Unlike Shakespeare's Caliban, Who appreciates the island's natural treasures and its wondrous music, Dryden and Davenant's Caliban is a completely a monster, insensitive to everything. He embodies little humanity except its worst vices; he is pimp and grotesque. His bestiality makes him an oppressor on the island until Prospero comes, who brings light, knowledge and virtue here and tries to educate this ungrateful monster to the civilized. .
Dryden and Davenant's changes to Shakespeare's original continued to influence the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics. Eighteenth-century commentaries on Caliban still treated him as a monster, but they focused on new issues. As well as Stressing Caliban's bestiality, critics pointed out that Caliban was Ariel's opposite, "the other" in a binary opposition between body and spirit, evil and good, guilt and innocence-a view that fits well with eighteenth-century moral certainties. Since people in that day firmly believed man as a rational animal who can and should control his baser passions, Caliban, the epitome of the darkest side of human nature, naturally earned no sympathy or appreciation.
However, this view began to change toward the end of the eighteenth century, when the American and French revolutions' rhetoric emphasized the rights of individual man, when Rousseau began to speculate man's natural nobility in an uncivilized state and the romantic poets began to show appreciation of poetic imagination attuned to the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". If in the earlier interpretations Caliban was scarcely human, in the romanticism he was scarcely animal. This turnabout did not happen overnight, but gradually reactions to Caliban became less moralistic and more sympathetic. Critics argued that Caliban's language displayed poetical awareness of nature's beauties; his imaginative power and pure nature made him redeeming. With the publication of Shakespeare's original text, people saw a kinder, gentler Caliban.
