of the play assert that Prospero is able to transform Caliban “by breeding and learning” from a
purely natural brute to a more civilized being able to express himself verbally (xlviii).
In fact, Caliban’s own words in The Tempest make clear the extent to which learning to
speak has given him a means of profound expression. One of the most beautiful passages in
the play is in Act 3, Scene 2, where Caliban is describing to Stephano and Trinculo the magic
of the island. He tells them the island’s noises “give delight and hurt not” and that they sound
like “a thousand twangling instruments” (lll.ii.131-32). His description is wistful and
heartbreaking, especially when he talked of the magical dreams he would have and told
Stephano and Trinculo, “when I waked / 1cried to dream again” (lll.ii.138). Caliban says
learning to speak has only been useful because it teaches him “how to curse” (l.ii.367). It is
through speaking, though, that Caliban is able to describe his island home, convince Stephano
and Trinculo to try and overthrow Prospero, and atone for his rebellion at the end of the play.
Caliban's final words in the play, that he is “a thrice-double ass” for having followed Stephano
and Trinculo, speak particularly powerfully to his sense of failure by the end of The Tempest
(V.i.295).
Caliban’s words that he was a “thrice-double ass” who will “seek for grace” are pointed
to by traditional scholars as providing evidence of Caliban’s awareness that the civility offered
by Prospero is superior to his own rebellious nature (V.i.295). The traditional reading requires
that The Tempest unequivocally assert the superiority of civilization over uncivilized nature,
and as such, it requires interpreting Caliban’s rebellion as unwarranted and his punishment at
the end of the play as completely justified. According to Kermode, Shakespeare has created in
Prospero an exemplar of how Art can most benevolently control Natur e, by exercising “virtue
and temperance” (xlviii). Prospero, then, is virtuous, temperate, and civilized. Caliban, by
rebelling against Prospero, rejects these qualities, and at the end of the play, he sees the error
in his ways and resolves to “be wise hereafter / And seek for grace" (V.i.294-95). His
punishment is seen as justified, as it has allowed him to understand that Prospero’s ways are
superior to his own.
Such readings of The Tempest are similar to and tend to reinforce the traditional view of
slavery in America as a largely benevolent institution. The portrait this reading gives of
Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban is that of a genteel, refined, and well-educated person
merely attempting to teach an uncivilized and ungrateful native appropriate and civilized
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