SOURCE: "Men of Inde: Renaissance Ethnography and The Tempest," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XXII, 1994, pp. 15-44.
In the following excerpt, Hamlin explores the relationship between Shakespeare's characterization of Caliban and Renaissance voyagers' narratives that depict Native Americans as fully human yet significantly different from Europeans. Just as with the ambiguous portrait of Caliban, the critic suggests, these accounts acknowledge basic affinities with New World natives even as they insist on their otherness.
