Enter ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, GONZALO, ADRIAN, FRANCISCO and others.
GONZALO By’r lakin, I can go no further, sir;
My old bones aches. Here’s a maze trod, indeed,
Through forthrights and meanders! By your patience,
I needs must rest me.
ALONSO Old lord, I cannot blame thee,
Who am myself attached with weariness
To th’ dulling of my spirits. Sit down and rest.
Even here I will put off my hope and keep it
No longer for my flatterer. He is drowned
Whom thus we stray to find, and the sea mocks
Our frustrate search on land. Well, let him go. (3.3.1-10)
Gonzalo does sound exhausted; his very mild oath By’r lakin, By Our Ladykin, or By Our (Little) Lady, using a diminutive, familiar form of lady has a childlike, nursery quality to it, an approved form of profanation. (Very appropriate: today is the Feast of the Annunciation, Lady Day!) Compare Innogen’s characteristic use of diminutives in Cymbeline: ‘’Od’s pitykins’ (By God’s pity) or, elsewhere, ‘’Od’s bodikins’ (By God’s body). And also compare the loyal servant Adam, to Orlando in As You Like It: ‘Dear master, I can go no further. O, I die for food. Here lie I down and measure out my grave’, 2.6. Gonzalo isn’t quite in such extremity, it seems, but he’s shattered. They’ve been going around and around the island – here’s a maze trod, indeed, through forthrights and meanders – straight paths and crooked paths. We’ve gone round in circles, retraced our steps, and we’re lost. And Alonso is giving up too, both physically and emotionally. I’m so attached with weariness, so overcome with exhaustion, that I’ve lost my will to keep going. Even here, right here, right now, I’ve given up all hope of finding my son. In a prescient image, he describes hope as being a flatterer, like an obsequious courtier, a court hanger-on who whispers compliment and reassurance even when it’s manifestly false. No more. He is drowned, whom thus we’ve been wandering about, directionlessly, to seek – he can’t even bring himself to name Ferdinand, his son, any more; and they all know whom he means. The sea has him, and mocks our fruitless, pointless, frustrate(d) search on land. Well, let him go. (Said more to himself, in the vain hope that it might be possible? That saying it might make it possible?) And Alonso, king and – as he thinks – bereaved father, presumably casts himself down on the ground, with his faithful Gonzalo.
Adrian and Francisco, let alone others, do not speak in this scene. Editors include them because they were present and spoke in the earlier scene with the Neapolitan courtiers and must still be part of that group!
