Robert Browning, ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ (1864)

[Previously on this blog: ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. Rome 15 — ’ (1845), ‘Cleon’ (1855) ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ (1855) and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855)]

‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ (1864) is Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), articulating his theology. You need to have some sense of Shakespeare’s play to understand Browning’s poem, but, of course you know the play. I wouldn’t insult you by suggesting otherwise. The Milanese Duke Prospero has been overthrown, by his own brother no less, and banished to an uncivilised island somewhere — we assume in the Mediterranean, although one of the mainstays of Tempest-scholarship latterly has been to see ‘the island’ as a cipher for the new world, America, which was in the news as the play was being written and performed (the first permanent English colony had been established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607). Prospero arrives on the island with two things: his infant daughter Miranda and a magical book (and staff), which gives him wizardly powers. Using the latter he commands both the aerial spirits of the place, and also rules over a kind of aboriginal beast-man, Caliban, the son of an island ‘witch’ called Sycorax (the identity of Caliban’s father is not vouchsafed to us). Sycorax is now dead, but when alive she worshipped a god called ‘Setebos’. Shakespeare’s Caliban himself complains that he has no choice but to do what Prospero demands: ‘I must obey. His art is of such power,/It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,/And make a vassal of him.’

Caliban is ugly, animalistic, smells of fish, is driven by his appetites. We learn that he tried, at one point, to rape Miranda, and was punished by Prospero for this affront. He serves as resentful antagonist in Shakespeare’s play, the action of which concerns Prospero using his magic to gussy-up a storm and shipwreck the craft of his usurper-rival Antonio (Prospero’s brother) along with Alonso, King of Naples, various members of Alonso’s court and Ferdinand, Alonso’s son, whom Prospero intends will marry Miranda. Prospero ensures that the shipwreck victims all survive though they are distributed around the island in disparate groups, and (with Ariel’s supernatural help) he orchestrates events, much as a stage-manager, to punish and reward, and ultimately to orchestrate his restoration as Duke of Milan. In all this, brutish Caliban becomes a comic pawn, although not without his sinister, rapacious side. Alonso’s drunken butler, Stephano, and Trinculo, his jester, separated from the main group, stumble across him. The three then plot to kill Prospero and rule over the island. Stephano gives Caliban some alcohol, and in gratitude Caliban affects to worship him as a god. This plot is a low-comic parallel to the more serious attempted coup d’état, in which Antonio, King Alonso’s bother, and Sebastian, Prospero’s brother and the usurping Duke of Milan, conspire to kill Alonso so Sebastian can become King (at Prospero’s command Ariel thwarts this conspiracy). It is all brought into the open at the play’s end. Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban are dragged on-stage.

CALIBAN.
O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed.
How fine my master is! I am afraid
He will chastise me.

….

PROSPERO [addressing Alonso and his nobles]
Mark but the badges of these men, my lords,
Then say if they be true. This mis-shapen knave,
His mother was a witch; and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power.
These three have robb’d me; and this demi-devil,
For he’s a bastard one, had plotted with them
To take my life. Two of these fellows you
Must know and own; this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.

CALIBAN.
I shall be pinch’d to death!

…

ALONSO [pointing to Caliban]
This is as strange a thing as e’er I look’d on.

PROSPERO.
He is as disproportioned in his manners
As in his shape. Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions. As you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.

CALIBAN.
Ay, that I will; and I’ll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!

PROSPERO.
Go to; away!

Browning’s poem opens with a passage inside square brackets, and closes with another such, framing the actual dramatic monologue.

[‘Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch, —
He looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks to his own self, howe’er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Because to talk about Him, vexes — ha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.]

The ‘pompion-plant’ is a pumpkin; the ‘eft things’ are little fish, or perhaps eels, or worms, swimming through the muddy water, tickling Caliban’s skin. The opening word there ‘…’Will’ is short for ‘He will’, or perhaps ‘I will’ — Caliban usually talks of himself in the third person, but sometimes slips into the first person. The shift from one to the other doesn’t appear to follow any pattern. But this opening word has another meaning, I think: for the whole of this quantity of blank verse is a Will sprawl, a tumble of Will-Shakespeariana. Caliban is supposed to be doing his chores, but since Prospero and Miranda are having a siesta he is bunking-off: lolling in the mud, staring out to sea, and contemplating the nature of Setebos. Why this last? Because, he says, to talk about Setebos ‘vexes’. Vexes whom? Is the meaning it vexes Setebos himself when Caliban talks about him? Odd to think of a god that dislikes hearing itself talked about. Or does it vex Prospero, who (as a Christian) would be displeased that Caliban is fixated on this false idol? I’m not sure.

