FERDINAND Most sure the goddess
On whom these airs attend!—Vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon this island,
And that you will some good instruction give
How I may bear me here. My prime request,
Which I do last pronounce, is (O, you wonder!)
If you be maid or no?
MIRANDA No wonder, sir,
But certainly a maid. (1.2.422-429)
Miranda thinks that Ferdinand’s divine, and Ferdinand thinks she’s a goddess, her presence the only possible explanation for the mysterious music, these airs which have drawn him here. Many people (well, educated men, mostly) in a seventeenth-century audience would recognise the allusion: O dea certe, surely you are a goddess, is how the shipwrecked Aeneas addresses the goddess Venus (actually his mother) when he encounters her, disguised, in the first book of the Aeneid. (The Aeneid is an important intertext for The Tempest: the shipwreck occurs as the king and his courtiers are returning from his daughter’s wedding to the king of Tunis, that is, Carthage, and ‘widow Dido’ is discussed by Gonzalo in 2.1.) Versions of this meeting and this greeting pop up in various early modern texts, the point being that the woman being addressed is never really a goddess; here it’s especially playful, given that they both think the other is divine. (Compare the parodic hyperbole of the enchanted Demetrius in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!’) Ferdinand is wonderfully polite and courtly, and he has three questions for her. The second is the sensible one: how am I meant to behave, bear me, in this country? But more important are the first and third: are you from round here? (do you remain upon this island?) And, are you seeing anyone? (That’s being a bit flippant: maid here can mean, simultaneously, virgin, unmarried woman, or perhaps simply – in this context – human, not a goddess, or a spirit.) And again, wonder – you wonder – no wonder, sir – the Latin-literate members of the audience primed by that Virgilian reference to make the connection (if they haven’t already) with Miranda’s name, in Latin the wondrous one, she who must be marvelled at. Yes, I’m a maid, human and unmarried, and virtuous.
