Caliban: The Tempest's Monster, or Its Victim?

2026-09-07

Caliban gets the cruellest treatment in The Tempest and the loveliest lines in it. That contradiction is the point of him.

Is he a monster, or the island's rightful owner robbed by an invader? A slave with every reason to rebel, or a creature beyond saving? Four hundred years on, readers still cannot agree, and the play refuses to settle it for you. That is worth sitting with rather than solving.

Who Caliban is

Caliban was born on the island, son of the witch Sycorax. Before Prospero and his daughter Miranda arrived, the place was his. He met them kindly, showed them the fresh springs and the fertile ground, and Prospero taught him to speak. Then Prospero enslaved him.

Caliban's own account is blunt:

This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou takest from me.

That is a land claim, spoken by the person who was there first.

The reason Prospero gives

Prospero has an answer for the enslavement, and it is ugly. The two of them lived together until, he says, Caliban tried to rape Miranda. Prospero's charge is that Caliban sought to "violate / The honour of my child."

Asked about it, Caliban shows no regret. "O ho, O ho! would't had been done!" he says. He wishes he had succeeded.

So the wronged islander is also, by his own mouth, a would-be rapist. The play sets both facts down on the same page and lets neither one cancel the other.

"You taught me language"

The sharpest line Caliban has is about the gift he was given and what he does with it:

You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse.

The enslaved man turns the master's own tool back on him. That single moment is where the modern reading of Caliban starts.

Caliban as the colonised man

Across the twentieth century, Caliban stopped being a stage monster and became a figure for colonised peoples. This is a reading the play invites. It is not a key that unlocks him, and it has specific authors.

Octave Mannoni's 1950 book Prospero and Caliban used the pair as a model for the psychology of colonisation. The Barbadian writer George Lamming reclaimed Caliban in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), settling on that same complaint about language. In 1969 the poet Aimé Césaire rewrote the whole play as Une Tempête, set in the Caribbean, with Caliban a Black slave in open revolt against his master.

None of this is anachronistic. Shakespeare wrote the play around 1611, while England was launching its first colonies in the Americas. The questions were already in the air.

The monster who hears music

Here is what stops Caliban being a simple hero. He plots Prospero's murder. He meets a drunken butler, Stephano, decides the man's wine is divine, and offers himself as a slave to this new master within an hour. Prospero's verdict is flat: "a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick."

And yet Shakespeare hands this character the tenderest speech in the play:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

The critic Stephen Greenblatt points to the strangeness of that: the "savage" everyone mocks speaks more beautifully than the shipwrecked noblemen who sneer at him. Shakespeare built the contradiction on purpose and left it standing.