That’s the prelude. Then Caliban begins his speech proper:

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.

’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

That triple invocation of the god’s name is interesting: almost a trinitarian gesture. Shakespeare found the name Setebos in a book by Antonio Pigafetta, a sailor who voyaged with Ferdinand Magellan on his circumnavigation of the globe 1519–22. Pigafetta’s Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo was quoted extensively in Richard Willes’ The History of Travel in the West and East Indies (1577), which Shakespeare clearly read. Here is Willles’ version of Pigafetta’s encounter with certain Patagonian natives:

When they felt the shackles fast about their legs … they roared like bulls and cried upon their great devil Setebos to help them. Being thus taken, they were immediately separated and put in sundry ships. Yet was one of them with much difficulty overthrown by nine of our men, and his hands bound; but he suddenly loosed himself and fled, as did also the other that came with them. In their flying, they shot of their arrows and slew one of our men. They say that when any of them die, there appear 10 or 12 devils leaping and dancing about the body of the dead, and seem to have their bodies painted with diverse colours. And that among other, there is one seen bigger then the residue, who maketh great mirth and rejoicing. This great devil they call Setebos, and call the less Cheleule.

One of the Patagonians remains on the ship and is converted to Christianity.

On a time, as one made a cross before him and kissed it, showing it unto him, he suddenly cried Setebos, and declared by signs that if they made any more crosses, Setebos would enter into his body and make him burst. But when in fine he saw no hurt come thereof, he took the cross and embraced and kissed it oftentimes, desiring that he might be a Christian before his death. He was therefore baptized and named Paul.

Browning’s Caliban’s Setebos, though, is more than a devil. He is in fact a demiurge, or cosmocrator: — for Caliban is a gnostic. This fact, which strikes me as of the highest importance where this poem is concerned, seems not discussed by the critics. But Caliban leads off with it: Setebos made this world and rules it; but he did not make the universe. That ‘came otherwise’ — later in the poem we discover that the god above Setebos, the higher deity, is called ‘The Quiet’. What Setebos did was make the sun, and sky (and its tempests) and the island, with that bit of sea surrounding it that Caliban can see. But there is another, higher realm beyond this material world.

The basic premises common to the many varieties of Gnostic belief were that since God is good and the material world is evil, he cannot have created it. A digest of the systems would read something like this: God, pre-existent, First Father or Principle, eternal Aeon, as Love abhors dwelling alone. He therefore created the Pleroma (fullness), containing a number of spiritual beings — in some systems paired in sexes — numbering up to thirty. These derived their descent from the One but deteriorated as they approached the boundary of the Pleroma. The last of them, sometimes called Sophia (Wisdom) gave way to lust and bore the Demiurge (Craftsman, worker for the people), who either created the material world himself or was the father of the god who created it. [David Christie-Murray, A History of Heresy (Oxford 1989), 22]

It’s Plato [Timaeus 29a] who says that δημιουργός means ‘worker for the demos’, ‘worker for the people’; there are other etymologies of the name. Gnosticism was, as Christie-Murray notes, a long-lived and wide-ranging heresy, particularly strong in the early church. There were many varieties of it, but all agree on the wickedness of this material world, and therefore the compromised nature of the god who rules it.

Caliban’s theology repeatedly relates the nature of god to his own experience — of suffering, of frustration, of bestial appetite, though also of yearning after something more. This is the point of Browning’s mocking sub-title to the poem: ‘Natural Theology in the Island’, a reference to William Paley’s once-popular Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), which argued from design, that the richness, complexity and beauty of the natural world proved that there was a creator. Paley is the inventor of the ‘watchmaker’ argument: if you chanced upon a watch, discarded upon a beach, you would know, from its intricacy and function that it had been created by a skilled craftsman (it is against this argument that Richard Dawkins titles his book on godless evolution The Blind Watchmaker). To the extent that Browning’s poem satirises Paley’s thesis, it is by following this logic with a different kind of observer than Paley, one who sees not richness and beauty but arbitrariness, cruelty and deprivation in the natural world, and therefore — by Paley’s own logic — conceives of God as arbitrary, cruel and deprived. But Paley was an orthodox Christian where Caliban, as I’m arguing, is a gnostic. That makes a difference, I think. What Caliban intuits about the Quiet is very different to what he thinks about Setebos.

