1There are two main approaches to intertextuality in postmodern fiction. One is typical of avant-garde authors like Kathy Acker, Christine Brooke-Rose or Thomas Pynchon. It construes borrowed characters as signs to be rearranged and collaged in unsettling cut-up novels or radically metafictional word mazes. In Constructing Postmodernism (1992), Brian McHale portrays Brooke-Rose’s 1975 novel Thru as the epitome of this approach (216-217). The other one is postmodern genre fiction’s specific form of intertextual excess. It consists in using canon works as sources for typically genre practices like "fan fiction" ("fiction that borrows a writer’s characters and builds new scenarios around them," Gelder 127), or "crossovers" (fan fiction which organizes literal meetings between characters from several diegeses, making them parts of one integrative diegesis). That creative game is typified by works like Alan Moore’s comics Lost Girls (1991-2006) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2014), or Neil Gaiman’s comic Sandman (1988-1996), his 2001 novel American Gods and his short stories "Chivalry" (1993) and "A Study in Emerald" (2003). Such wild, broad-minded integrative fiction emulates Philip Jose Farmer’s "Wold Newton Universe" novels, a cycle begun in the 1970s. Yet the principle of fan fiction traces back to a time when genre fiction and fans were not codified as such, as David Brewer shows in The Afterlife of Character, his 2005 essay on "imaginative expansion" and "character migration" in the 18^th century. Not only did Falstaff inspire fan-fiction-style sequels (Brewer 1), but Shakespeare’s works gave birth to at least one crossover: George Saville Carey’s 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee, A Masque (2).

2Modern and postmodern fiction is fraught with echoes or rewritings of Shakespeare’s works. Caliban and The Tempest are no exception. Prospero’s reluctant servant was painted twice by Henry Fuseli (Vaughan and Vaughan 228-229, 232-233), given voice in W.H. Auden’s 1944 poem The Sea and the Mirror (112-116), depicted as the monstrous embodiment of the id in Hollywood’s 1956 space opera Forbidden Planet (204-206), or as Prospero’s Black slave in Aimé Césaire’s 1969 play A Tempest (158,162).

3These characters have been embraced by postmodern fantasy too, appearing in integrative fiction and "professional fan fiction" (tales working like fan fiction, but written for publication, by professionals). Indeed, Shakespeare is the great fantasist who "never abandoned popular culture, the world of oral tradition, legend and ballad" (Laroque 22), breathing eerie life in Macbeth’s witches, the ghost of Hamlet’s father or "the fairy world of the forest, derived from old wives’ tales, childhood stories and ballads" (Gillespie and Rhodes 80). Yet he is also England’s "national poet" (Holderness xi), the revered figure perceived as "a culture hero, as transcendent genius and omniscient seer" (138). Thus he embodies the paradoxes postmodern fantasy authors long to solve: writing supernatural fables, they aim to transcend pulp fiction and geek culture, without betraying them—to gain respectability on their behalf, but retain their youthful edge and imaginative energy. To carry out this crusade, Shakespeare is often the standard they choose to wield.

