PROSPERO     Thou liest, malignant thing; hast thou forgot

The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy

Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?

ARIEL             No, sir.

PROSPERO                 Thou hast! Where was she born? Speak; tell me.

ARIEL             Sir, in Algiers.

PROSPERO                             O, was she so? I must

Once in a month recount what thou hast been,

Which thou forget’st. This damned witch Sycorax,

For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible

To enter human hearing, from Algiers,

Thou knowst, was banished. For one thing she did

They would not take her life; is not this true?

ARIEL             Ay, sir. (1.2.257-268)

Prospero has a terrible temper and a short fuse; he is a bully. He is determined to remind Ariel that they are in his debt – forced gratitude – but to call them malignant thing here, as if they are filled with malice and ill-will, seems wildly excessive. Projection, much? (Prospero does a lot of projecting.) There’s a point to this new piece of backstory, of course: Caliban. But not for a bit. First, there’s a strange, exotic detour to Algiers, and another of the play’s notably invoked but absent women, especially mothers. First Prospero’s unnamed wife, Miranda’s mother, then those unspecified women who waited on Miranda in Milan – and now the foul witch Sycorax (the name is Shakespeare’s invention). That with age and envy she was grown into a hoop is an utterly bizarre detail, comically grotesque, not least because how could anyone forget such a figure, as Prospero is accusing Ariel of having done. But her physical appearance is rapidly occluded by the detail of her origins in Algiers, the principal city of Algeria, north Africa. (Other north African connections will emerge later in the play.) And the fact that Sycorax was banished from there, for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible, so terrible that they could not be spoken of, is significant. She would have been killed, but for one circumstance, about to be revealed. Because the thing about Sycorax is that she sounds a lot like Prospero – apparently (at least according to him) dark and twisted – but still, exiled from her home for practicing magic. An echo of Miranda’s earlier question too, about their forced departure from Milan: why didn’t they just kill us? Meanwhile, Ariel is being so polite…