To step through the poem, verse-paragraph by verse-paragraph. Why did Setebos, Caliban asks, create this world? He did it because he was cold and suffering and wanted to make a place warm and comfortable — but not for reasons of self-satisfaction, since Setebos, trapped in the moon, cannot enjoy his own creation. Nor did he do it for reasons of disinterested generosity. On the contrary, it was because he both ‘hated’ and ‘loved’ the possibility of warmth. Caliban compares his situation to a certain type of cold-water fish he has observed who lives in a chill stream, and yearns to escape his coldness into the warmth — but cannot.

’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only, she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

I wonder why flounced? Perhaps ‘bounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe’ was too alliterative for Browning’s ear; or perhaps the flounce, with its air of petulance, is the better word. It’s a great line, certainly. Caliban goes on to itemise the different creatures Setebos created for the island, thwarted in his desire for a proper mate and so out of ‘spite’ creating a host of lesser things that he could torment.

’Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole — He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself:
He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,
Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be —
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too, — that is it.
Because, so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if He begin to plague.

It doesn’t seem very Mediterranean, this island, never mind Caribbean: otters, auks (an arctic circle seabird), badgers, magpies: we might be in the Hebrides. Caliban speculates: what if he could create life, like Setebos? Say he created a bird, ‘make a live bird out of clay’ what then? He might delight in its ability to fly — might command it to fly off and torment the grasshoppers, out of sheer sadism: ‘fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns/Of grigs high up that make the merry din,/saucy through their veined wings’ (why torment the grasshoppers? Because ‘they mind me not’ — Caliban finds their indifference to him outraging: he will compel them to notice him, by hurting them). At the same time, Caliban would take equal delight in seeing his own creation suffer:

… if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
And he lay stupid-like, — why, I should laugh;
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again, —
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.

From this Caliban ponders whether morality, questions of right and wrong, have any bearing on Setebos, and concludes that they don’t. Only ‘he is strong, and lord’. Might makes right. Caliban considers how he treats island crabs: neither motivated consistently by mercy, nor cruelty, but out of a kind of randomness.

Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
[I] let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

He imagines making a reed pipe to imitate bird-song and so snare birds. What if that pipe were to come alive and boast that it, not its maker, was the clever one? ‘Would not I smash it with my foot?’ says Caliban. Yes he would. And that’s Setebos’s attitude: ‘So He.’

From here Caliban moves to a profounder question. Given how powerful he is, why is Setebos so ill at ease? ‘Aha, that is a question!’ says Caliban slipping for a moment from The Tempest to Hamlet. The answer?

What knows, — the something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought,
Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o’er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
’Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought nor care that way.

Setebos is like a cuttle-fish that, looking up the surface of the ocean and knowing that it can never travel into that wide, peaceful area, turns his attention instead to the sea-beasts below him: ‘Next looks down here, and out of very spite/Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real.’ Caliban recalls his own play-acting at being a kind of pretend Prospero: how he made a toy book out of tree-leaves and pretended it was Prospero’s book; made himself a wand from a twig; and kept captive both ‘a four-legged serpent’ he pretends is Miranda ‘and my wife’ (the four legs are a lewd reference to coupling, I suppose) but

Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o’ the rock and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
‘Plays thus at being Prosper in a way,
Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.

Setebos is play-acting at God, just as Caliban play-acts at Prospero, and for the same reason. We come a crucial point in the poem’s ethical cosmology: for Caliban has in two respects a different view of Setebos than did Sycorax, his ‘dam’ (his mother). Here’s the first of those differences.

His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: ’holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.

The logic here is a little compressed, but seems to run as follows: if the Quiet — peaceable, good, all-powerful — had made the life in this lower realm, it would not have been so weak. That life is weak is manifestly true, and the reason it is weak is because its maker specifically wants it that way; and the only reason a creator would want such a thing is because he wishes to torment that life. Vex is an interesting word: from the Latin vexo, which means primarily ‘shake or jolt violently’ — a suitably direct, somatic meaning for a someone like Caliban — and only secondarily ‘harass, annoy.’ It comes down into English not just as vex, vexatious and so on, but, via the Old English cweccan (‘to shake, swing, move, vibrate’) as quake. This brings us closer to the tempest out of which Caliban’s character is first shaped by Shakespeare — and ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ ends with a sudden storm, which Caliban, in terror, reads as the wrath of Setebos.

