MIRANDA You have often
Begun to tell me what I am, but stopped
And left me to a bootless inquisition,
Concluding, ‘Stay, not yet’.
PROSPERO The hour’s now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
Obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not
Out three years old.
MIRANDA Certainly, sir, I can. (1.2.33-41)
A slight clarification here: Prospero has raised this before, the fact that he and Miranda have a backstory, a different status and identity to that simply conferred by their island life together, their relationship as father and daughter. A clever ramping up of suspense, not simply by Prospero delaying the beginning of his story through sheer fussy wordiness, but by a preliminary remembering, of all the times – there have been many, apparently – when he’s started to tell the story, and then stopped himself: not yet. It’s not just that this revelation has been delayed – it’s been delayed until exactly this moment, which is apparently, and finally, the right time: the hour’s now come. And not just the hour, the very minute: after this imprecise imagining of a past of repeated not-tellings, the clock is now ticking and it’s time. So there’s a dense layering and juxtaposition here of different kinds of time and timeliness: now may be the moment, but what about the time before? And the time before that? What can Miranda remember? Prospero is partly thinking in terms of kairos, a Greek word which means the right or propitious moment; in idiomatic English it might be called the fullness of time. A momentous moment, the time when a particular thing can happen, perhaps has to happen. (The late plays in general are marked by moments of kairos: Paulina tells Hermione, as a statue, that ‘’Tis time’, and of course Time appears as a character, to bridge the play’s ‘gap of time’.) This may finally be that moment, but immediately from this marker put down in time, like a pin in a map, there’s an arrow backwards in the dark, back through Miranda’s life, to when she was not quite three years old, properly a little child. What does she remember? Can she remember? Prospero is nervous, full of anticipation and apprehension, and here that nervousness is manifested in bossiness: sit still and listen, listen with all your might. (Obey is certainly be obedient, submit, do as you’re told, but in etymological terms it’s specifically about listening, paying attention. That sense is here, I think.) So there are at least three kinds of time here: the time of a life, measured in years but more in experiences and memories; Miranda’s life. Measured time: minutes and hours. Sometimes this maps on to the time of the play, the time of the audience. And the fullness of time, timeliness, kairos. The hour’s now come.
(And maybe The Waste Land and its Shakespeherian Rag: HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.)
