Under oath
From Who was William Shakespeare? : an introduction to the life and works, by Dympna Callaghan.
Language is the defining characteristic of human identity, and Caliban's is some of the most powerful and eloquent in the play [The Tempest]. Yet, Prospero treats him as subhuman, and Trinculo, finding him sheltering under a "gabardine" in the rain, takes him for a monster -- a word that is repeatedly applied to him in the course of the play. The word "gabardine" is also an interesting one. Shakespeare used it to describe Shylock's distinctive ethnic dress in The merchant of Venice. Unlike the inhabitants of Montaigne's Brazil, who were naked, Caliban is clothed in a garment the Europeans see as a marker of his savagery, and which was also the conventional dress of the indigenous Irish. Indeed, the English claimed that in Ireland, England's closest colony, the native population was, like Caliban, both savage and subhuman. John Speed's illustration for the map of Ireland in The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine (1611), published in the same year that The Tempest was written, represents "the wilde Irish man" with long hair and cloak, known as an Irish mantle, that mark him as an uncivilized racial other. In Shakespeare's time, the indigenous Irish were regarded as being every bit as racially different from the English as they were from, say, indigenous Americans or black Africans. Further, there was a strong conviction that difference in apparel hid more fundamental anatomical differences between the Irish and the English. Thirty years after Shakespeare's play, an entire company of milita swore under oath that when they had stripped the corpses of the slain Irish after the Cashel Massacre in 1647, they found them to have tails nine inches long. This conflation of the bestial and the demonic was a standard feature of colonial encounter since Columbus first voyaged to the New World, and it appears in relation to Caliban's alleged demonic monstrosity, or what Miranda calls, "thy vile race."
Language is the defining characteristic of human identity, and Caliban's is some of the most powerful and eloquent in the play [The Tempest]. Yet, Prospero treats him as subhuman, and Trinculo, finding him sheltering under a "gabardine" in the rain, takes him for a monster -- a word that is repeatedly applied to him in the course of the play. The word "gabardine" is also an interesting one. Shakespeare used it to describe Shylock's distinctive ethnic dress in The merchant of Venice. Unlike the inhabitants of Montaigne's Brazil, who were naked, Caliban is clothed in a garment the Europeans see as a marker of his savagery, and which was also the conventional dress of the indigenous Irish. Indeed, the English claimed that in Ireland, England's closest colony, the native population was, like Caliban, both savage and subhuman. John Speed's illustration for the map of Ireland in The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine (1611), published in the same year that The Tempest was written, represents "the wilde Irish man" with long hair and cloak, known as an Irish mantle, that mark him as an uncivilized racial other. In Shakespeare's time, the indigenous Irish were regarded as being every bit as racially different from the English as they were from, say, indigenous Americans or black Africans. Further, there was a strong conviction that difference in apparel hid more fundamental anatomical differences between the Irish and the English. Thirty years after Shakespeare's play, an entire company of milita swore under oath that when they had stripped the corpses of the slain Irish after the Cashel Massacre in 1647, they found them to have tails nine inches long. This conflation of the bestial and the demonic was a standard feature of colonial encounter since Columbus first voyaged to the New World, and it appears in relation to Caliban's alleged demonic monstrosity, or what Miranda calls, "thy vile race."