The poem gives us three example of the capricious suddenness with which fate, or Setebos, afflicts Caliban — for ‘He hath a spite against me, that I know,/Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why?’ One: Caliban spent months building a pen in which to keep tortoises, for their eggs; only to lose all the eggs in a moment when a serpent broke in and ate them. Then a more startling development: a meteor crashed to ground out of the sky, landing where Caliban had been, only a little while before, sleeping:

’Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies)
Where, half an hour before, I slept i’ the shade:
Often they scatter sparkles: there is force!

Shooting stars are in poetry in various places, but I wonder if this is the first poem to describe an actual meteorite. I even wonder if this is Browning’s reference to the Islamic ‘black stone’, taken by some to be a meteorite, housed in the Kaaba, the most holy site in Islam, and the focus of Muslim pilgrimage. But the point of here is not holiness, but rather the arbitrariness with which the falling rock missed Caliban, when it could just as easily have annihilated him. From here Caliban’s mind moves to a different kind of rock:

’Dug up a newt He may have envied once
And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone.
Please Him and hinder this? — What Prosper does?
Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!
There is the sport: discover how or die!

It’s a very 1860s item, this fossil — a very post 1859, Darwin’s Origin of Species detail, we might think. But Caliban does not understand fossilisation. He believes the newt to have been punished by Setebos by being trapped inside the stone. His concern is: how to avoid the same fate? How to please Setebos? But the next couple dozen lines reveal that Caliban doesn’t know how to do this. Sometimes Setebos punishes resistance; sometimes not — as when a squirrel bites Caliban’s thumb and steals a nut from him, or a sea-urchin curls up and pricks Caliban with its spines. Then we come to the second point of theological divergence between Caliban and his mother:

’Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.
His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for worst, — with which, an end.

The main thrust of Caliban’s theology, though, is the radical arbitrariness of Setebos’s judgment. He himself is capricious: sees two flies, ‘with purple films and pink’, basking on the pompion-bell above and ‘kills both’; but then he sees two beetles struggling to get past a big stick that has fallen in their way, and moves the stick to assist them. The capriciousness is the point, and the closest thing Caliban comes to an absolute law in this respect is: do not extrapolate from any given circumstance. Today he killed the flies and spared the beetles. Tomorrow it might be the other way around. And any creature than presumed to think itself in a special, safe category, will only infuriate Setebos with its complacency.

That either creature counted on its life
To-morrow and next day and all days to come,
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
“Because he did so yesterday with me,
And otherwise with such another brute,
So must he do henceforth and always.” — Ay?
Would teach the reasoning couple what must means!
‘Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

The last stage in Caliban’s monologue is him groping towards a theory of sacrifice. What would he do if Setebos was angry with him? Well, he would, he says, try to appease the god: by cutting off one of his fingers, perhaps, or making a burnt offering of his goats:

Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
While myself lit a fire, and made a song
And sung it, “What I hate, be consecrate
To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate
For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?”
Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

Then the poem ends with a second bracketed section: stormclouds roll over like a curtain, lightning strikes and thunder rolls. Caliban believes it to be the wrath of Setebos.

[What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing: not a bird — or, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze —
A tree’s head snaps — and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may scape!]

We readers, more literate than Caliban, understand that this is the storm with which Shakespeare’s play opens; and that therefore it is not the product of Setebos’ wrath, but Prospero’s magic. Although, the poem seems to be saying, what if those two things aren’t so different? Here the pillars of cloud and fire, recall those Moses followed, and the tattletale raven is, of course, the bird that reports human malfeasance to Odin. It’s as if Caliban is recapitulation the ontogeny of all religions.

Raven is, in Latin, corax: and here I think Browning is also playing a game — sc[uds]-corax, s[u]corax, Sycorax. There is no scholarly consensus on from where Shakespeare got the name of Caliban’s mother: Wikipedia covers a dozen or so theories. Me, I choose to believe it is a version of σῦκον sûkon, “fig”, a word that also means ‘vulva’ (‘the gesture of “showing the fig” was a vulgar one, which was made by sticking the thumb between two fingers, a display which vaguely resembles a fig, which is itself symbolic of a σῦκον or vulva’) + vorax, hungry, voracious: a Freudian witch-figure of devouring sexuality, the only source of human fertility on the island — for Miranda is a maiden, and neither Prospero nor Alonso have wives. And in Browning’s poem I wonder if Sycorax and Setebos are not presented as, in effect, in league, versions of one another. Or, bearing in mind that in The Tempest Prospero tells us that Sycorax ‘was a witch; and one so strong/That could control the moon’ — the moon that Browning’s Caliban identifies as the home of Setebos — maybe she is the more powerful deity of the two.

