Setebos
In the play, Setebos, an unseen character, is described as the god worshiped by the sea-witch Sycorax, the mother of the subhuman Caliban.
Largely because of Shakespeare's use of the name, "Setebos" has maintained currency in published works, including poems, novels and plays.
Near the southern tip of South America he encountered native people who were described by the Italian who accompanied the expedition, Antonio Pigafetta (1480–1534), as “Patagoni”.
[7] The most accurate and complete English translation of Pigafetta's report was published by James Alexander Robertson in 1906 based on the Ambrosian manuscript.
According to Pigafetta,[9] "One day we suddenly saw a naked man of giant stature on the shore of the port, dancing, singing, and throwing dust on his head.
[11] Pigafetta also reported on the burial customs of the natives: When one of those people die, ten or twelve demons all painted appear to them and dance very joyfully about the corpse.
That giant [native] also told us by signs that he had seen the demons with two horns on their heads, and long hair which hung to the feet belching forth fire from mouth and buttocks.
[13] The Patagonian's god is also mentioned (this time spelled "Settaboth" and also "Settaboh") in a separate account of Sir Francis Drake's voyage of circumnavigation (1577–1580), a half-century after Magellan's.
Pigafetta returned to Europe in 1522, where he presented a number of kings and queens with extracts from his narrative of Magellan's voyage,[17] and from the Seignory of Venice he obtained permission to publish it, but he never did.
[20] Francis Fletcher's account[15] of Drake's voyage of circumnavigation, which also discussed an encounter with the native Patagonians, was not published until 1628, after Shakespeare's death.
Ariel has lured Caliban and two co-conspirators, Antonio and Sebastian, to Prospero's cell, where spirits in the shape of dogs have been set to snarling at them.
There is no documented proof that Shakespeare was familiar with the accounts by Pigafetta or Fletcher of the New World, or that he knew about the Tehuelche god Setebos.
However it is widely accepted, by literary scholars and historians, that Shakespeare was familiar with those accounts, and that he chose the name Setebos for the god of Caliban and Sycorax based on them.
[27] But probably more persuasive is the work by Shakespearean scholars Frank Kermode,[29] Geoffrey Bullough,[30] Hallett Smith[31] and others who have traced textual connections between New World materials and The Tempest.
In the words of Hallett Smith: "Shakespeare's imagination, at the time he wrote The Tempest, would appear to have been stimulated by the accounts of travel and exploration in the new world".
For instance, John Lee writes:[34] In his comprehensive generalisation Shakespeare ascribes to Caliban some vague affinities with the most barbarous of all the American races.
... [Sir Francis] Drake echoes reports by earlier Spanish travellers of the savage worship, which the Patagonians offered their 'great devil Setebos.'
J. Cotter Morison gave what is now a standard interpretation of Browning's title: "the writer's intention ... is to describe in a dramatic monologue the Natural Theology,—that is, the conception of God,—likely, or rather certain to occur to such a being as Caliban.
Browning uses Caliban (or so it is widely argued) to demonstrate the errors of constructing God in the image of ourselves, and perhaps also as a rhetorical vehicle to attack established religions, in particular, Calvinism.
Caliban imagines, for instance, crabs walking from the mountains to the sea, and says he will Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
The result, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, required about 30 professional actors for the speaking roles and about 2500 mute participants for the pantomimes.
The action begins[53] with actors arriving at a cabaña in El Chaltén, a small mountain village in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina that is supposedly the birthplace of the Tehuelche fire-god Setebos, creator of the region's people and wildlife.
Near the end of the play, the story of the birth of Setebos and the Tehuelche people is presented by the spiritually reborn actors wearing animal masks.
An extraterrestrial creature called Setebos plays an important role in Dan Simmons' science-fiction novels Ilium and Olympos.
The creature sits over a crater at the center of a blue, ice-cold dome: This raised crater looked very much like a nest and the impression was reinforced by the thing that filled it—gray brain tissue, convoluted ridges, multiple pairs of eyes, mouths, and orifices opening and shutting in no unison, a score of huge hands beneath it—these hands occasionally rearranging the huge form's mass on its nest, settling it more comfortably—and he saw other hands, each larger than the room Daeman occuped at Ardis Hall, that had emerged from the brain on stalks and were pulling themselves and their trailing tentacles across the glowing floor.
