From this original Stephano or from the voyagers' tales may have come some hints for Caliban. There were many strange accounts of cannibals and monsters. An earlier narrative tells of "a sea monster ... arms like a man, without hair and at the elbows great fins like a fish." Indians had been brought back from America; and only a few years before the play several had been exhibited and aroused much curiosity. As Trinculo observes, "When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Caliban was doubtless intended to be of the earth, earthy, the opposite of Ariel, the spirit of the air, and was also intended as a sketch of the savage resisting the mastery of the European. But, brutish and savage though he be, he too is a dweller in the enchanted island. For him too life has its romance. There is no finer touch of Shakspere's magic in the whole play than this. Marco Polo had recounted that "You shall heare in the ayre the sound of tabers and other instruments, to put the travellers in fear, &c., by evill spirits that make these sounds and also do call ... travellers by their names." But Shakspere's Caliban reassures his companions frightened by Ariel playing on a tabor. Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd, I cried to dream again. The enchanted island owes still more to preceding voyagers in the great seas of romance. Shakspere had made many earlier voyages thither, but he was not the first Columbus to search out the undiscovered lands of illusions and enchantments. Fortunately for us he lived in the period of imaginative adventure and steered his crafts on the oceans whence many predecessors had returned treasure-laden. This is no place to relate the various circumstances that placed the men of the sixteenth century in a fortunate position for Romance, or to indicate the long development of romantic-comedy in which Shakspere played so great a part. But surely the interview between the dramatist and the sailor would have had very different results if the Elizabethan theater had not been accustomed to the union of the laughable and the romantic, the comic and the marvellous. Such a union is not a common one. There are no romantic-comedies in the literature of antiquity, and very few in modern literature since Shakspere's death. He found a stage that was already the home of romance, used to fantasy and medley, and used also to fill out a three hours entertainment with sentiment and fun, music and monsters, idealized heroines and puns.