Editing Setebos (section)

=== In poetry ===
====''[[Caliban Upon Setebos]]''====

[[Robert Browning|Robert Browning's]] poem, published in 1864, has as second title "Natural Theology in the Island".
[[James Augustus Cotter Morison|J. Cotter Morison]] gave what is now a standard interpretation of Browning's title: "the writer's intention ... is to describe in a dramatic monologue the [[Natural Theology]],{{ emdash}}that is, the conception of God,{{emdash}}likely, or rather certain to occur to such a being as Caliban."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Morison |first=J. Cotter|author-link=James Augustus Cotter Morison|date=25 April 1884 |title='Caliban upon Setebos' |journal=Papers of the Browning Society |volume=1 |issue=26 |pages=493–98}}</ref> Caliban's god is, of course, Setebos, and the poem can be seen as an analysis of the thought processes of Caliban as he tries to understand the nature of his god. Browning uses Caliban (or so it is widely argued) to demonstrate the errors of constructing God in the image of ourselves, and perhaps also as a rhetorical vehicle to attack established religions, in particular, [[Calvinism]].<ref>{{cite journal |last=Tracy |first=C. R. |date= July 1938 |title=Caliban upon Setebos |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4172415 |journal=Studies in Philology |volume=35 |issue= 3|publisher=University of North Carolina Press |pages= 487–499|jstor=4172415 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Cronin |first=Richard |date=2012 |title=Reading Victorian Poetry |chapter=Victorian Poetry and Life|publisher=[[Wiley-Blackwell]]|isbn=978-1-4051-9392-4}}</ref>

Shakespeare's Caliban is a primitive version of a man, and Caliban conceives of his god as a primitive man might, based on his experience with the natural world.<ref>{{cite book |last=Melchiori |first=Barbara |date=1968 |title=Brownings Poetry of Reticence |publisher=[[Oliver & Boyd]] |pages=140–157 |chapter=Upon "Caliban upon Setebos"}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Loesberg |first=Joshua |title=Darwin, Natural Theology, and Slavery: A Justification of Browning's Caliban |journal=[[ELH|English Literary History]] |date=2008 |volume= 75 |issue= 4 |pages= 871–897 |publisher=[[The Johns Hopkins University Press]] |doi=10.1353/elh.0.0023 |jstor=27654641 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27654641|url-access=subscription }}</ref>
Much of the poem is concerned with Caliban's fantasy of himself as a god, and the analogies he draws between his own imagined behavior and that of Setebos. Caliban imagines, for instance, crabs walking from the mountains to the sea, and says he will
<blockquote>
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,<br />
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
</blockquote>
He concludes "As it likes me each time, I do: so He" [i.e. Setebos]. Caliban reasons that Setebos is a being who derives vicarious satisfaction from creating creatures who (unlike Setebos) are capable of physical reproduction, and then expresses his jealously by committing capricious acts of spite and vengeance on those creatures. Setebos inspires fear and loathing in Caliban with few consolations: Caliban anticipates no afterlife nor 
is he optimistic about relief from suffering in this one. Although he imagines a second god above Setebos, which he calls "The Quiet", Caliban can't imagine either of these gods as working in his favor. Setebos, Caliban imagines, "Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar / To what is quiet and hath happy life; / Next looks down here, and out of very spite /
Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real".

Browning twice mentions, as a physical attribute of Setebos, his multiple hands:
<blockquote>
'Careth but for Setebos<br/>
The many-handed as a cuttle-fish, 
</blockquote>
and
<blockquote>
Also it pleaseth Setebos to work,<br /> 
Use all His hands, and exercise much craft,<br /> 
By no means for the love of what is worked. 
</blockquote>
although it is possible that Caliban is meant to be speaking metaphorically here.