PROSPERO                                         Lend thy hand

And pluck my magic garment from me. So,

Lie there my art. Wipe thou thine eyes, have comfort;

The direful spectacle of the wreck which touched

The very virtue of compassion in thee,

I have with such provision in mine art

So safely ordered, that there is no soul –

No, not so much perdition as an hair,

Betid to any creature in the vessel

Which thou heard’st cry, which thou sawst sink. Sit down,

For thou must now know further. (1.2.22-33)

An unusually specific costume note: Prospero has a magic garment! It’s probably a gown (long, open down the front, with or without sleeves, or perhaps with hanging sleeves) or a cloak (easier in non-Renaissance dress; it’s big enough (and heavy enough, therefore) to need assistance in taking it off. (It is almost certainly not a pointy hat. Some academics still wear gowns but they are mostly not magical. They can, however, act as a nice warm extra layer, and you can keep stuff in the sleeves, like pens and bits of paper and tissues.) Prospero’s probably has magical, cabalistic signs and symbols on it, not least to distinguish it from other authoritative-looking gowns (such as those worn by scholars or clergy or lawyers, which would be plain and usually black); it would also have been important, I think, that in the original seventeenth-century production it didn’t look like church vestments, the form of which was periodically controversial throughout this period. There were enough evil cardinals on the English stage in the early seventeenth century, and Prospero doesn’t need to go down that route, and it could also be increasingly controversial for him to look like a Church of England bishop. But his garment is more than a costume, for he addresses it as his art, as if by taking it off, he has set aside his power. This could be an exaggeration – surely his art, his magic is more than a magic gown? He is, however, going to step away, temporarily, from his identity as magus, as seer, even as scholar, to be first and foremost Miranda’s father. He continues to praise her compassion and to comfort her – wipe thou thine eyes (one imagines, perhaps, a handkerchief being produced, as one would for a child) – and to promise that his magic in raising the storm, although it has appeared catastrophically destructive, has done no harm. No one has been hurt; it was all carefully planned (so safely ordered) that not even a hair on the heads of any creature in the vessel, anyone on board the ship, has been damaged – even though, as he acknowledges, it certainly looked like it to Miranda. (This is, perhaps, another instance of Prospero making a Christ-like promise, further suggested by perdition, here meaning loss, but also suggesting damnation: Jesus promises his disciples that although they will be persecuted for his sake as the end of the world approaches, ‘there shall not a haire of your head perish’, Luke 21.18. But not to have even a hair hurt is a pretty common idiom.) Sit down, Prospero says to Miranda, and I’ll tell you a story.