PROSPERO     Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,

Thy father was the Duke of Milan and

A prince of power.

MIRANDA                                          Sir, are not you my father?

PROSPERO     Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and

She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father

Was Duke of Milan, and his only heir

And princess, no worse issued. (1.2.53-59)

And now there are details, although Prospero is still being quite oblique. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the exchange that they’ve just had about time and memory, its formlessness and obscurity, he begins by emphatically establishing a timeframe: the events that he is about to recount took place twelve years ago. (We do the maths: Miranda is around fifteen years old.) And to go with that temporal specificity, the naming of a place: Milan. And the first big reveal: Prospero was Duke of Milan. What, then, happened twelve years ago? But the tension is broken by Miranda’s wide-eyed Sir, are not you my father? (Her question may give some indication of just how shabby and unlikely a duke Prospero looks, without his magic garment.) And the old joke: your mother was virtuous (a piece means a model or example, as in masterpiece) and she told me that I was your father. (This echoes other plays. In Much Ado, when the Prince says, of Hero, to Leonato ‘I think this is your daughter’, he replies ‘Her mother hath many times told me so’ (1.1); Much Ado was certainly in the repertoire of the King’s Men around the time that The Tempest was most likely first performed, as it was played at court in early 1613, as part of the celebrations of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick of Bohemia. So was Winter’s Tale, in which Leontes comments on the likeness of Florizel to his father Polixenes: ‘Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, | For she did print your royal father off, | Conceiving you’ (5.1)). So there’s a laugh, probably (although Miranda could be upset and shocked, more than confused, at the mistaken thought that Prospero might not be her father), and then Prospero can continue: I am your father, I was Duke of Milan, and that means that you were a princess, and my only heir. The tenses are interesting: Prospero says clearly that he was Duke of Milan (suggesting that he is no longer, as would seem obvious) but the verbs are elided (as is often the case in the late plays) when it comes to describing Miranda as his only heir and princess, no worse issued, that is, of no lower birth. Is she still a princess? What might she be heir to?