Reinaldo Arenas, Caliban, and Postcolonial Discourse By Enrique ...

Chapter 1

Caliban, Shakespeare’s Transformative Other

Caliban is a symbol that depicts the relationship between colonizers who perceive him as weak, inferior, and colonized. The colonizer sees the colonized as “irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European [the colonizer] is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” (Said, Orientalism 40). William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was influenced by specific events taking place in the New World, particularly on reports of shipwrecks on islands inhabited by strange and wild creatures. Some scholars claim that Shakespeare was familiar with documents that described voyages and first contact information during the colonization process. European colonization, nevertheless, played a role in the development of the setting and the use of Caliban and his representation as the New World native. As