peopled the isle with Calibans |
| Stage direction | “Caliban, burden of wood” |
| OTHER READERS | … |
| (Martin Butler) | (Ambivalence) |
| (Martin Butler) | (He is defined not by his own identity but by what others see in him and make of him) |
| (Martin Butler) | (Caliban’s touchingly aesthetic response to the island’s ‘sounds and sweet airs’, suggests he is not the simple brute the Europeans automatically assume) |
| (D. A. Traversi) | (Caliban, the offspring of a witch but himself uncorrupted by civilisation, is a strange mix of the poetical and the absurd, the pathetic and the savagely evil) |
| (D. A. Traversi) | (He expresses a genuine and distinctive poetic note in appreciation of the natural beauties around him but has to choose between his spiritual and animal nature when Prospero breaks-up the simplicity of the island) |
The Tempest – Caliban
July 2, 2019