How Shakespeare presents Caliban, and how the character develops across the text: the island's first inhabitant, enslaved by Prospero, from 'This island's mine' through rebellion to his promise to 'seek for grace'.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I must eat my dinner', 'This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother', 'Thou strok'st me and made much of me', 'You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse', 'I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans', 'I'll show thee the best springs', 'A plague upon the tyrant that I serve', 'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises', 'A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick', 'this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine', 'What a thrice-double ass / Was I, to take this drunkard for a god', 'I'll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace'.
Caliban's verse, often more beautiful than his masters' speech, beside Stephano's and Trinculo's prose, and the attempted rape of Miranda that Prospero gives as the reason for his punishment.
Context: Caliban's name and the word 'cannibal', Montaigne's essay, and readings since about 1950 in which his claim to the island becomes a protest against colonisers.
Edexcel's Shakespeare question has two parts: part (a) on the printed extract marks only language, form and structure (AO2), so context earns nothing there; part (b) on the play elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1, 15 marks) and context (AO3, 5 marks), not language analysis. Say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
