GONZALO And—do you mark me, sir?—
ALONSO Prithee, no more.
Thou dost talk nothing to me.
GONZALO I do well believe your highness, and did it to minister occasion to these gentlemen, who are of such sensible and nimble lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing.
ANTONIO ’Twas you we laughed at.
GONZALO Who, in this kind of merry fooling, am nothing to you, so you may continue and laugh at nothing still.
ANTONIO What a blow was there given!
SEBASTIAN An it had not fallen flat-long.
GONZALO You are gentlemen of brave mettle. You would lift the moon out of her sphere, if she would continue in it five weeks without changing.
Enter ARIEL playing solemn music.
SEBASTIAN We would so, and then go a bat-fowling. (2.1.171-185)
Finally this interminable exchange winds down. Gonzalo tries once more to get Alonso’s attention – do you mark me, are you listening? (a reminder of Prospero at the beginning of 1.2, perhaps?) and Alonso, yet again, has to say, please stop talking. You have nothing to say, you are talking nonsense. I know, says Gonzalo, pleased with himself, and I had a cunning plan! I wanted to give these gentlemen (possibly being ironic? they’ve been behaving so appallingly. Or maybe being faultlessly courteous) something to laugh at, something to mock – because that’s what they’re good at, laughing at nothing, they do it all the time. (A bit of a sting in the tail, clever Gonzalo, perhaps? They’re the idiots, they’ll laugh at anything, put all that energy into mocking the most foolish, trivial things.) We were laughing at you, says Antonio, petulantly (and truthfully), but it makes him sound like the petty, foolish one. I know, says Gonzalo, and that’s why you’re the fools here: you don’t take me or anything I have to say seriously, I am nothing to you – so you’ve been laughing at nothing. Idiots. (Shades of Romeo’s response to Mercutio, interrupting the out of control Queen Mab speech?) Ooooo, Antonio might as well say, I’m wounded, cut to the quick; well, you would have been if it hadn’t been a blow given with the flat of the blade, not the cutting edge or the point of the sword. Gonzalo, perhaps, picks up the implicit metal of the blade to pun on brave mettle, you think you’re so smart, so big and clever. You’re so arrogant and blustering that you’d knock the moon out of its orbit. (An echo, perhaps, of Hotspur, who will ‘pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon, | Or dive into the bottom of the deep | Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, | And pluck up drowned honour by the locks’, 1 Henry IV 1.3. It’s known to have been performed at court in 1612-13, and may well have been in the regular repertoire and more generally well-known; Hotspur’s speech had been quoted in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, written in 1607 and this bit sounds very Tempest-like indeed. This is a roundabout way of saying that the reference to lifting the moon out of her sphere might recall other, more honourable characters, for both Shakespeare and his audience.) Finally, enter ARIEL playing solemn music. Are they still invisible? Probably? Certainly Sebastian takes no notice: yes, we would, and then we’d go bat-fowling. Which, perhaps disappointingly? has nothing to do with hunting bats, but rather hitting roosting, sleeping birds with a bat in the dark. An underhand way of hunting, not a fair contest.
