EnterALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, GONZALO, ADRIAN, FRANCISCO and others.

GONZALO       Beseech you, sir, be merry. You have cause

(So have we all) of joy, for our escape

Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe

Is common: every day some sailor’s wife,

The masters of some merchant, and the merchant,

Have just our theme of woe. But for the miracle,

I mean our preservation, few in millions

Can speak like us. Then wisely, good sir, weigh

Our sorrow with our comfort.

ALONSO                                                         Prithee, peace.

SEBASTIAN    [to Antonio] He receives comfort like cold porridge.

ANTONIO       [to Sebastian] The visitor will not give him o’er so. (2.1.1-13)

Finally! Act 2! And here are the Neopolitan and Milanese courtiers, last encountered getting in the way on the ship in the storm, in 1.1. It’s a bit of a jump, from the intense engagement with Prospero and Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, and latterly Ferdinand, to all of these men. None of them has yet been introduced by name, although the King was identified, but their characters were quickly established in that chaotic opening scene: Gonzalo goes on a bit (a lot); Sebastian and Antonio are sarcastic, subversive, unpleasant. There are jostling hierarchies and power struggles here too… Adrian and Francisco are minor characters, and a smaller cast could easily reallocate their lines in what follows. And others might be an addition of Ralph Crane, the scrivener, copying the text of the play; editors point out that there aren’t any others mentioned in the stage directions in the play’s final scene. It seems that Gonzalo may well have been going on in this way for some time, trying to cheer the King up – not simply console him – by pointing out the obvious, that they haven’t been drowned. But Ferdinand is dead, or so his father Alonso believes – this is what the audience has to be processing as this scene begins, the inadequacy of Gonzalo’s well-meaning platitudes in the face of a father’s grief. Ferdinand had more to say about his father’s supposed death, and Ariel mourned for him in song – here Alonso is largely silent. Prithee peace could be said angrily, perhaps, or with dull, resigned shock. He longs for peace, for silence; words can change nothing. He can certainly not be merry, as Gonzalo ill-advisedly suggests. Gonzalo is offering a kind of bare calculus of grief: look, all of us have escaped drowning, only Ferdinand is lost. And, moreover, he misguidedly continues, people drown all the time: sailors’ wives lose their husbands, and the owners of merchant ships, as well as those who depend on them (and perhaps those who captain them: the masters of some merchant is an obscure line) also endure losses at sea. (A flashback to Merchant of Venice, and Antonio’s losses. And to Macbeth, and the witches taking delight in drowning sailors because their wives have slighted them.) We’re so lucky, says Gonzalo – few in millions can speak like us. Our preservation was a miracle. But his generalisations do not offer any comfort to this grieving father, and it is far too soon for there to be any comfort in the philosophical shrug of, well, count your blessings. Raw grief does not work like that. Gonzalo’s generalisations, which are all entirely true, and fall into a long Christian, and Stoic, tradition of finding comfort in tribulation, cannot offer any consolation yet (if ever) for the particularities of this loss. (Compare Friar Lawrence, telling Romeo to get a grip and be grateful that he’s banished, not dead. It’s a question that Shakespeare returns to repeatedly, as do many other writers: is it any consolation, in suffering, to know that other people have suffered too? Is this what art is for? The Rape of Lucrece, for instance: It easeth some, though none it ever cured | To think their dolour others have endured, as Lucrece tries to find some consolation for her suffering in the picture of the fall of Troy.)

Sebastian and Antonio, as they did in 1.1, snipe from the sidelines. (Compare the Gentlemen in Cymbeline, presumably written for the same pair of actors; they do very much the same thing.) Their switch into prose to undercut Gonzalo’s formal, balanced verse with their asides to each other makes it even more obvious that they’re only interested in their own conversation, their own agenda and point-scoring; they are each other’s audience and they have no interest in Alonso and his loss. Gonzalo is an easy target for their mockery. The comfort he has offered could indeed be compared to cold porridge – it’s unattractive and unwanted and ineffectual, as well as cold in its attempt to find some kind of calculated balance between gain and loss – but it seems cruel to point it out like this (and it perhaps makes an audience more sympathetic, slightly, to Gonzalo – at least he’s making an effort). (Although cold porridge is intrinsically comic, and the line will probably get a laugh.) But, as Sebastian adds, The visitor will not give him o’er so – Gonzalo isn’t going to give up that easily when the King asks him to be silent; he’s still got plenty more to say.