The poem opens with Caliban in a womb-like immersion in living gloop, peering out at the world; it ends with a violent ejection from that safety and security. From almost as soon as the poem was published readers and critics have interpreted Caliban’s habit of speaking of himself in the third person as an infantile affectation (Alexandra Orr’s Handbook to Robert Browning (1887) says: ‘Caliban speaks as children do in the third person’) — although E K Brown’s more scrupulous assessment, made in the 1950s, argues that the poem is as much a first-person as a third-person exercise.

Interpreters of ‘Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island’ usually mention the curious third personal speech of Caliban, and usually ignore the passages where he speaks in the first person. W. L. Phelps did not ignore these, but his comment is unhelpful: ‘Caliban speaks in the third person (did Browning make a slip when he changes occasionally to the first?) in order to have indicated the low order of his intelligence.’ Caliban shifts to the first person singular six times; over a hundred lines in a poem just short of three hundred are in the first person singular or governed by others that are; and another twenty-five are in the first person plural. Both the number of first personal lines and the frequency of the shifting to them tell against an interpretation that the first person intrudes only by a slip. [E K Brown, ‘The First Person in “Caliban Upon Setebos”’, Modern Language Notes 66:6 (1951), 392]

Like Brown, I don’t think the movement from third-person to first- in this poem is a slip. But I do think it’s significant that Caliban uses the third-person singular, the first-person singular and occasionally the third-person plural, but never the first-person plural. There’s no ‘we’ in this poem; it is not a poem of congregation, or community. Caliban is alone and knows it, and the cosmos he constructs is one of isolation, separation, obstacles and suffering and loneliness.

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Critics have made much of ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’, arguing whether or not it is a satire, and if it is, of what; following criticism of The Tempest into reading it as a poem about colonialism and slavery; taking it as a poem about Darwin and Darwinism, published as it was only a few years after Origin of Species. William Clyde DeVane: ‘the starting point of “Caliban” was Darwin’s Origin of Species, which set Browning thinking of primitive man, perhaps of the “missing link,” a popular phrase of the 1860s’ [DeVane, (1975), 299]. I’m not persuaded by the Darwin connection, I must say, and not just because there’s reason to believe the poem was actually written 1855 or 1856, before the publication of Origin of Species. The natural world of the poem, intricately and often beautifully described, is not portrayed as in competition within itself. Animals do not predate other animals (the one exception is the snake that ate the tortoise eggs Caliban was cultivating), it’s not red in tooth and claw. Rather it is a torture chamber in which suffering comes down from above, sometimes literally as with the crashing meteorite, or the thunder storm at the poem’s end: more often through a sense that fate is manipulated from above, that, according to caprice or malice, Setebos will send down cold, hunger, boils, misery, pain. Caliban in his small way copies this: kills flies, smashes the occasional crab. A Darwinian would see the matrix of life on the island as driven by competition for resources rather than punished by cosmic malice; but that’s not the world of this poem.

John Hunter Lammers thinks the poem as much an intertextual gloss upon Paradise Lost as The Tempest. Robert W Witt argues the poem is glossing Plato (‘Browning wished to present Caliban as the rational man, and so identifies him with the most rational of all men — Plato. The portrait, thus, is satirical; Browning wished to show in Caliban the man who carries over to the point of absurdity in an area where, Browning believed, reason alone was not sufficient. The ideas of Caliban are thus a grotesque parody of Platonic ideas, and this parody helps to point up the satirical nature of the portrait’). Ashton Nicholls, more persuasively, sees the poem as a celebration of the grotesque.

