PROSPERO                                         My brave spirit,

Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil

Would not infect his reason?

ARIEL                                                             Not a soul

But felt a fever of the mad and played

Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners

Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel;

Then all afire with me, the King’s son Ferdinand,

With hair up-staring (then like reeds, not hair),

Was the first man that leapt, cried ‘Hell is empty,

And all the devils are here’ (1.2.206-215).

The line-sharing so characteristic of Prospero’s interactions with his daughter Miranda also marks his dialogue with Ariel: this is a master and a servant, but they know each other intimately, follow each other’s trains of thought. Prospero’s gleeful questions and responses are potentially disquieting: did anyone demonstrate courage, was there anyone who kept his head, his reason in the face of this coil, this confusion? Or did they all go mad? All maddened indeed, to the point of desperation, despair, suicide. What Ariel describes seems to relate to a point slightly beyond the end of 1.1, as they recount the way in which the passengers – not the sailors – jumped overboard, in the foaming brine, the wild sea. (The detail that the mariners remained on board is going to be important for the plot: the King, Antonio, and their entourage and servants have to be separated from the ordinary sailors, and in fact they will turn out to have been further separated into smaller groups.) And that final, vivid vignette of Ferdinand, the prince (here named for the first time): there’s a punctuation quibble (exciting!) – is it the vessel that is all afire with Ariel, as the previous passage described, or Ferdinand himself as he leaps, and specifically his hair? Or is the fire now a metaphor to suggest Ferdinand’s madness in jumping from the stricken ship to almost certain death in the sea? Whether flaming or not, Ferdinand’s hair is up-staring, standing on end like reeds (less vivid, alas, than Hamlet’s fretful porpentine, but also with less comic potential). A useful reminder that this action of storm-raising, and this play, flirt with black magic and devilry, with the demonic. Storms are raised by the witches in Macbeth (as they discuss in 1.3). But the devil that Ferdinand has – perhaps – seen can only have been Ariel, Prospero’s affectionately-addressed brave spirit.