This study notes covers Colonial Context: The New World and the 1609 Pamphlet within Caliban (character) for GCSE English Literature. Revise Caliban (character) in The Tempest for GCSE English Literature with 12 exam-style questions and 17 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 10 of 17 in this topic. Use this study notes to connect the idea to the wider topic before moving on to questions and flashcards.
🏛️ Colonial Context: The New World and the 1609 Pamphlet
The Tempest (c.1611) was written when English colonial activity in the Americas was intensifying. The 1609 Bermuda pamphlets — accounts of the Virginia Company's Sea Venture shipwreck — were circulating when Shakespeare was composing the play. The language of the "savage" native in 17th-century colonial discourse — inferior, childlike, requiring governance — shapes the vocabulary Prospero and Miranda use about Caliban.
The name "Caliban" is widely understood as an anagram of "cannibal" — the Jacobean term for indigenous New World people, derived from Columbus. Montaigne's essay Of Cannibals (1580, translated by Florio 1603) argued that so-called savages were in many ways more virtuous than Europeans — a direct contextual challenge Shakespeare likely knew.
Later readers, particularly post-colonial critics, have read Caliban as the archetype of the colonised subject — Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969) rewrites the play with Caliban as a Black Caribbean revolutionary. These are critical responses produced 350 years after Shakespeare; introduce them in essays as "later readers have argued..." rather than as 1611 meaning.
Practice questions for Caliban (character)
In Act 1 Scene 2, Caliban claims the island is his. How does he justify this claim?
Explain how Shakespeare uses language in the quotation 'You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse' to present the colonial relationship between Prospero and Caliban. [2 marks]