CALIBAN        All the infections that the sun sucks up

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him

By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me,

And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,

Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’th’ mire,

Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark,

Out of my way unless he bid ’em. But

For every trifle are they set upon me:

Sometimes like apes that mow and chatter at me

And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which

Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount

Their pricks at my footfall. Sometime am I

All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues

Do hiss me into madness. Lo now, lo,

                        Enter TRINCULO

                        Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me

For bringing his wood in slowly. I’ll fall flat;

Perchance he will not mind me. (2.2.1-17)

 

Caliban has indeed learned how to curse, and he does so with vivid inventiveness, imagining (and entirely correctly, according to early modern theories of disease, and of the weather) that noxious fogs, carrying diseases, are being drawn up by the sun from bogs and fens, marshes, swamps. It’s going to be smelly but more, it will infect Prospero inchmeal, inch by inch; he won’t just fall ill, he won’t just be a person with a disease, he will become entirely a disease, every single part of him. (Thersites in Troilus and Cressida: ‘Agamemnon: how if he had boils full all over, generally?’, 2.1.) And then fear: his spirits hear me, these invisible agents (sometimes staged), Prospero’s surveillance apparatus. (Or has Prospero just got Caliban convinced that this is the case? a dummy camera, an elf on the shelf?) I have to curse! I’m tired, I’m in pain, I’m frightened, and I’m angry – even though the spirits will hear me. But they don’t do anything without Prospero’s command; they will neither pinch me or frighten me with shows – specifically of urchins, hedgehogs, regarded as sinister, even diabolical; the hedgepig whines ‘thrice and once’ for the witches in Macbeth, as a signal that their ritual should begin, 4.1. Or  throw me into the bog or the mud, or distract me and lead me on false paths, like the phosphorescent lights that shine and mislead travellers in bogs. It’s all Prospero’s doing; he’s the one in control. Any small thing, any trifle that I do wrong, the spirits are set upon me. They pull faces at me, mow, and chatterlike apes(perhaps the implication is that they mock Caliban, mimic him); they bite me. They lie in my path, like hedgehogs(again), waiting with their prickles mounted, raised, and I tread on them in bare feet. And there are adders, who crawl on me and wrap themselves around me and hiss. (The fairy lullaby for Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue, | Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen’, 2.2.) (Caliban’s account of time is characterised by ‘sometimes’ and ‘sometime’, and not only here; nothing like the clock-dependence of the courtiers and indeed Prospero. For Caliban, things happen, and other things happen. His chief causality is, I make mistakes, and I am tormented for them.) And now, lo, someone’s coming, who’s this? another new character, although he has presumably been present in 1.1: Trinculo. A spirit? I’m behind with my work, says Caliban; if I lie down and keep very still perhaps he won’t notice me…