SOURCE: Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Alden T. Vaughan. Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare: The Tempest, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, pp. 1-138. London: Thomson Learning, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, Vaughan and Vaughan analyze the main characters of The Tempest—Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel—and briefly summarize the remaining, minor characters.]

Like the location of the enchanted island, the origins of [The Tempest's] characters are elusive. There are, to be sure, links to Shakespeare's earlier endeavours: Prospero has often been compared to Measure for Measure's Vincentio, Miranda to the late romances' Marina, Imogen and Perdita. Despite the echoes of past creations, the characters in The Tempest are as much sui generis as the play's structure and language.

Ben Jonson included a Prospero and a Stephano in the first version of Every Man in his Humour (1598), which makes it tempting to imagine that Shakespeare, who appears in Every Man's cast list, once performed Jonson's Prospero. But the resemblance between the two characters is in name only. Prospero, ironically enough, means ‘fortunate’ or ‘prosperous’ but, like Shakespeare's magician, the name has often belied reality. For example, William Thomas's Historie of Italie (1549), sometimes suggested as a direct source for The Tempest (Bullough, 8.249-50), describes the fate of Prospero Adorno, who was established by Ferdinando, Duke of Milan, as the Governor of Genoa. According to Thomas, Prospero was deposed; the citizens ‘(remembryng how thei were best in quiet, whan they were subjectes to the Duke of Millaine) returned of newe to be under the Milanese dominion: and than was Antony Adorno made governour of the citee for the Duke’ (Thomas, 182). Whether or not Shakespeare took the names of Ferdinand and the brothers Prospero and Antonio from Thomas, the latter's account of a brother's treachery provides an intriguing analogue.

Prospero is ‘fortunate’ in that after twelve years of suffering on a lonely island he sees his daughter happily betrothed and is at long last restored to his dukedom. He is clearly the play's central character; he has far more lines than anyone else¹ and manipulates the other characters throughout. One's reaction to Prospero almost inevitably determines one's response to the entire play. In the eighteenth century, when the magus was perceived as an enlightened and benign philosophe, the play seemed a magical comedy; by the late twentieth century, when Prospero had come to be viewed as a tetchy, if not tyrannical, imperialist, the play itself seemed more problematic.

Congruent with these changing interpretations were different physical images of the magus. From the eighteenth century into the twentieth, he was customarily depicted on stage and in visual representations as an old, grey-bearded sage; in many late twentieth-century commentaries, he is presented as middle-aged, which reflects partly a better knowledge of Renaissance royal culture and partly the influence of Freudian theories. Renaissance princes usually married early. Since Miranda is apparently his only offspring (whose mother presumably died giving birth) and is now approximately 15, Prospero could be as young as 35. The range of his emotions attests to a nature still in development, and his comment at the play's finale that ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’ is most likely the mature reflection of middle age that time is not limitless. When Richard Burbage (1567-1619) performed Prospero's role in 1611, he was 44 (Shakespeare was 47), which reinforces our impression of Prospero as between 40 and 45, but no older. If this is indeed the case, an underlying motive for his urgency for the match with Ferdinand may be incestuous feelings for his own daughter. As some recent critics and performances have emphasized, he needs to get her off the island and married, for his own sake as well as hers.

Throughout the play Prospero displays ‘a superb combination of power and control’ in his relations to others (Kahn, 239). His stance throughout is authoritarian, which may explain the changing reaction to his role over the centuries. As Duke, he was reponsible for the health of his duchy; his inattention to politics invited Antonio's coup d'état twelve years before the play begins; when Prospero resumes his ducal robes at the play's conclusion, there is some question as to what kind of ruler he will be now. His willingness to relinquish his books, the source of his earlier distraction, suggests that he will take a more ‘hands-on’ approach, perhaps replacing the information gathered by Ariel by using his own surveillance techniques to monitor Antonio and Sebastian.

Prospero is also … a magician. He wears magic robes, uses a magic staff and refers to his books on magic. Magic is his technology, a means to the end of getting what he wants. But a central ambiguity in the play is what he wants. Does he plan a spectacular revenge against his enemies? His disjointed language and palpable anguish in 1.2.66-132 suggest the rage that has festered for twelve years, but his plan for Miranda's marriage to Ferdinand makes it less likely that he intends real harm to her future father-in-law. Prospero's angry outburst in the midst of the masquers' festive dance in 4.1 reveals a mind distempered by crimes he cannot forgive, yet he claims to have forgiven the courtiers at the play's conclusion, partly in response to Ariel's remonstrance and partly because he must if Miranda's union with Ferdinand is to succeed. Prospero's darker side, moreover, is emphasized by his being the mirror image to Sycorax. Like Prospero, she arrived with a child, though hers (Caliban) was still in the womb; like him, she used her magic (witchcraft) to control the elements. But Sycorax's powers are presented as demonic, and until he echoes the sorceress Medea's invocation in 5.1.33-50, Prospero construes his own magic as benign: ‘There's no harm done’ (1.2.15). Still, the parallel underlies the play and casts an ambiguous shadow on the magician.

