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The dramatis personae of The Tempest casts Caliban as "a savage and deformed slave."1 Since the mid-twentieth century, critics have scrutinized Caliban's status as a "slave," developing a riveting post-colonial reading of the play, but I want to address the pairing of "savage and deformed."2 If not Shakespeare's own mixture of moral and corporeal abominations, "savage and deformed" is the first editorial comment on Caliban, the "and" here working as an " = ". Stigmatized as such, Caliban's body never comes to us uninterpreted. It is always already laden with meaning. But what, if we try to strip away meaning from fact, does Caliban actually look like?
The ambiguous and therefore amorphous nature of Caliban's deformity has been a perennial problem in both dramaturgical and critical studies of The Tempest at least since George Steevens's edition of the play (1793), acutely since Alden and Virginia Vaughan's Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (1993), and enduringly in recent readings by Paul Franssen, Julia Lupton, and Mark Burnett.3 Of all the "deformed" images that actors, artists, and critics have assigned to Caliban, four stand out as the most popular: the devil, the monster, the humanoid, and the racial other. First, thanks to Prospero's yarn of a "demi-devil" (5.1.272) or a "born devil" (4.1.188) that was "got by the devil himself" (1.2.319), early critics like John Dryden and Joseph Warton envisioned a demonic Caliban.4 In a second set of images, the reverberations of "monster" in The Tempest have led writers and artists to envision Caliban as one of three prodigies: an earth creature, a fish-like thing, or an animal-headed man. Prospero's derisions, "earth" (1.2.313-14) and "mountain" (4.1.255), encouraged Romantic critics like Schlegel, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, as well as more recent writers like Franssen, to imagine the islander as some outgrowth of the ground.5 Elsewhere, Prospero calls Caliban "tortoise" (1.2.316) and "poisonous" (1.2.319), and Trinculo turns this reptilian aspect amphibian by repeatedly riffing on Caliban's fishiness: "a man or a fish?" (2.2.24), "debosh'd fish" (3.2.26), "half a fish and half a monster" (3.2.28-29). Critics such as John Draper, Barry Gaines, Michael Lofaro, and Michael Saenger have focused on these lines, giving their Calibans fins, fangs, scales, tails, and webbed feet.6 Meanwhile, some of Trinculo's other offhanded remarks, as when he...