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) |