5Gaiman’s "The Tempest," from his comics series Sandman, focuses on Shakespeare, portrayed in Stratford-upon-Avon, writing The Tempest as part of a pact with Morpheus, the eponymous King of Dreams and protagonist of the series. Contrary to the many mythological gods, historical figures, fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and DC Comics characters who appear in Sandman, Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, Caliban or Trinculo are not parts of the series’ diegesis. They stay confined in the embedded narrative The Tempest. They appear in 6 panels out of 110, to illustrate captions that feature Shakespeare’s own reading out of passages he has just written. This shows how incidents from everyday life get transformed and incorporated in a writer’s fiction. Charles Vess’s pictures actually feature Caliban only twice. The first time (Fig. 2), he is a child in Sycorax’s arms. The captions quote from I.2, lines 272-280 (Shakespeare 116), and do not even mention Caliban. The second time (Fig. 3), Caliban is lying down, hiding under his cloak. Having already seen him, Trinculo wonders what kind of creature he is beholding (II.2, lines 24-32; Shakespeare 145). His words—"When [English people] will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian"—are directly linked, in the comics story, to an earlier passage in which Shakespeare goes to the inn and meets sailors who exhibit, for money, an Indian’s mummified corpse. There is another passage in which Caliban is just mentioned in the captions. Those contain Miranda’s words about him: "’Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on" (I.2, lines 308-309; Shakespeare 118). The panels depict Judith Shakespeare, who is disapprovingly spied on by her father through the window as her suitor, Thomas Quiney, woos her (Gaiman, Zulli, Muth, Vess et al. 165). This juxtaposition suggests that many harsh words about Caliban Shakespeare put in his characters’ mouths were inspired by his dislike of Quiney, and that Prospero’s outraged exclamation about Caliban "seek[ing] to violate the honour of [his] child" (lines 347-348; Shakespeare 120) reflects Shakespeare’s fears about his own daughter’s "honour." Yet, a few pages later, after an argument with his wife, Shakespeare shifts from identifying with Prospero the protective father to identifying with Caliban. At the end of the story, the Bard complains to Morpheus that their pact did grant him the power "to give men dreams that would live on long after [he] was dead" (Gaiman, Zulli, Muth, Vess et al. 178), but left him unsatisfied with his life, as it alienated him from his family, making his writer’s imagination his only horizon (179-180). This context gives a retrospectively personal resonance to the words he puts in the mouth of Caliban immediately after having been scolded by his wife for "liv[ing] in words" and through "pretty-play nonsense," "not in the real world" (166). That is the moment chosen in the story for Shakespeare to write Caliban’s famous words: "You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!" (I.2, lines 362-364; Shakespeare 121). In this context, they sound as much as Shakespeare’s curse on Morpheus as they do as Caliban’s curse on lProspero. Near the end of the narrative, the Bard says:

I am Prosper, certainly ... But I am also Ariel ... And I am dull Caliban. I am dark Antonio, brooding and planning, and old Gonzalo, counseling silly wisdom ... (Gaiman, Zulli, Muth, Vess et al. 176)

6This metafictional statement about writing as a projection of the writer’s shattered self in several characters is epitomized by the previous passage in which regretful Shakespeare becomes Caliban.

7Those are among the most famous postmodern fantasy works. Both feature Caliban and other characters from The Tempest in limited roles. Other works of fan fiction or crossovers based on the play are more generous to Caliban.

8Two works published in the same period as Sandman’s 75 issues are narrated by him, claiming to tell his version of the play’s events. One is Tad Williams’s 1994 novel Caliban’s Hour. The other one is Nigel A. Sellars’s 1989 short story "The Confessions of Caliban."

9Their common premise is reminiscent of John Gardner’s 1971 novel Grendel, but it was also a frequent concept in 1990s fantasy. Valerie Martin’s 1990 novel Mary Reilly apply a similar narrative trick to R.L. Stevenson’s 1886 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, his 1999 novel Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister to Cinderella’s story and Gaiman’s own 1994 short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" to Snow White’s.

10Despite this similarity, the two works are very different in their approaches. Sellars’s features an uneventful frame narrative set on Prospero’s island. Caliban’s embedded tale is a fanciful prequel describing another dimension where he used to live among his fellow alien beings the Sycorax, and from which he was exiled for being too vainglorious and wishing to rule over them. The Sycorax must decide if they will destroy mankind, so they have arranged for Prospero to be deposed and to have opportunity for revenge and access to otherworldly power. If he exacts revenge on Antonio, humanity will be destroyed; if he does not, it will be spared. Caliban is part of the plan: changed in a deformedly humanoid creature, he is meant to spur Prospero’s vengeful dreams. In Caliban’s Hour, on the contrary, the frame narrative is a tenser sequel to Shakespeare’s play. Prospero is dead, and Caliban arrives in Naples to take revenge on the duke’s scions, Miranda and her daughter Giuletta, after telling the former his side of their common story. His embedded narrative is a quasi-realistic revision of Shakespeare’s fable, showing how he was raised as a feral child by his outcast mother Sycorax (in chapters that are particularly reminiscent of Gardner’s Grendel, with the narrator’s isolation and love/hate relationship with a mute mother), how she died and he buried her, and how his lonely and simple life in the wilderness was shattered by Prospero and Miranda’s landing. The novel shows Ariel as a sadistic demon bent on torturing Caliban, and Prospero as a brutal tyrant and a despicable crook who "drown[ed] a few dozen sailors" to scare his enemies, before "selling […] [his] daughter to his old enemy to enable his own resumption of power" (Williams 155). At the end of the frame narrative, Caliban is unmoved by Miranda’s pleas to spare her life, but eventually, instead of killing her, he chooses to abduct Giulietta, with the girl’s consent and to Miranda’s horror.

