CALIBAN Do not torment me! O!
STEPHANO What’s the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon’s with savages and men of Ind? Ha! I have not ’scaped drowning to be afeard now of your four legs; for it hath been said, ‘As proper a man as ever went on four legs cannot make him give ground’. And it shall be said so again while Stephano breathes at’ nostrils.
CALIBAN The spirit torments me! O!
STPEHANO This is some monster of the isle, with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language? I will give him some relief, if it be but for that. If I can recover him and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather. (2.2.55-69)
The scenario: Caliban and Trinculo are under Caliban’s gaberdine – a cloak, or cloth, presumably of some size. There are four legs sticking out (this is usually played with two at each end…) Caliban is being tormented by Trinculo, in some unspecified way (they are struggling, or maybe trying to work out what the other is, by touch alone; Caliban is probably imagining that Trinculo is one of the spirits periodically set upon him by Prospero, perhaps in the form of a hedgehog) and he is also perhaps disquieted by Stephano’s singing, so the whole assemblage – four legs, under a gaberdine – is shaking, as if it has an ague, a feverish chill, a concealed monster with a cold. (Also proverbial, and current by the sixteenth century, is that ‘there is more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed’; the repetition of four legs here might allow for some suggestion of sexual action under the gaberdine…) Whatever, Stephano, being drunk, is not best placed to interpret this phenomenon. Like Caliban, he thinks first of spiritsor devils. Is this a devil? Or a devil playing tricks? Is this a savage or a man of Ind? here meaning either an Indian (like the dead Indian cited previously by Trinculo) or an inhabitant of the Indies, either West or East. But Stephano is most taken with the four legs; this partially-seen monster is emphatically a quadruped. His proverbial wisdom is drunkenly misremembered: the proverb is ‘as good a man as ever went on legs’ but here that is adapted for the four-legged monster, and hence becomes meaningless. But Stephano will repeat it so long as he lives, breathes through his nose (helpfully naming himself as he goes). A mystery, though: where the devil did the four-legged monster learn our language (not specified as English, or Italian or Neapolitan), thus enabling him to protest that he is being tormented by a spirit? (From Prospero, that’s who.) It’s the fact that the monster speaks intelligibly that determines Stephano’s course of action: I will give him some relief – I will help him because, given that he’s a talking monster, I can revive him, and tame him, and take him back to Naples and make money out of him, either indirectly by presenting him to someone rich and powerful (the king, even; there is, of course, no emperor in Naples, even one who trod on neat’s leather, that is, cow-hide, that is, wore shoes) or by selling him – or, indeed, by putting him on show, as Trinculo has already contemplated.
