SOURCE: "Men of Inde: Renaissance Ethnography and The Tempest," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XXII, 1994, pp. 15-44.

In the following excerpt, Hamlin explores the relationship between Shakespeare's characterization of Caliban and Renaissance voyagers' narratives that depict Native Americans as fully human yet significantly different from Europeans. Just as with the ambiguous portrait of Caliban, the critic suggests, these accounts acknowledge basic affinities with New World natives even as they insist on their otherness.

Throughout The Tempest an air of ambiguity surrounds Caliban. His name—almost certainly an anagram of "cannibal"—appears in the First Folio's cast list among the play's human characters (as opposed to its spirits) and above those of Trinculo and Stephano, but he is described there as "a salvage and deformed slave."³³ And when Prospero first mentions him to Ariel in act 1, it is difficult to decide whether...