Caliban (character)
Encyclopedia
Caliban is one of the primary antagonists in William Shakespeare
's play The Tempest
.
, a freckled monster, he is the only human inhabitant of the island that is otherwise "not honour'd with a human shape“ (Prospero, I.2.283). In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, stemming from the confusion of two of the characters about what he is, found lying on a deserted island. Caliban is the son of the luciferous woman Sycorax
by (according to Prospero) a devil
. Banished from Algiero (Algiers), Sycorax was left on the isle, pregnant with Caliban, and died before Prospero's arrival. Caliban refers to Setebos
as his mother's god. Prospero explains his harsh treatment of Caliban by claiming that after initially befriending him, Caliban attempted to rape
Miranda
. Caliban confirms this gleefully, saying that if he hadn't been stopped he would have peopled the island with a race of Calibans. Prospero then entraps Caliban and torments him. Resentful of Prospero, Caliban takes Stephano, one of the shipwrecked servants, as a god and as his new master. Caliban learns that Stephano is neither a god nor Prospero's equal in the conclusion of the play, however, and Caliban agrees to obey Prospero again.
Despite his portrayal, he also has moments in which he delivers beautiful speeches, such as in Act 3, Scene 2:
' 1963 novel The Collector
, Miranda - the kidnapped girl held hostage in the cellar - calls her abductor Caliban.
Caliban is the protagonist of Aimé Césaire
's 1969 play Une Tempête
, in which he is a black slave in rebellion against his white master Prospero.
In the Swedish 1989 film The Journey to Melonia, an animated film loosely inspired by The Tempest, there is a character named Caliban, a creature whose face consists of mainly vegetables. Unlike Caliban in the Tempest, this Caliban is kind at heart, and even becomes a hero later in the film.
Tad Williams
' 1997 novel Caliban's Hour (US: HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0061054136 and UK: Legend Books, ISBN 0-09-926361-0) takes place twenty years after the events of The Tempest
. Abandoned on the island by Prospero
and Miranda, Caliban manages to escape and make his way to Milan with the intention of avenging himself on Prospero, only to learn that Prospero has died. He then travels to Naples and one night gains entry to Miranda's chamber, where he forces her to listen to his story and make her understand what she and her father have done to him.
Adrian Herrero danced Calibán in the choreographic adaptation of the Tempest (La Tempestad) by the Ballet Contemporáneo of the Teatro General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2008.
In the 2010 film adaptation, Caliban is portrayed by Djimon Hounsou
.
In the 2010 film The King's Speech the king's speech therapist recites Caliban's famous speech from Act 3, Scene 2, to amuse and educate his children.
Oscar Wilde
refers to Caliban in the preface of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
.
of the Spanish
word canibal, the source of cannibal
in English
.
The character's name may also be inspired by kaliban or cauliban in the Romani language
, which mean black or with blackness. As the first Romani immigrants arrived in England a century before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest
, the Bard may have been influenced by their exotic looks and manners. In Shakespeare's time, the English discriminated against the Romanies. Alternatively the name may originate from the Arabic
word for "wild dog".
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's play The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
.
Character
Caliban is forced into servitude on an island ruled by Prospero. While he is referred to as a calvaluna or mooncalfMooncalf
A mooncalf is the abortive fetus of a cow or other farm animal. The term was occasionally applied to an abortive human fetus....
, a freckled monster, he is the only human inhabitant of the island that is otherwise "not honour'd with a human shape“ (Prospero, I.2.283). In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, stemming from the confusion of two of the characters about what he is, found lying on a deserted island. Caliban is the son of the luciferous woman Sycorax
Sycorax (Shakespeare)
Sycorax , an unseen character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest , is a powerful witch and the mother of Caliban, one of the few native inhabitants of the island on which Prospero, the hero of the play, is stranded....
by (according to Prospero) a devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
. Banished from Algiero (Algiers), Sycorax was left on the isle, pregnant with Caliban, and died before Prospero's arrival. Caliban refers to Setebos
Setebos
Setebos may refer to:*Setebos, a fictional god worshipped by Sycorax in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Robert Browning's poem Caliban upon Setebos describes the musings of Sycorax's son, Caliban, on the god....
as his mother's god. Prospero explains his harsh treatment of Caliban by claiming that after initially befriending him, Caliban attempted to rape
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
Miranda
Miranda (Shakespeare)
In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Miranda is the beautiful daughter of the old Duke Prospero.Cast away with her father since she was three years old, she has lived an extremely sheltered existence. Though she has received a well-rounded education from her father, she is desperately lacking in real...