Perhaps Prospero's most controversial role is that of master. In his service are Ariel, who serves under oral contract for an unstated period (1.2.245-50), and Caliban, enslaved by Prospero a year or two earlier, the text implies, for his sexual assault on a recently pubescent Miranda. Although Prospero handles both subordinates with threats of confinement and bodily pain, and although he is, in many modern interpretations, unduly strict and often petulant towards them, at the end he sets Ariel free ahead of schedule and, perhaps, leaves Caliban to fend for himself when the Europeans return to Italy. Prospero is equally impatient with Ferdinand, whom he temporarily forces to do manual labour. Ferdinand's service is short-lived, however, and he is rewarded with Miranda as a bride.²

In the effort to control his fellows, Prospero also seeks to monopolize the narrative. He burdens Miranda in 1.2 with one of the lengthiest expositions in all Shakespearean drama, and at his concluding invitation to the courtiers to pass the night in his cave, he promises to recount the events of his twelve-year exile. His anger at the plot devised by Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo may result in part from their threat to set up a competing narrative; Caliban wants to get his island back (even if Stephano is king), just as Prospero wants to get his dukedom back, and Caliban's plot to kill Prospero would, if successful, destroy the magus's plans. Caliban's and Prospero's conflicting perspectives produce contrary accounts of key events.

If Prospero can be said to ‘prosper’, Miranda is also aptly named with the feminine form of the gerundive of the Latin verb miror, ‘wonder’. Ferdinand exclaims, ‘O, you wonder!’ when he first meets her, and her response to her newly discovered relatives in the famous line, ‘O wonder! … O brave new world!’ (5.1.181-3), bespeaks her own amazement at a world now opening before her.

Miranda's role within The Tempest's authoritarian framework is first as a daughter and then as a future wife. But even though she conveniently (or magically) falls in love with the man of her father's choice, Miranda is not as meek and submissive as she is often portrayed. She clandestinely (she thinks) meets Ferdinand without permission and then disobeys her father's command not to reveal her name. Earlier, her stinging rebuke of Caliban (1.2.352-63) reveals an assertive young woman. Still, despite occasional disobedience and outspokenness, Miranda remains the chaste ideal of early modern womanhood. Central to Prospero's ‘obsession with themes of chastity and fertility’ (Thompson, 47), Miranda is his raison d'être, her marriage and future children his promise of immortality.

Although Miranda is central to The Tempest's story line, Prospero's two servants play more vocal and dynamic roles; both have problematic names. ‘Ariel’ must have had rich resonances for a Jacobean audience: ‘Uriel’, the name of an angel in the Jewish cabala, was John Dee's spirit-communicant during his ill-fated experiments with magic (French, 111-17). Even richer are the biblical nuances. Although the Bishops' Bible equates Ariel with the city of Jerusalem, marginalia to Isaiah, 29, of the Geneva Bible observe that ‘The Ebrewe worde Ariel signifieth the lyon of God, & signifieth the altar, because the altar semed to devoure the sacrifice that was offred to God’. Ariel is thus an appropriate appellation for the powerful magus's agent who contrives a storm and a disappearing banquet. In the Bishops' Bible, the prophet declares that the altar of Jerusalem ‘shall be visited of the Lord of hostes with thundre, and shaking, and a great noyse, a whirlwinde, and a tempest, and a flame of devouring fyre’. Ariel describes his activity in the storm:

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin
I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide
And burn in many places—on the topmast,
The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join.

(1.2.197-201)

The prophet Isaiah continues, ‘And it shalbe like as an hungrie man dreameth, and beholde, he eateth: and when he awaketh, his soule is emptie … For the Lord hath covered you with a spirit of slomber and hath shut up your eyes’—metaphors that are reified in 2.1 when a ‘strange drowsiness’ possesses the Neapolitans and in 3.3 when ‘the banquet vanishes’. By 1610 Shakespeare probably had heard Isaiah, 29, expounded in church and perhaps had read it at home; whether he turned directly to the bible or drew on subconscious recollections while he wrote, the image of Ariel as the ‘lyon of God’ speaking through flood and fire reverberates in The Tempest.

