PROSPERO Why, that’s my spirit!
But was not this nigh shore?
ARIEL Close by, my master.
PROSPERO But are they, Ariel, safe?
ARIEL Not a hair perished;
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before; and, as thou bad’st me,
In troops I have dispersed them ’bout the isle.
The King’s son have I landed by himself,
Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs,
In an odd angle of the isle, and sitting,
His arms in this sad knot. (1.2.215-224)
Here is the reassurance – and also the evidence that this has all been carefully planned by Prospero and Ariel, his spirit. The wreck happened close to the shore. And everyone – even the people who jumped overboard – are safe and unharmed, not a hair perished. (This conceit for what it is to be completely unharmed is biblical: Christ tells his followers that although they will be hated for His sake, ‘there shall not a hair of your head perish’, Luke 21.18, echoing many passages in the Old Testament.) And their clothes are fine too: wardrobe pragmatics perhaps? But mostly evidence of magic. The garments are sustaining, possibly (much editorial discussion) because they acted like life-jackets, trapping air and preventing their wearers from sinking; the analogue is Ophelia. It seems unlikely, though: however voluminous, male dress would surely never trap as much air as a farthingale. Avoid speculation: it’s magic, and no one needs to worry about breaking down the costumes with realistic water damage and salt stains. The King and his party are dispersed, in small groups or troops, but Ferdinand the prince is by himself, and Ariel describes him vividly. He’s in an odd angle of the island, an out of the way corner, a little cove perhaps. He is distressed, and traumatised – but this distress is described in a way that makes him sound (already) like a stereotypical lover, cooling of the air with sighs (in the seven ages speech in As You Like It, the lover sighs like a furnace). And his arms are folded across his body in a sad knot, the pose customarily assumed by the melancholy lover, which here Ariel clearly imitates. (Ariel is a mimic; Ariel can, it seems, do comedy.) But overlaid onto this familiar stereotype there is still the image of the terrified young man, alone on a strange shore, hugging himself for comfort in his grief, as he thinks that everyone else – and above all his father the king – has drowned.
