Rock Fish

The identities of the characters are each in a state of liminality on the island: There are no easily identifiable villains and heroes, from many perspectives the characters experience a strange type of identity crises on the island. The dual identities that the characters are seemingly unable to reconcile manifests itself figuratively when Trinculo invades Caliban’s personal space hiding inside of his cloak. The oddness of the scene can thus be used to question the value of identity, as neither Trinculo nor Caliban correctly identify one another’s identities and simultaneously intimately occupy the same space.

What is the value of being at the top of a hierarchy; or even, what is the disadvantage of being on the bottom of one? Trinculo isn’t royal or divine by any means; he is a jester—an incredibly low status figure. Regardless, Caliban, a character that is himself a veritable contradiction—between human and fish, bush and rock, slave and monster—thinks he’s a god. At that moment, regardless of the reality of the situation—the reality that specifies hierarchal position—Trinculo is a god, not a jester; at the moment Trinculo comes upon the concealed Caliban, he is indeed a piece of foliage. Shakespeare uses this incredible conflagration of identities to question the value of assigning them at all-- whether or not Caliban is a rock or a fish is irrelevant; the fact that the characters, and by extension the readers, can even contemplate the relevance of identity is exactly what Shakespeare is attempting to arouse.