Essay on The Characters of Prospero and Caliban in The...

The Conflict between Passion and Intellect in The Tempest During the time of Shakespeare, society had a hierarchical structure. In Shakespeares play, The Tempest, the characters of Prospero and Caliban, represent two different extremes on the social spectrum: the ruler, and the ruled. Their positions on the social hierarchy are largely due to the fact that Caliban responds almost wholly to passions, feelings of pleasure -- his senses, while Prospero is ruled more by his intellect and self-discipline -- his mind. However, the fight that Prospero has against his own natural tendency to ignore the discipline of his intellect, and give in to pleasures such as vanity and self-indulgence, cannot be ignored.†¦show more content†¦Although we are not given details of Calibans birth, it seems likely that a creature as subhuman in appearance as Caliban was not born of a human union. It has been postulated that, to quote Prospero, he was got by the devil himself upon thy wicked dam, from a union between Sycorax and an incubus (an extremely att ractive male apparition with intention to tempt). Caliban was therefore a creature born from passion, the offspring of an unholy pleasure. Prospero was not only of noble birth; he was also born to be the ruler of the city-state of Milan. Nobility, in Elizabethan times, carried with it heavy implications. It was expected that Prospero would be intellectually superior, and that he would exercise as great a discipline over himself as he was expected to exercise over others, in his leadership role. From their ancestry, Prospero is likely to be more ruled by his intellect, and Caliban by his love of pleasure. In the history of each character before the opening of The Tempest, there is a further contrast. Calibans original love for Prospero and Miranda, and his later misdemeanor and subsequent hatred of them, illustrate his fundamental reliance on his senses. Caliban loved Prospero and Miranda because they made much of me; and his response to this was purely sensual in hisShow MoreRelatedWilliam Shakespeare s The Tempest1229 Words   |  5 Pagesplay, The Tempest. One of Cohen’s theses though - thesis four â€Å"The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference† - appears quite prominently in Shakespeare’s work. The thesis articulates that monsters are divisive and often arise in a culture to make one group seem superior to another. Further, societies devise monsters in order to create a scapegoat for social and political inequities and instabilities that surface in that society. 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