Enter CALIBAN.

CALIBAN        As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed

With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen

Drop on you both. A southwest blow on ye

And blister you all o’er.

PROSPERO     For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps,

Side-stitches, that shall pen thy breath up; urchins

Shall forth at vast of night that they may work

All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinched

As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging

Than bees that made ’em.

CALIBAN                                                        I must eat my dinner. (1.2.322-331)

Enter Caliban, with strikingly sensual, vividly evocative blank verse. What? is this the tortoise, the whelp, the devil’s child, the slave? Apparently so and, accordingly, far more complex than might have been anticipated. He speaks of dew, delicate, often heavenly – but it’s wicked. He imagines – and remembers – the brush of a feather– but it’s from a raven, coal-black. The dew is from an unwholesome fen, a bog; it suggests miasma, disease. (Sycorax has collected it to use in her witchcraft. Ariel has brought Prospero dew from the still-vexed Bermudas.) And then a warm wind, from the southwest – but so hot that it blisters. Caliban enters cursing. (And he brings the memory of his mother with him.) So Prospero curses back, and his curses are as vivid, but much less refined, more straightforwardly sadistic: Caliban will be plagued with cramps, stitches in his side so violent that he won’t be able to breathe (a stitch is a stab). He will be attacked by hedgehogs in the middle of the night. (Put like that, it sounds much less threatening. A sea-urchin is, of course, a sea-hedgehog.) And he will be pinched as thick as honeycomb – this is weird – as if every pinch is like the formation of the cells in the comb, as densely spaced, as regular. The pinches will sting, like bee-stings. Prospero says, essentially, you will be in pain – and he likes messing with people’s sleep, having power over it. But Caliban’s curses are, frankly, better, more coherent, more original and perhaps more deeply felt, more malevolent. His stubborn retort – I must eat my dinner – is a wonderful, unexpected turn to the human and domestic – leave me alone, I’m eating…