ARIEL                                     You fools! I and my fellows

Are ministers of fate. The elements

Of whom your swords are tempered may as well

Wound the loud winds, or with bemocked-at stabs

Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish

One dowl that’s in my plume. My fellow ministers

Are like invulnerable. If you could hurt,

Your swords are now too massy for your strengths

And will not be uplifted. (3.3.60-68)

Ariel is not messing around; they are supremely and fiercely scornful of these foolish mortals who dare to draw their swords in defiance of destiny: You fools! I and my fellows are ministers of fate. (The fellows are the other spirits, currently offstage.) Ministers of fate, servants doing the work of fate, parallels Ariel’s previous description recalls their earlier figure of the lower world, the material world, as the instrument of destiny. Everything, animate and inanimate, is directed towards telling Antonio, Sebastian, and Alonso that it’s time for a reckoning, time for their comeuppance; fate has finally caught up with them. Their swords are useless, no matter how their blades have been tempered (or, by extension, of what they are made). And then a series of images of impotence and futility: you might as well try to wound the loud winds (loud here is a brilliant touch: trying to stab the wind is foolish enough; trying, by implication, to stab the sound it makes is surreal in its futility). Or you might try to kill the waters, the sea, still-closing because every wound disappears, is closed over as soon as it is made. Bemocked-at stabs is a nice touch, suggesting scorn but also, perhaps, the cynical mockery which is the default mode of Antonio and Sebastian, with the bemocked making it sound fussy, a bit camp. You might as well do either of those pointless, impotent things – attacking with your swords the wind and the waves – as diminish, cut off, damage, shorten, the tiniest bit of one of my feathers. Plume could suggest a tail, but that seems overly complicated (and tails risk comedy); it could be a wing, or simply a general reference to Ariel’s featheriness. A dowl is specifically a single filament in a feather, one of its fibres or strands. Whatever the details: no chance. I and my fellow ministers, we are invulnerable, says Ariel. You cannot touch us. And even if you could, your swords are now too massy for your strengths, too heavy for you to lift. You pathetic little men…