The Tempest

The Tempest was Shakespeare’s final play and as a result has been read many different ways. One character that has sparked discussion among scholars is the original inhabitant of the mystical island, Caliban. I hesitate to describe Caliban because he has been called many things, but Shakespeare certainly intended him to be a savage and a servant of Prospero. Since Caliban was the original inhabitant, many view the interactions between Prospero and him as a representation of conquest and colonization. Aime Cesaire wrote a critique of the The Tempest titled A Tempest, which portrayed Prospero as a slave-owner on a Caribbean island . Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest focuses on Caliban as a black slave, who is treated unjustly by his master, Prospero.

The name “Caliban” was given to him and is not his real name. This was common practice in colonial times in order to dehumanize conquered subjects and make them easier for the masters to command. When Prospero and Caliban are arguing Caliban exclaims: “Put it this way: I’m telling you that from now on I won’t answer to the name Caliban...It’s a name given to me by your hatred, and every time it’s spoken it’s an insult.” Caliban realizes the derogatory position that Prospero is trying to put him in and decides to protest. Cesaire wants to show the reader the pride that conquered peoples had in their culture. They were not ready to submit to European colonizers easily and were going to fight them every step of the way because of their unjust treatment. Of course, Prospero responds to further try to delegitimize Caliban’s argument: “I’ve got to call you something. What will it be? Cannibal would suit you, but I’m sure you wouldn’t like that would you. Let’s see...what about Hannibal? That fits. And why not...they all seem to like historical names.” He first taunts him by threatening to call him Cannibal. In Adolphus William Ward’s A History of English Dramatic Language, he states that “Caliban is indisputably a metathesis of Canibal (i.e Caribee) which is the Spanish word for the Carib people. Naming an entire group of people after cannibals make them seem like the “other” and create a dichotomy, which in the seventeenth-century European world is the clash between the orient and the occident. Cesaire brings to light the entrenched beliefs that that natives were of a lower class by not only showing that they were named by the colonizers, but also that they were named derogatorily. Secondly, the part about liking “historical” things serves to further demean Caliban because the word “historical” in this context does not mean related to history, but rather means something