Caliban,son of the witch Sycorax, is an important character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

His character is one of the few Shakespearean figures to take on a life of its own ‘’outside’’ Shakespeare’s own work: as Russell Hoban put it, with pardonable exaggeration, “Caliban is one of the hungry ideas, he’s always looking for someone to word him into being...Caliban is a necessary idea”.

Half human, half monster, after his island becomes occupied by Prospero and his daughter Miranda, Caliban is forced into servitude. While he is referred to as a calvaluna or mooncalf, a freckled monster, he is the only human inhabitant of the island that is otherwise "not honour'd with a human shape" . In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, a dwarf or even a tortoise.

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