PROSPERO No, wench, it eats and sleeps and hath such senses
As we have—such. This gallant which thou seest
Was in the wreck, and but he’s something stained
With grief (that’s beauty’s canker) thou mightst call him
A goodly person. He hath lost his fellows
And strays about to find ’em.
MIRANDA I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.
PROSPERO [aside] It goes on, I see,
As my soul prompts it. [to Ariel] Spirit, fine spirit,
I’ll free thee
Within two days for this. (1.2.413-422)
Wench is, again, affectionate; Prospero could be exasperated, but (more likely?) affectionately amused at her innocence. It’s not a spirit: it’s a man! (Caliban, we know, eats and sleeps too, but he has been emphatically excluded from the category of human by Prospero, and by Miranda. They don’t care about his dinner, or his dreams…) And gallant, courtly, elegant gentleman (perhaps used ironically or archly by Prospero here, given that Ferdinand is apparently looking a bit rough) is a new term for Miranda, presumably, one for which there has been no call hitherto in her island life. It’s going to be established much, much later on that the clothes worn by the shipwrecked characters have not been damaged by salt water: here, it’s grief – salt water in the form of tears – that stains Ferdinand, impairs his beauty. (Sorrow is like a canker, a worm in a bud, a cancer, that destroys beautiful things; the conceit is proverbial. Ferdinand may be weeping; he is certainly not smiling.) And he’s alone and lost, Prospero adds, to tug even more at his kind daughter’s heart-strings. But she – sigh – is still most taken with Ferdinand’s appearance: I might call him a thing divine. Prospero is delighted: this is all his plan, apparently, and he’s taking all the credit for how Miranda, and indeed Ferdinand, are feeling. This is Ariel’s doing, bringing him to this place. A reminder of their promised freedom, but also that Prospero is in control of everything.
