Even the local scenery is
of a piece and character with the subject. Prospero's enchanted
island seems to have risen up out of the sea; the airy music, the
tempest-tossed vessel, the turbulent waves, all have the effect of
the landscape background of some fine picture. Shakespeare's pencil
is (to use an allusion of his own) 'like the dyer's hand, subdued to
what it works in'. Everything in him, though it partakes of 'the
liberty of wit', is also subjected to 'the law' of the
understanding. For instance, even the drunken sailors, who are made
reeling-ripe, share, in the disorder of their minds and bodies, in
the tumult of the elements, and seem on shore to be as much at the
mercy of chance as they were before at the mercy of the winds and
waves. These fellows with their sea-wit are the least to our taste
of any part of the play: but they are as like drunken sailors as
they can be, and are an indirect foil to Caliban, whose figure
acquires a classical dignity in the comparison.
The character of Caliban is generally thought (and justly so) to be
one of the author's masterpieces. It is not indeed pleasant to see
this character on the stage any more than it is to see the God Pan
personated there. But in itself it is one of the wildest and most
abstracted of all Shakespeare's characters, whose deformity whether
of body or mind is redeemed by the power and truth of the
imagination displayed in it.
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