As he did in many of his plays, Shakespeare uses The Tempest to ask questions about how well society and nature intersect. Most of the characters in this play exist in a civilized world, although certainly not all of them are civilized. Caliban, though, is referred to several times as a "natural man." What then does it mean in Elizabethan society to be a natural man, to exist as a natural man, as Caliban exists?
Caliban serves to illustrate ideas about the social hierarchy of the Renaissance world, which formulated a socially rigid — and very political — hierarchy of God, king, man, woman, beast. This order was based on the patriarchal tradition and the teachings of religious leaders, which postulate a hierarchical order for mankind based on physiological and physical characteristics. Other means of defining a place within this order were emotional stability and the ability to reason. Based on these definitions, beasts were lower in the evolutionary scale than all humans. According to this rather rigid social hierarchy, Caliban belongs at the bottom of the Elizabethan social hierarchy, having little perceived social worth. And yet, for many critics and students, he dominates The Tempest.
