Caliban’s character is made into the fool of Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” where as such he moves through and among Prospero’s company, though a slight notch less nimbly than does the privilege of Prospero’s greater spirit, Ariel.  Ariel functions as the mobilizing catalyst designed for efficiency in the production of Prospero’s vision, as so too functions Caliban perfectly in the role of reporting his antithesis.  The apparition of Caliban the character within this play is voice to the limitations of Prospero’s power and illustrating of the author’s mind – a setting of antagonized deficit proportionate to the scale of its dislocation from which he is least far from removed.

Prospero proves his power in terms of adaptability – or regains it, having been newly refurbished – and with such motions Caliban becomes his slave.  Was this relationship inversed in a previous state of existence so that Prospero here curses his slave with the nettles, cramps, and shards of the earth? If Caliban had been master of Prospero, Ariel would have been the most horrible contingent in his plot against his master.  That Ariel has been rescued from the grip of nature by Prospero, by his mere appearance on earth, adopted with no slight of difficulty towards the appropriation of his particular skills (at singing and other timely magic), seems to resemble the hospitable conductivity of raw earthen temporalities to the malleable and shifting ways of mans’ imaginative flow and that process of recognition.  Nature finds man only deficit to his imagination, while history finds man in the tracks of his plow.

Caliban and Ariel exist as poor reincarnations of disembodied formulations most prevalent as spirits of the inheritance of earth to man.  They are poignant reciprocities.