ARIEL             I boarded the King’s ship: now on the beak,

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin

I flamed amazement. Sometime I’d divide

And burn in many places—on the topmast,

The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,

Then meet and join. Jove’s lightning, the precursors

O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary

And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks

Of sulphurous roaring, the most mighty Neptune

Seem to besiege and make his bold waves tremble,

Yea, his dread trident shake. (1.2.196-206)

So was Ariel there in the storm scene? Sometimes they are, glimpsed amid ropes, a quicksilver presence strobed by lightning. But they don’t have to have been for this speech to work, because what Ariel describes is movement faster than the eye can see. If they were present, they were present as lightning, as the fire that they have just identified as one of their elements. They darted around the ship, flaming amazement from its bow to its cabins, and all the decks in between. They caused confusion, and wonder, and fear; amazement. (No more amazement, Prospero said to Miranda, when she was distressed by the spectacle of the storm.) And Ariel divided to burn in many places, setting flames on various parts of the ship’s rigging, its masts, its crossbars (the yards), its bowsprit – and then joining them all up, so that the ship seems outlined, rigged with fire. But it was all faster than flashes of lightning and thunderclaps, beyond the limits of sight and sound. It was a storm on a godlike scale, the work of Jove and Neptune – but it was also theatrical, made from sulphurous fireworks (so strong, so loud, that smell and sound seemed to be one and the same).

It seems vanishingly unlikely that this is a faithful description of the storm that was staged in 1.1. There would have been thundering from cannon balls and lightning from fireworks – but the ship outlined with fire, the mercurial spirit of flame who burned in many places? Only in this retrospective description, which the audience might project backwards, to remember something that they did not see. (It won’t be the last time in this play.) Ariel’s speed and shape-shifting are the crucial thing here, momentary and sight-outrunning. Sleight of hand; blink and you miss it. If it were ever there in the first place.