Browning is one of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on and patronising culture.

Browning's Caliban is far truer to Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, not followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,--Caliban of the days before the Storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island, inaccessible to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice.
His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own.

He anticipates the heady joy of Stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own invention.

And his religion too is his own,--no decoction from any of the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the Island.

It is a mistake to call Caliban's theology a study of primitive religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the individualist ways of Browning's imagination.