11As for the other crossover featuring Caliban, it consists in Dan Simmons’s two novels Ilium (2003) and Olympos (2005), about an intergalactic and inter-dimensional war between heroes and gods from The Iliad. Complete with bio-engineered Zeus, Athena, or Apollo, Olympos stands atop Olympus Mons, on the terra-formed planet Mars, while Achaeans and Trojans battle with each other down on Earth, or, at some point, try to overthrow the gods under a modern university professor’s counsel. The semi-divine strength of the heroes comes from nanotechnologies, thanks to which the gods have modified their bodies. The university professor, Thomas Hockenberry, comes from the bygone 21^st century of another dimension’s post-apocalyptic Earth. His body and memory were rebuilt out of his DNA. In that other dimension, humans are also at war with some godlike creature: "Setebos," the very same "deity" Sycorax is said to worship in The Tempest. In Olympos, Setebos "is most like a gigantic brain" (Simmons 2006, 150) with "multiple pairs of yellow eyes set in the folds between pink tissue and a surfeit of hands" (151). It created the gods and Caliban (154-155).

12Caliban first appears, in Ilium, as a ravenous scavenging man-eater imprisoned in an orbital station by Prospero. He is freed at the end of the novel, and reappears in Olympos as the agent of Setebos. Throughout the story, he performs mass killings, or he threatens, follows, besieges or savagely fights other characters. He always speaks with Early Modern turns of phrase, mostly about Setebos and Prospero, in intricate tirades that sound meaningless to the human heroes, and which quote and transform passages from Robert Browning’s poem "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864):

Thinketh, Sycorax, my mother made me, mortal morsel. Thinketh, Prospero, the silent servant of the Quiet, made Himself servant to the servant. Thinketh, though, that Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, who making Himself feared through what He does, looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar to what is quiet and happy in life, but makes this bauble-world to ape yon real. (Simmons 2009, 503)

13The lines from Browning’s poem are mixed with unclear revelations about the novel’s diegesis. This re-contextualization changes the function of his words, making them part of a progressive unveiling of the novels’ background story. These offbeat monologues and the accompanying acts of gory violence are performed by a Caliban who is described in vividly teratological terms: “Yellow eyes blinked. Impossibly long forearms and clawed fingers unfolded. A lizardy tongue flicked out over long teeth” (486). John Clute, the Canadian co-editor of the 1979 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, aptly described the half human, half saurian, oddly-speaking killer as “a cross between Gollum and the alien of Alien” (Clute).

15This longstanding difficulty to figure out Caliban is reflected in The League. Though he has but a graphic identity in the series, it manages to be accurately ambiguous. He is drawn as inhumanly tall, grotesquely muscular, with hyperbolically ferocious features–just like Stevenson’s Edward Hyde in the first two volumes of the series (Fig. 4). Moore and O’Neill’s Hyde is just the aporia Caliban is made out to be in The Tempest: both human and monstrously inhuman. The ambiguity of Caliban is reinforced by making his shape both monstrous enough to recall Hyde’s and more human than Hyde’s (with less body hair, and no razor blade teeth like the ones Hyde sports).

16Caliban’s inhumanity in Sellars’s story can be seen as no more than a logical step for a fantasy/science fiction parody of Shakespeare’s play, which explains all the supernatural in it through other dimensions, alien races and other weird fiction staples. The premise (the Sycorax conspiracy to test humanity) is reminiscent of the string of 1950s U.S. science fiction films that had space aliens punish humankind’s warlike ways, as in Ed Wood’s 1959 Plan 9 from Outer Space, or at least coerce them into more peaceful ones, as in Robert Wise’s 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still.

