SEBASTIAN Well, I am standing water.
ANTONIO I’ll teach you how to flow.
SEBASTIAN Do so. To ebb
Hereditary sloth instructs me.
ANTONIO O,
If you but knew how you the purpose cherish
Whiles thus you mock it, how in stripping it
You more invest it. Ebbing men, indeed,
Most often do so near the bottom run
By their own fear or sloth. (2.1.221-228)
This is somewhat obscure… How clear is it – yet – that Sebastian is the younger brother of Alonso the king? Not very, I think, if at all, which doesn’t help the clarity. The conceit is mostly tidal (oh yes) but lurking behind it is, perhaps, a metaphor familiar from political discourse, that of the prince, or the court, being like a fountain. (The opening scene of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: ‘a prince’s court | Is like a common fountain, whence should flow | Pure silver drops in general, but if’t chance | Some curs’d example poison ’t near the head, | Death and diseases through the whole land spread’. Also a King’s Men play, it was probably written and performed very soon after The Tempest.) So, Sebastian is standing water, perhaps stagnant, at any rate not flowing, or rising or falling; not going anywhere. Antonio will teach him how to flow, in tidal terms, grow higher, whereas Sebastian comments that his hereditary sloth, either his lazy nature, his natural lack of ambition – or perhaps his hereditary position as a younger brother – makes him more included to ebb, to be low. But Antonio – not least because he is himself a usurping younger brother, and wants to project his own motivations and actions on to Sebastian – argues that Sebastian’s mockery or dismissiveness, his seeming indifference (and that hereditary sloth) is merely a façade, that in fact he cherishes the purpose, the prospect that Antonio is about to elucidate: that of the crown of Naples dropping on to Sebastian’s head. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it, he says, in effect. Even as you strip it, mock it, you are more invested in it, you think about it more intensely: the conceit now is one of clothing, as if Sebastian is secretly imagining himself in new clothes, literally invested in the kingly robes of office. (Macbeth: ‘Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?’) And a bit of a snide, needling jibe, of course: it’s only ebbing men, those who are on the way out, those with no ambition or hope of power who run, remain, near the bottom – of the sea, down in the mud, stuck (bottom-feeding, to describe fish, or to insult lazy, exploitative people is alas a twentieth-century coinage). It’s fear or laziness that’s keeping you down, that’s stopping you from exploiting this chance to rise, to take power, to take the crown.