. Caliban confirms this gleefully, saying that if he hadn't been stopped he would have peopled the island with a race of Calibans. Prospero then entraps Caliban and torments him. Resentful of Prospero, Caliban takes Stephano, one of the shipwrecked servants, as a god and as his new master. Caliban learns that Stephano is neither a god nor Prospero's equal in the conclusion of the play, however, and Caliban agrees to obey Prospero again.
Despite his portrayal, he also has moments in which he delivers beautiful speeches, such as in Act 3, Scene 2:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
Other works
In John FowlesJohn Fowles
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Birth and family:...
' 1963 novel The Collector
The Collector
The Collector is the title of a 1963 novel by John Fowles. It was made into a movie in 1965.- Plot summary :The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time...
, Miranda - the kidnapped girl held hostage in the cellar - calls her abductor Caliban.
Caliban is the protagonist of Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".-Student, educator, and poet:...
's 1969 play Une Tempête
Une Tempête
Une tempête is a 1969 play by Aimé Césaire. It is an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective: Prospero is a white master, while Ariel is a mulatto and Caliban is a black slave. Caliban favors revolution over Ariel's non-violence, and rejects his name as the...
, in which he is a black slave in rebellion against his white master Prospero.
In the Swedish 1989 film The Journey to Melonia, an animated film loosely inspired by The Tempest, there is a character named Caliban, a creature whose face consists of mainly vegetables. Unlike Caliban in the Tempest, this Caliban is kind at heart, and even becomes a hero later in the film.
Tad Williams
Tad Williams
Robert Paul "Tad" Williams, born in San Jose, California, is the author of several fantasy and science fiction novels, including Tailchaser's Song, the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, the Otherland series, and The War of the Flowers....
' 1997 novel Caliban's Hour (US: HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0061054136 and UK: Legend Books, ISBN 0-09-926361-0) takes place twenty years after the events of The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
. Abandoned on the island by Prospero
Prospero
Prospero is the protagonist in The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare.- The Tempest :Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, who was put to sea on "a rotten carcass of a butt [boat]" to die by his usurping brother, Antonio, twelve years before the play begins. Prospero and Miranda survived,...
and Miranda, Caliban manages to escape and make his way to Milan with the intention of avenging himself on Prospero, only to learn that Prospero has died. He then travels to Naples and one night gains entry to Miranda's chamber, where he forces her to listen to his story and make her understand what she and her father have done to him.
Adrian Herrero danced Calibán in the choreographic adaptation of the Tempest (La Tempestad) by the Ballet Contemporáneo of the Teatro General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2008.
In the 2010 film adaptation, Caliban is portrayed by Djimon Hounsou
Djimon Hounsou
Djimon Diaw Hounsou is a Beninese actor and model. As an actor, Hounsou has been nominated for two Academy Awards.-Early life:Djimon Hounsou was born in Cotonou, Benin, in 1964, to lbertine and Pierre Hounsou, a cook. He emigrated to Lyon in France at the age of thirteen with his brother, Edmond....
.
In the 2010 film The King's Speech the king's speech therapist recites Caliban's famous speech from Act 3, Scene 2, to amuse and educate his children.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
refers to Caliban in the preface of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine...
.
Etymology
The name is an anagramAnagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
of the Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
word canibal, the source of cannibal
Cannibalism
Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...
in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
.
The character's name may also be inspired by kaliban or cauliban in the Romani language
Romani language
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....
, which mean black or with blackness. As the first Romani immigrants arrived in England a century before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
, the Bard may have been influenced by their exotic looks and manners. In Shakespeare's time, the English discriminated against the Romanies. Alternatively the name may originate from the Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
word for "wild dog".
External links
- Caliban at Sunset, a poem by P. G. Wodehouse.
- "Something Rich and Strange": Caliban's Theatrical Metamorphoses
- "Caliban Upon Setebos, a poem by Robert Browning.