17In Caliban’s Hour, there is nothing supernatural about him. The novel may not even qualify as fantasy without the unabashedly supernatural nature of Ariel: "a figure of almost unseeable brightness, a white flame in man’s shape [whose] voice [was] buzzingly inhuman" (Williams 143), "a slender child [whose] pale body was curiously featureless, un-nippled, un-naveled" (145-146). By contrast, Caliban is considered as a monster by Miranda or other characters, but clearly described in terms that can apply to a human: "a shaggy-haired head set low and tilted forward on short neck and broad, muscle-knotted shoulders. His skin was tanned and leathery. Beneath his heavy, bony brows his eyes glinted as shockingly yellow as an owl’s." (16) The latter detail is perfectly possible—albeit rare—in a human being’s face. Yet it may be the main reason for other characters to call Caliban a monster. Hence, the words of a passer-by at the beginning of the novel: "I have met the Devil tonight … His eyes are yellow… and he stinks of fish." (7) At the end, though, Miranda’s daughter tells Caliban: “I have listened to you all the night long. I think you are no monster, but a man” (174). Then, Caliban tells Miranda: "If I am the monster you and your father made me out, then you should run and throw open the doors and shout for help this very instant. […] If not, then give us until the candle burns down to escape" (178-179), which Miranda eventually does (179-180).

18The book does not only portray him as human: contrary to "The Confessions of Caliban," which casts the narrator as an unrepentant despot (Sellars 61, 64), Caliban’s Hour clearly belongs to the works of artists and critics who see Caliban as a "deeply wronged native" (Vaughn and Vaughn 49). In Shakespeare’s play, Caliban complains to Prospero: "This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me." (Act I, scene 2, lines 331-332; Shakespeare 119) This indictment of Prospero’s small-scale colonialism was often the basis of rewritings or criticism of The Tempest from the 19^th century on (Vaughan and Vaughan 105), up to such postcolonial works as Césaire’s A Tempest, in which Prospero asks, "What would you be without me?" and Caliban replies, "the King of the Island given me by my mother, Sycorax" (17-18). Caliban’s Hour is mainly a novel-length extension of Caliban’s indictment of Prospero. In Shakespeare’s play, Caliban describes how Prospero coaxed him so that Caliban showed him all the island’s secrets, not realizing that, for the deposed duke, he was but a servant (I.2, lines 332-336; Shakespeare 119-120). All this is developed in the novel’s central chapters (73-98). Prospero "tames" feral child Caliban, first with food, and then with gifts that "he both gave and took away," such as a pair of breeches to make him feel "elevated" (97) or an axe to enable him to cut wood (98). Then it is under Caliban’s guidance that Prospero finds a place to have his house built by Caliban (99-103), progressively letting him do all the work (103-105), up to the moment when Caliban wonders: "how can you give me a single room in a house which I built?" (115)

19As shown above, Simmons’s approach is the exact opposite of Williams’s. In his novels, Caliban is a horrible, cruel monster with nothing human about him. Simmons chose to characterize him thus in hostile response to the postcolonial trend depicting Caliban as a "wronged native." He explained it in an interview:

The Caliban that most modern audiences "know" … is a weak, pale, politically correct shadow of the slithery monstrosity that made audiences shiver in Shakespeare's day. … Today's heavy-handed political interpretation is that Caliban was a poor victim—an oppressed but noble native soul straining under the yoke of capitalist-colonial-imperialism—but Shakespeare and his audiences understood that Caliban was a monster—and a really monstrous monster, ready to rape and impregnate Prospero's lovely daughter at the slightest opportunity. (Shindler)

21Unlike such clear-cut approaches, Gaiman’s "The Tempest" is, like Moore’s The League, a synthesis of the two conflicting perceptions. Charles Vess’s two pictures of Caliban (Fig. 2 and 3) show him as non-human. His design is vaguely reminiscent of the way Robin the puck is drawn (also by Vess) in the Sandman story "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" (Gaiman, Jones, Vess, Doran et al. 63-86). Yet, a link is suggested between the creation of the character and the real-life American native Gaiman’s Shakespeare is confronted with. Indeed, the passage at the inn, with the two sailors exhibiting the corpse of an alleged Bermudian native, occurs early in the course of the narrative (Gaiman, Zulli, Muth, Vess et al. 154-155). So Trinculo’s later words at the sight of Caliban–"When [English people] will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian"–are given biographical resonances as Shakespeare’s experience at the inn is shown as antedating the inclusion, in the play-text, of a short reference to such experiences. Thus, while Vess’s graphics suggest that Caliban is not human, the narrative’s organization suggests that he was inspired by a human, and that he, at least symbolically, stands for some humans, namely Indians.