Caliban and Ariel are two contrasting characters, not only by their personalities but by

the way they are referred to and are treated by others.  Caliban is often portrayed as a
rebel whilst Ariel seems to be the conformist.  Ariel is portrayed as mischievous and
ubiquitous, able to cross the length of the island in an instant and to change shapes at
will, he is Prospero's embodied imagination. He carries out virtually every task Prospero
needs accomplished in the play.  Their very names contrast, Ariel meaning air, fire and
possibly water, all the graceful elements an Elizabethan audience would be acutely aware
that Caliban would possess elementary qualities of the earth and Ariel the celestial
qualities of the air. Prospero reminds us that Ariel was "but air" he addresses Caliban as,
"thou, earth, thou!"

Ariel

Nowhere in Shakespeare's plays are two more sharply contrasted characters than Ariel
and Caliban. Both are equally preternatural; Ariel is the air spirit, Caliban the earth spirit.
Ariel's very being is spun of melody and fragrance; if a feeling soul and an intelligent
will are the warp, these are the woof of his exquisite texture. He has just enough of
human-heartedness to know how he would feel were he human, and a proportionable
sense of that gratitude which has been aptly called the memory of the heart; hence he
needs to be often reminded of his obligations, but he is religiously true to them so long as
he remembers them

. His delicacy of nature is nowhere more apparent than in his sympathy with right and
good; the instant he comes within their touch he follows them without reserve, and he
will suffer any torments rather than "act the earthy and abhorr'd commands" that go
against his moral grain. And what a merry little personage he is withal; as if his being
were cast together in an impulse of play, and he would spend his whole life in one
perpetual frolic. Small wonder that Prospero calls him "my tricksy spirit," V, i, 226. In
his fondness for mischievous sport Ariel is strongly reminiscent of Puck. With what gusto
he relates the trick he played on Caliban and his confederates, when they were
proceeding to execute their conspiracy against the hero's life:

But the main ingredients of Ariel's zephyr-like constitution are shown in his leading
inclinations, as he naturally has most affinity for that of which he is framed. Moral ties
are irksome to him; they are not his proper element When he enters their sphere, he feels
them to be holy mdeed, but, were he free, he would keep out of their reach and follow the
circling seasons in their course, and always dwell merrily in the fringes of summer.
Prospero quietly intimates his instinctive dread of the cold by threatening to make him
"howl away twelve winters." And the chief joy of his promised release from service is
that he will then be free to live all the year through under the soft rule of summer, with its
flowers and fragrancies and melodies. He is indeed an arrant little epicure of perfume and
sweet sounds.

A markworthy feature of Ariel is that his power does not stop with the physical forces of
nature, but reaches also to the hearts and consciences of men, so that by his music he can
kindle or assuage the deepest griefs of the one, and strike the keenest pangs of remorse
into the other. This comes out in the different effects of his art upon Ferdinand and the
guilty king, as related by the men themselves:

Ariel's powers and functions entide him to be called Prospero's prime minister. Through
his agency Prospero's thoughts become things, his volitions events. And yet, strangely
and diversely as Ariel's nature is elemented and composed, with touches akin to several
orders of being, there is such a self-consistency about him, he is so cut out in individual
distinctness, and so rounded in with personal attributes, that contemplation freely and
easily rests upon him as an object. He is by no means an abstract idea personified, or any
sort of intellectual diagram, but a veritable person; and we have a personal feeling
towards the dear creature, and would fain knit him into the living circle of our human
affections and make him a familiar playfellow of the heart.

Caliban

If Caliban strikes us as a more wonderful creation than Ariel, it is probably because he

has more in common with us, without being in any proper sense human. He represents,
both in body and soul, a sort of intermediate nature between man and brute. Though he
has all the attributes of humanity from the moral downwards, so that his nature touches
and borders upon the sphere of moral life, the result but approves his exclusion from such
life in that it brings him to recognize moral law only as making for self. He has
intelligence of seeming wrong in what is done to him, but no conscience of what is wrong
in his own doings. But the magical presence of spirits has cast into the caverns of his
brain some faint reflection of a better world; he has taken in some of the epiphanies that
throng the enchanted island. It is a most singular and significant stroke in the delineation
that sleep seems to loosen the fetters of his soul and lift him above himself. It seems as if
in his passive state the voice of truth and good vibrated down to his soul and stopped
there, being unable to kindle any answering tones within, so that in his waking hours they
are to him but as the memory of a dream:

Caliban's most remarkable characteristic is the perfect originality of his thoughts and
manners. Though his disposition is framed of grossness and malignity, there is nothing
vulgar or commonplace about him. His whole character is developed from within, not
impressed from without, the effect of Prosperous instructions having been to make him
all the more himself, and there being perhaps no soil in his nature for conventional vices
and knaveries to take root and grow in. Hence the almost classic dignity of his behavior
compared with that of the drunken sailors. In his simplicity, indeed, he at first mistakes
them for gods who "bear celestial liquor," and they wax merry enough at the "credulous
monster," but in his vigor of thought and purpose he soon conceives a scorn of their
childish interest in trinkets and gewgaws, and the savage of the woods seems nobility
itself beside the savages of the city.