PROSPERO This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child,
And here was left by th’sailors. Thou, my slave,
As thou report’st thyself, was then her servant,
And – for thou was a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorred commands,
Refusing her grand hests – she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine, within which rift
Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years, within which space she died
And left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as millwheels strike. (1.2.269-281)
Oh, the blue-eyed hag. Much editorial agonising – for which see the brilliant, classic essay by Leah Marcus. In modern Western European culture, blue eyes are associated with a particular kind of feminine beauty, so (as Marcus demonstrates) editors have historically contorted themselves (Sycorax-like) to demonstrate that this Algerian hag could not have had blue eyes – that blue refers to the under-eye shadows of pregnancy, for instance. Or they emend to ‘blear’, as in bleary-eyed. Whatever, it’s a tiny detail: what matters more in the moment (perhaps – that’s not at all to downplay the long history of this play in relation to race, empire, and colonialism) is Prospero’s anger, and this briefly particularised vignette of the powerful, feared, hated pregnant woman, abandoned on an island. Where, it seems, Ariel already was. Just as Prospero has done, Sycorax made Ariel her servant– or, as Prospero implicitly mocks, her slave (Ariel is, Prospero still thinks, his servant, not enslaved as they formerly were, surely a better deal). But Ariel refused to do as Sycorax commanded, too much a creature of air to act her earthy and abhorred commands (perhaps a slight suggestion of sexual demands? perhaps?) and in her most unmitigable rage (another quality Sycorax shared with Prospero – unreasonable, violent temper, difficult to appease) – they were imprisoned, by help of her more potent ministers (more slaves, or servants? perhaps devils or fiends?) into a cloven pine, a split tree. Again a very specific detail, and a frightening one: this airy spirit, who still retains (in the theatrical world) a human shape, a capacity to feel pain, wedged into the hard, unyielding wood of the stricken (lightning stricken?) tree, which was perhaps even full of tension, squeezing and contracting around Ariel’s tender, airy body. A dozen years – the same length of time, carefully established, that Prospero and Miranda have been on the island, that Ariel has been Prospero’s servant. And groaning in constant agony, like a machine, unceasing, with Sycorax dead and no apparent prospect of release.