Prospero describes Ariel as ‘quaint’, ‘delicate’, ‘dainty’, and ‘tricksy’ (1.2.318; 4.1.49; 5.1.95, 226). Although Prospero is angered by the sprite's momentary rebellion in 1.2, usually master and servant seem fond of each other, and for most of the play Ariel gladly and expeditiously complies with his master's requests. (In some recent performances, however, such as Simon Russell Beale's in the 1993-4 production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Ariel is palpably resentful of Prospero. As an airy spirit, Ariel can be seen as one pole in a neo-Platonic dualism: Air as opposed to Caliban's Earth. Thus Ariel is usually portrayed in illustrations as airborne, sometimes with wings, and is often attached to ropes or wires in stage performances. Caliban, in stark contrast, is usually hunched and close to the earth, often, in illustrations and stage productions, emerging from a rocky or subterranean cave. Ariel is also associated with water: the spirit implements the tempest and is disguised as a ‘nymph o'th' sea’ (1.2.302). Air and water connote lightness, fluidity and grace of movement. Accordingly, Ariel is often enacted by performers trained to be dancers; Caliban is contrastingly awkward, often impeded by fins, or a hunched back, or even, as in the Trinity Repertory production of 1982, in Providence, Rhode Island, with his feet strapped to the tops of stools three feet high.

Although The Tempest's cast of characters and the text itself identify Ariel as a non-human, though rational, spirit, he has independent thoughts and feelings. He refused, says Prospero, to enact Sycorax's ‘earthy and abhorred commands’ (1.2.272-4), and he urges Prospero to choose forgiveness over vengeance (5.1.16-19). Still, Ariel once served the sorceress and is the main instrument of Prospero's illusionistic power. The magician even calls Ariel a ‘malignant thing’ (1.2.257), though admittedly in a moment of pique. In sum, he should not be seen simply as the ‘Virtue’ to Caliban's ‘Vice’, but as a complex character who asks for Prospero's affection: ‘Do you love me, master? No?’ (4.1.48)

Caliban's nature and history are more controversial than his fellow servant's, as is the source of his name. A rough consensus has long prevailed that because Caliban is an anagram for ‘cannibal’, Shakespeare thereby identified the ‘savage’ in some way with anthropophagism. Cannibals were topical in Shakespeare's day (though probably less than in the previous century), partly because reports from the New World insisted that some natives consumed human flesh and partly because simultaneous reports from sub-Saharan Africa, often drawing on ancient myths, made similar claims. In America, the association of anthropophagism with the Carib Indians provided the etymological source for ‘cannibal’, a term that in the sixteenth century gradually replaced the classical ‘anthropophagi’. Simultaneously, ‘Caribana’ soon became a common geographical label, widely used by cartographers for the northern region of South America, while other forms of ‘Carib’ were associated with various New World peoples and locations.³ Shakespeare might have borrowed ‘cannibal’ or one of its many variants from narratives of New World travel, or from contemporary maps, or, as has often been proposed, from the title and text of Montaigne's ‘Of the Caniballes’, to fashion an imprecise but readily recognizable anagram. The necessity of dropping a superfluous ‘n’ or ‘e’ and of substituting ‘l’ for ‘r’—the latter was frequent in transliterations of native languages—would not, perhaps, have interfered with an audience's awareness of the anagram.

If Shakespeare intended an anagrammatic name for his deformed savage, it was too obvious or too cryptic for printed comment until 1778, when the second edition of Samuel Johnson and George Steeven's Tempest attributed to Richard Farmer, a prominent Cambridge University scholar, the notion that Caliban was ‘cannibal’ in verbal disguise. Although adherents to Farmer's exegesis have increased markedly in the succeeding two centuries, sceptics continue to challenge the anagram's theatrical feasibility. As Horace Howard Furness asked in the 1892 Variorum edition:

[W]hen The Tempest was acted before the motley audience of the Globe Theatre, [was] there a single auditor who, on hearing Prospero speak of Caliban, bethought him of the Caribbean Sea, and instantly surmised that the name was a metathesis of Cannibal? Under this impression, the appearance of the monster without a trace of his bloodthirsty characteristic must have been disappointing.

(Var, 5)

The usual retort is that Shakespeare meant not a literal cannibal but a morally and socially deficient savage. Nonetheless, the evidence of authorial intentionality is at best inferential.

