The Sublime Savage:

"Caliban on Setebos"

"Caliban my slave, who never / Yields us kind answer."
(The Tempest, I.ii.310-1)

Joseph L. Lockett
June 29, 1992
Victorian Poetry
Dr. Southwell

"Caliban on Setebos" was one of Robert Browning's more popular poems among the Victorians, for its presumed satire of orthodox Calvinism, Puritanism, and similarly grim Christian sects. And Browning as Shakespeare's savage does indeed seem to hurl a few barbs in that direction, but the poet's exercise seems to be as much one in alternative theology. Caliban's bog-bound conjectures, in their significant departures from standard religious doctrine, serve as both an interesting repudiation of Archdeacon Paley's attempts to rationalize God, and as an entertaining 'science-fiction' tale, if you will, of religious thought under alternate circumstances.

Caliban is, of course, the "salvage and deformed slave" of Shakespeare's dramatis personae in The Tempest, son of the deceased witch Sycorax, servant of the mage Prospero, consort of and bootlicker for Stephano and Trinculo, failed plotters and drunken buffoons. "As disproportion'd in his manners / As in his shape" (V.i.290-1), he has tried to ravish Prospero's daughter Miranda before being exiled to his cave, and in the course of the play attempts to overthrow Prospero himself and install Stephano on the throne of the island. At last, though, Duke Prospero comes to pardon even Caliban -- "This thing of darkness I / acknowledge mine" (V.i.275-6), and his drudge promises to "be wise hereafter, / and seek for grace" (V.i.294-5) or favor with his master.

Browning certainly did his research in crafting the poem: near the end of the work, Caliban cowers under Setebos' "raven that has told Him all" (l. 286), recalling his Shakespearean curse that "as wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd / with raven's feather from unwholesome fen / drop on you both!" (I.ii.323-5). And the storm which concludes both the poem and Caliban's rumination seems sure to be the "tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning" which begins Shakespeare's Act I, Scene i. Even many of the animals living on the island agree with those mentioned in Shakespeare's tale -- beetles, hedgehogs, crabs, the magpie or jay, all have mention in Shakespeare's play.

From this common launchpoint, however, Browning's Caliban soon differs from his Renaissance progenitor. Though both speak in blank verse, Browning's dramatic character is much more given to idle philosophy than Shakespeare's, as well as more Browningesque opacity. Some opening 'stage directions' set the scene for Caliban's comfortable "mire," full of "cool slush" and wriggling "small eft-things" (ll. 2, 4, 5), and foliage and fauna as lush in description as Shakespeare's mystical isle. But immediately we notice Caliban's odd prose: he nearly always speaks of himself in the third person, and often even omits the pronoun, from his first "'Will sprawl" (l. 1) to his final sentence, starting with "'Maketh" (l. 293). Browning thus sets up a Caliban almost Oriental in obsequiousness, recalling the grovelling demeanor of the stereotypical vizier of some Arabian Night. Such self-negation also prepares the reader for Caliban's paranoid concealment from a capricious and vengeful deity, always feigning, for "the best way to escape His ire / is, not to seem too happy" (ll. 256-7).

Shakespeare's Caliban admits that Propero did "teach me how / To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day and night" (I.ii.335-8), and the play hints at a devotion to the moon, for Stephano's claim to be the "man i' the moon" prompts: "I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee: My mistress show'd me thee, and thy dog, and thy bush" (II.ii.140-1). The moon is even a reasonable object of devotion for a witch's son, given the legends, from the Greek Hecate on, of lunar worship and sorcery. But Caliban, from his first theological musings, inverts the sun-worship motif that has influenced human culture since Egypt's Ra or the Roman Heliogabalus: he chooses the moon as his primary planet, "with the sun to match" (l. 26) as almost a creative afterthought. The concept of a deity who "dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon" (l. 25) influences all of what is to come, for Caliban's unhappy living conditions become Setebos', Caliban's yoke of drudgery in an unhappy home the kernel for a limited deity "ill at ease: / He hated that He cannot change His cold / Nor cure its ache" (ll.31-33). From the very beginning, Caliban's nocturnal habits and marginal humanity have produced an interesting variant on traditional religion: that the eventual result will have some resemblances to Browning's rejected orthodox Calvinism is both an interesting philosophical twist and an effective satire.

Caliban proceeds, Descartes-like, to further deduce the existence, personality, and behavior of his deity, all based on his own condition. Archdeacon Paley's similar "natural theology" soon becomes ridiculous-looking in comparison with Browning's counter-example. For what Caliban's musings most reveal is Caliban's own self-serving egotism: with almost every point he proposes, he relates a story or theory of himself in a similar situation, describes his behavior, then attributes the same to Setebos with the recurrent, terse refrain "so He."

Caliban dislikes his condition and wishes he could create servants, distractions, "baubles": so Setebos. Caliban, enslaved by a sometimes capricious Prospero, believes in the power of the stronger working their will on the weaker, whether they be mortals or crabs: so Setebos. Caliban would smash any servant who pointed out his own frailties or failings: so Setebos. Caliban is subordinate to a stronger, more serene philosopher, "that feels nor joy nor grief, / Since both derive from weakness in some way" (ll. 133-4) (this the Prospero who can calmly state "the rarer action is / in virtue than in vengeance" (V.i.27-8)), a powerful being who "all it hath a mind to, doth" (l.137). So Setebos, who, Caliban would have us believes, plays at being a greater deity like Quiet just as Caliban "'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way, / Taketh his mirth with make-believes" (ll. 168-9). Caliban's easy acceptance of a capricious, often cruel deity, and his willingness to abase himself in penance for irrational divine anger, serves as a satiric reproof to both Paley and the Calvinists, and eloquent support for Browning's more palatable God of love.

Shakespeare's Prospero claims that, without his help and education, Caliban "didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish" (I.ii.357-9). Some of Browning's detractors considered "Caliban on Setebos" still to be brutish, for its harsh language and unpleasant philosophy. Yet the poem is successful in its aim: it is an effective purgative to complacent religious theory, and an entertaining glimpse into a putative religion based on quite different tenets from Victorian Christianity.