ADRIAN Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to their queen.
GONZALO Not since widow Dido’s time.
ANTONIO Widow? A pox o’that. How came that widow in? Widow Dido!
SEBASTIAN What if he had said widower Aeneas too? Good lord, how you take it!
ADRIAN Widow Dido, said you? You make me study of that. She was of Carthage, not of Tunis.
GONZALO This Tunis, sir, was Carthage.
ADRIAN Carthage?
GONZALO I assure you, Carthage.
ANTONIO His word is more than the miraculous harp.
SEBASTIAN He hath raised the wall, and houses too.
ANTONIO What impossible matter will he make easy next?
SEBASTIAN I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple.
ANTONIO And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands! (2.1.75-94)
Adrian bulldozes on with his compliments and positivity: Claribel will be a paragon, a wonder, the best possible queen of Tunis, like they’ve never seen before. And Gonzalo joins in, equally positive, and well-meaning in his attempts to distract Alonso – but also pedantic: not since widow Dido’s time, ancient history, the days of the Aeneid, just after the fall of Troy, when Dido ruled in Carthage (now Tunis, more or less, as Gonzalo and Adrian subsequently establish) and where she fell in love with the shipwrecked Aeneas. (If Claribel glances at James I’s daughter Elizabeth, then Dido glances at her namesake Elizabeth I, who was sometimes compared by poets with Dido via another name used for the Carthaginian queen, Elissa, so there’s a sly comparison between the two Elizabeths too.) Dido was a widow when she met Aeneas: her husband was Sychaeus, and it was to his ghost that she turned in the underworld when the living Aeneas journeyed there in Aeneid 6, probably the best known part of the epic to early modern readers although not, apparently, to Antonio, not a scholar like his brother Prospero. So the repeated description of her as widow Dido, while silly, mightn’t have been quite as incongruous to audiences as it now is. (Part of the silliness is in the repeated sounds.) The only point that Sebastian can score here is to note that Aeneas was a widower too, when the lovers met, his wife Creusa having been lost, and subsequently died, at the fall of Troy. (There are so many remembered, absent, lost, dead women in this play…) And then Gonzalo and Adrian have a pedantic little exchange, establishing that Tunis and Carthage weren’t quite the same city, Carthage having been destroyed in antiquity, but Gonzalo says they might as well have been, prompting Antonio to sneer that his words are more powerful than Amphion’s magical harp, which raised the walls of the city of Thebes, and Sebastian to add that Gonzalo in effect rebuilds the city of Carthage. (Ancient Carthage was the byword for the complete destruction of a city: the Roman orator Cato had repeatedly said Carthago delenda est, Carthage must be destroyed, and so it was, by Scipio Aemilianus, in the Third Punic War of 146BC.) So if Gonzalo can rebuild Carthage with a word as modern Tunis then he can do anything: he can pick up this island with his superhuman strength and carry it home like an apple in his pocket, scattering seeds that make new islands. It’s a weird passage, densely classical in its allusions, but oblique and playful and ironic (and sarcastic), finishing with this strange fantasy of Gonzalo as a giant, wading across the ocean, bringing new worlds into being like some Renaissance Johnny Appleseed. (What’s Alonso, the grieving king and father doing, as these somewhat tedious men distract and amuse themselves?)