I am struck by two things in particular. One is the ambiguity of motivation Caliban ascribes to Setebos. His is a cosmology of suffering, and we suffer (he thinks) because we are weak, made such by our creator, so that he may torment us. But why does he do so? The poem gives us two, incompatible explanations. One is that Setebos is motivated by spite, envying the warmth of our world in his cold lunar prison, hating us, despising us ‘in spite: how else?’; he ‘looks down here, and out of very spite/Makes this a bauble-world’. This is a coherent, if uncomfortable, take on the nature of reality. But it’s hard to reconcile with Caliban’s other explanation: not that Setebos is motivated to act from spite, but that he acts out of perfect arbitrariness, sometimes punishing, sometimes rewarding, according to no pattern, no cogent motivation. Caliban thinks this is a way of showing power — to act from spite is to be, in a sense, enslaved by your feelings, where to act with absolute arbitrariness shows the completion of your potency. In this, Caliban is describing not the jealous, angry, punishing God of the Old Testament, but the gods of the Greek pantheon.

But above all it is in being irresponsible and arbitrary that kings resemble gods. Achilles, we have seen, is apt to blame the innocent. The conduct to be expected of a king is viewed in the same light, and with the same apprehension, in both epics. Calchas asks in advance for a guarantee of protection before he names Agamemnon as the cause of the plague, ‘for a king is too powerful when he is angry with a man of lower rank: even if he digests his wrath for a time, yet he keeps his anger in his heart thereafter, to pay him out.’ In the same way we hear of Zeus: ‘if the Olympian does not bring it to pass at once, he brings it out in the end, and men pay for it dearly’. Penelope describes the normal kingly behaviour, to which Odysseus was such an exception: ‘This is the custom of god-like kings: one man he will hate, another he will love — but Odysseus never did violence at all to any man.’ The gods, in their superior power, can be arbitrary. Kings, placed on the pinnacle of mortal power, try to emulate them. [Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford 1980), 89]

Or as Caliban puts it: Setebos ‘doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord?’ There’s a corollary, though: Caliban, imitating Setebos in this arbitrariness — letting twenty crabs scuttle past him to the sea and smashing the twenty-first, for no particular reason — will, as we know from Shakespeare’s play, come to grief. ‘The motives which impel the gods to intervene in human affairs are personal and arbitrary,’ Griffin notes; ‘Men try to act in the same way and come to grief.’

How to reconcile these two versions of Setebos, these two visions of the logic that governs this our sublunary world? Spite is predictable; arbitrariness is not. It’s chaotic. Still, and within the parameters of suffering that determine existence, it has its own logic. As the Joker tells the newly-mutilated Two-Face in hospital in The Dark Knight: ‘you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.’ It’s fair because it is disinterested.

But perhaps the point of the poem is that these two explanations can’t be reconciled. There is a fundamental division between the cosmos. Which brings me back to the question of Gnosticism.

It is not just that the structure of Caliban’s theology is Gnostic. The specific terms he uses are, too. 2nd century AD gnostic Valentinus, arguably the most influential of all, believed that before the god of this world came into being, there was prior God called Depth (Βῠθός) and Quiet (Σῑγή).

If the amount of hostile writing he inspired among the orthodox authorities is a criterion of importance, Valentinus was the greatest of them all. Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria all wrote against his teachings which were given, like those of some other famous Gnostics, at Alexandria. In his system Depth and Silence were both pre-existent in invisible ineffable heights. [David Christie-Murray, History of Heresy, 28]

This God might be a jointly named Βῠθός-Σῑγή, or Βῠθός, at the fundamental level below or behind everything, could be his location, and Σῑγή, Quiet, his name. Acccording to Valentinus, from him was created the Pleroma, ‘the fullness’, a perfect realm, and into that were born thirty ‘aeons’ — fifteen sexed pairs — in descending order. The lowest of these, said Valentine, was Sophia, ‘wisdom’, known as μήτηρ — that is, mother. Our of her was born, first, Christus (conceived by her coupling ‘with a shadow’, meta skias tinos) and afterwards, once Christus had returned to the Pleroma, Sophia forms the Demiurge and so creates the whole of this, our whole lower world, again by coupling with the shadow. This is the realm of kenoma, or emptiness, in contrast to the fullness of the Pleroma.

Redemption became possible for the men and women born into this world when Christus came down to them — although Valentine, like other gnostics, did not believe that Christ himself actually suffered during the crucifxion: a phantom version of him was nailed to the cross, whilst the actual Christ stood by and watched.

I can’t find specific evidence that Browning was reading, or reading about Valentinus, or Gnosticism, more generally at this time; but it’s the kind of thing he was interested in, and he certainly researched Early Christianity extensively, to write ‘Cleon’ and ‘Death in the Desert’ and other poems.