TRINCULO      Legged like a man and his fins like arms! Warm, o’my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt. Alas, the storm is come again. My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows! I will here shroud until the dregs of the storm be past. (2.2.32-40)

A short passage, but with lots of implied action, and considerable scope for physical comedy. If this is a fish – as Trinculo has just concluded, largely on the basis of smell – then it is legged like a man and his fins like arms! And it is warm (Trinculo has perhaps lifted the covering, and touched Caliban’s body). This is very fishy, which is to say, not very fishy at all. I’ve changed my mind, says Trinculo, I hold my opinion no longer: this is no fish. It’s a man, an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt, been struck by lightning. (This is the reason why the noise of the thunder was heard at the beginning of the scene, while Caliban was speaking and Trinculo was approaching.) And now the storm is come again – more thunder, and perhaps palms outstretched upwards, the universally understood gesture for, it’s raining. The only possible shelter is for me to creep under his gaberdine, his cloak, his outer garment. Apparently this could be overlooked while Caliban was deemed to be a fish; now that he is deemed to be an islander, a man, he has clothes. It’s not waterproof, as in the later gaberdine, a closely-woven, twilled wool or cotton fabric used specifically for raincoats. Caliban is not wearing a Burberry trench. He might, however, be wearing a garment which, on the stage at least, seems to have been associated with Jewish characters: Shylock says that Antonio has ‘sp[a]t upon my Jewish gaberdine’, 1.3. If the gaberdine under which Trinculo is about to take shelter has that association, then it is ‘othering’ Caliban in very particular ways. But it could simply refer, as it did more generally, to a coarse, loose cloak. Needs must; misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, which is proverbial, but also must have been true for many in the early seventeenth century, when it was usual for beds to be shared, both within households and, for example, by strangers travelling alone at inns, if they could not afford to sleep alone. Trinculo is going to tuck himself under this voluminous shroud, and wait out the storm, his reference to its dregs returning to his earlier conceit of the clouds as enormous bombards, bottles or buckets, about to shed their liquor in pailfuls. And so under the gaberdine he goes.