Several alternative etymologies have been offered. Among them is the African placename ‘Calibia’, which appeared near the Mediterranean coast on some sixteenth-century maps and is mentioned in Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turks (1603), a book that Shakespeare unquestionably plumbed for Othello only a few years before he wrote The Tempest. A classical possibility is the ‘Chalybes’, a people mentioned by Virgil (Aeneid, Bk 10, 174). Still other proposed sources for Caliban's name are an Arabic word for ‘vile dog’, Kalebon; the Hindi word for a satyr of Kalee, Kalee-ban; and, more plausibly, the Romany (Gypsy) word for black or dark things, caulibon. Gypsies were a major social concern throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, as numerous laws, plays, tracts and sermons attest; ‘caulibon’ may have been an effective theatrical signifier of unruliness, darkness and licentiousness (Vaughan, Caliban, 33-6). But the Gypsy word, like the other proposed etymologies—including cannibal, Carib and Caribana—has no contemporary corroboration.⁴

The Folio's ‘Names of the Actors’ describes Caliban as a ‘saluage and deformed slaue’, words that may not be Shakespeare's but which do set rough parameters for his characterization though not for his poetic language. Surely in Prospero's and Miranda's eyes, Caliban is a savage, as she specifically calls him (1.2.356); to Prospero he is a creature ‘Whom stripes may move, not kindness’ (1.2.346). Prospero accuses Caliban of being the son of a witch (Sycorax)⁵ and ‘the devil’ (1.2.263, 320-1; 5.1.269), but the magus's angry words, especially about Caliban's paternity, are not necessarily true; Caliban was conceived before Sycorax's exile from Algiers. Her ‘freckled whelp’ (1.2.283), an islander by birth, grew for his first twelve or so years without the benefits of European culture, religion and language; to Prospero he resembles the bestial wild man of medieval lore—unkempt, uneducated and thoroughly uncivilized. His ‘savagery’ is thus opposed to the ‘civility’ brought to the island by Europeans (see Vaughan, Caliban, 7-8).

The extent of Caliban's ‘deformity’ is woefully imprecise. Prospero describes him as ‘Filth’, ‘Hag-seed’, ‘beast’ and ‘misshapen knave’ (1.2.347, 366; 4.1.140; 5.1.268) and claims that ‘with age his body uglier grows’ (4.1.191), but these vituperative terms are doubtless coloured by the magician's anger at Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda and his subsequent rebelliousness. Trinculo initially mistakes Caliban for a fish and later labels him a ‘deboshed fish’ and ‘half a fish and half a monster’ (3.2.25, 28), epithets that may reflect Caliban's smell instead of his shape, which may also be the case when Antonio calls him a ‘plain fish’ (5.1.266). Stephano and Trinculo persistently demean Caliban as ‘monster’, combining the term with various qualifiers: ‘shallow’, ‘weak’, ‘scurvy’, ‘most perfidious and drunken’, ‘howling’, ‘puppy-headed’, ‘abominable’, ‘ridiculous’ and, in a more positive (but surely sarcastic) vein, ‘brave’. More suggestive of grotesqueness is Alonso's quip that Caliban is ‘a strange thing as e'er I looked on’ (5.1.290). But Caliban is nonetheless of human form and, in most respects, of human qualities. Prospero reports that except for Caliban, the island was ‘not honoured with / A human shape’ (1.2.283-4) when he and Miranda arrived; and she includes Caliban in her list of three human males when she calls Ferdinand ‘the third man that e'er I saw’ (1.2.446), although she implicitly modifies that comparison when she later attests that she ‘may call men’ only Ferdinand and her father (3.1.50-2). Once again The Tempest is indeterminate, yet the bulk of the evidence points to a Caliban who is, despite his possibly demonic parentage and unspecified deformity, essentially human.

Throughout The Tempest's long history, Caliban has nonetheless been burdened with a wide variety of physical aberrations, sometimes in eclectic combination, including fins, fish scales, tortoise shells, fur, skin diseases, floppy puppy ears and apelike brows, to name just a few. The common thread here is, of course, difference. The simple fact of aboriginal nakedness in Africa and America, and to some extent in Ireland, contrasted with early modern Europe's obsession with ornate clothing and reinforced English notions of the natives' inherent otherness. In Prospero's and Miranda's eyes, Caliban was unalterably ‘other’, probably from the beginning but surely after the attempted rape, and the numerous pejorative epithets hurled at him by all the Europeans throughout the play reflect their assessment of his form and character as fundamentally opposite to their own.⁶

That Caliban is a slave for the play's duration is indisputable, by Caliban's testimony as well as Prospero's. The slave's resentment of his master is also indisputable, as evidenced by Caliban's curses, by his reluctant service (according to Prospero and Miranda), and by his plot with Stephano and Trinculo to kill Prospero and take over the island. Yet this slave seems more determined to gain liberation from his current master than from servitude in general. He shows no reluctance until the denouement in 5.1 to serve ‘King’ Stephano, and even Caliban's ‘Freedom high-day’ song is deeply ambivalent:

Ban' ban' Ca-caliban,
Has a new master, get a new man.

