Colonization and Slavery in The Tempest

Caliban curses under his breath as he carries firewood, muttering the diseases he wishes upon Prospero. “All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prospero fall and make him by inch-meal a disease.” He speaks as a colonized subject who knows his colonizer’s language and uses it as a weapon—the only weapon available to him. Caliban’s situation is clear from the start: Prospero came to an island that belonged to him, learned everything Caliban could teach him, and then enslaved him. The play does not hide this. It names it directly. Prospero took the island “which thou takest from me,” and Caliban calls himself the rightful owner, dispossessed and imprisoned. Yet the play presents his enslavement as necessary, his servitude as deserved, and his resentment as ungrateful. The colonizer’s logic is built into the dramatic structure itself.

Caliban’s relationship to language encapsulates the violence of colonization. Prospero taught him to speak, and Caliban says it was a terrible gift: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.” Language, presented as a civilizing force, is actually a tool of domination. Before Prospero’s arrival, Caliban had a world of his own, complete with springs and berries and knowledge of the island’s secrets. Now he has the language to name his dispossession, but naming it changes nothing. He cannot escape. The play shows Caliban attempting to find allies—first Stephano and Trinculo, whom he mistakes for gods, then plotting murder—but all resistance is presented as comic and contemptible. When he curses Prospero, Prospero threatens him with magical torture. When he attempts escape, he is hunted with dogs and spirits. The play stages colonization not as a moral question but as a fact to be managed.

Yet Caliban is not simply a victim, and the play complicates easy sympathy. He tried to rape Miranda, Prospero tells us, and this act—which Caliban himself doesn’t deny—seems to justify his enslavement in Prospero’s eyes and perhaps in the audience’s. The play does not ask whether Caliban’s attempted assault was born of desperation, loneliness, or the collapse of any possibility of consensual human connection. It simply registers it as proof of his baseness. When Stephano and Trinculo arrive, Caliban’s hope for liberation becomes entangled with drunk fantasy and theft. He worships Stephano as a god, a repetition of the colonized subject’s need to find power outside himself. The play makes his liberation pathetic rather than tragic, which is perhaps its most telling move: it renders the colonized person’s desire for freedom ridiculous.

By the play’s end, Caliban appears to accept Prospero’s authority again, or at least to recognize its power over him. Prospero calls him “this thing of darkness” and claims him as his own—a moment of possession that masquerades as acknowledgment. Caliban’s final words are ambiguous: he will “be wise hereafter and seek for grace.” Has he internalized his enslavement, or has he learned that resistance is futile? The play does not answer. What it does is end without resolving the colonial question. Prospero returns to Milan to reclaim his dukedom, Ferdinand and Miranda will be married and presumably rule Naples, and Caliban remains on the island, his enslaver departing but his enslavement unchanged. The play stages colonization as a fact of nature, justified by difference and reinforced by power, and leaves no room for genuine liberation or even genuine rebellion.