(2.2.179-80)

Such clues to Caliban's ingrained dependency have encouraged some actors and artists to portray him as a wistful re-inheritor of the island⁷ and have reinforced theories of a native dependency syndrome. …

The Tempest offers only shorthand sketches of the remaining dramatis personae. Ferdinand, the handsome prince who deserves the heroine not just by birth but by merit, is descended from a long line of heroes from Orlando through to Florizel. The court party comprises similarly recognizable types, representative of early modern political discourse. Gonzalo, like Polonius, is a garrulous counsellor whose moral platitudes are often ignored, but there the similarity ends. Gonzalo never resorts to Polonius's Machiavellian intrigues but speaks his mind openly and honestly to whoever will listen. Antonio,⁸ the ambitious Machiavel, tries to corrupt Sebastian into murder in a scene remarkably akin to Lady Macbeth's temptation of her husband; Sebastian is Antonio's less imaginative partner in crime. Both are reminiscent of Cleon and Dionyza in Pericles. Alonso, like Leontes, is a ruler of mixed qualities—guilty of conspiracy against Prospero but capable of repenting and wishing he had acted differently.

The court party is parodied by its servants: Stephano, the drunken butler, and Trinculo, the court jester. Trinculo's name aptly comes from the Italian verb, trincare, to drink greedily, while Stephano is a more generic Italian name that may, in this instance, derive from a slang word (stefano) for stomach or belly. His ‘celestial liquor’ roughly parallels Prospero's magic—it mysteriously transforms people and provides visions of delight. When the two clowns join Caliban in a conspiracy to kill Prospero and take over the island, they parody Antonio's actions of twelve years earlier, not to mention his current plot to kill Alonso. More important, their stupidity in dawdling over Prospero's fancy robes instead of murdering him contrasts with Caliban's superior knowledge that the clothes are ‘but trash’.

The two pairs of disreputable Europeans—Antonio and Sebastian, Stephano and Trinculo—differ in many respects from Caliban to illustrate the issues Montaigne contemplated in his famous essay on Brazilian Indians: which is more barbarous, the educated European who makes a sham of his Christian upbringing, or the ‘savage’ who responds honestly to his natural instincts? Does civilization uplift or corrupt? In contrast to Antonio, Caliban finally learns from his experience to ‘seek for grace’; in contrast to Stephano and Trinculo, he seems to have an innate understanding of nature, of music and of how to achieve his goals.

Notes

1. Prospero has nearly 30 per cent of the lines; the next highest figure is Caliban's at less than 9 per cent. See Marvin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 9 vols (Hildesheim, Germany, 1968-80), 1.36-62.

2. The Tempest's master-servant relations are explored in Andrew Gurr, ‘Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban’, in Maquerlot and Willems, 193-208.

3. The best discussion of cannibalism and The Tempest is in the first two chapters of P. Hulme.

4. Another etymological possibility is Kalyb, a female character in Richard Johnson's Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom (1596-7), a widely disseminated book and a likely influence on Coriolanus.

5. Prospero's insistence that Sycorax is a witch (1.2.258, 263, 275-9, 289-91) is confirmed by Caliban (1.2.322-4, 340-1).

6. We calculate Caliban's age to have been 24 at the time of the play's action, based on the following clues: Sycorax was pregnant with Caliban when she arrived at the island; sometime after, she pinioned Ariel in a tree, where he was confined for twelve years before Prospero arrived and set him free, which in turn was twelve years before the play's action begins (1.2.263-93). Only if there was a lengthy gap, not implied in the text, between Caliban's birth and his mother's imprisonment of Ariel can he be appreciably older than 24.

7. The text is silent about Caliban's fate, suggesting neither that he is left behind nor that he accompanies Prospero to Milan. Both scenarios have figured prominently in imaginative extensions of The Tempest.

8. The Tempest's Antonio was Shakespeare's fourth. They are fully discussed in Cynthia Lewis, Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays (Newark, Del., 1997).

Works Cited

Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1975)

Peter J. French, John Dee: The World of the Elizabethan Magus (London, 1972)

Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, 1986)

Coppélia Kahn, ‘The providential Tempest and the Shakespearean family’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murry M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore, Md., 1980), 217-43

Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems, eds, Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time (Cambridge, 1996)

Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1973)

William Thomas, Historie of Italie (London, 1549)

Ann Thompson, ‘“Miranda, where's your sister?”: reading Shakespeare's The Tempest’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (Hemel Hampstead, Herts, 1991), 45-55

Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1991)