ARIEL                                     Then I beat my tabor,

At which like unbacked colts they pricked their ears,

Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses

As they smelt music; so I charmed their ears

That calf-like they my lowing followed, through

Toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking gorse and thorns,

Which entered their frail shins. At last I left them

I’th’ filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,

There dancing up to th’ chins, that the foul lake

O’erstunk their feet.

PROSPERO                             This was well done, my bird. (4.1.175-184)

We’ve seen (or heard) Ariel’s tabor before – they had it in an earlier scene with the drunkards – and here it enchants the drunken Stephano and Trinculo (and Caliban) into following. (Ariel is still, it will shortly be confirmed, invisible.) They are so drunk, and so stupid, that they’ve become like animals, inhuman, lacking reason: they’re compared first to unbacked colts, unbroken horses, starting, pricking up their ears and opening their eyes wide, following the music as if it were a (delicious?) scent. Less dignified (at least potentially) than horses, they were like calves, docile, obedient (Ariel describes their own music as being like lowing, mooing) – as Ariel led them (like Puck: over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough briar) through a comprehensive selection of prickly bushes: briars, brambles, covered with thorns like teeth, or perhaps like the lacerating edge of a toothed saw; sharp furzes, pricking gorse (these are different names for the same thing) – and just thorn bushes in general – which entered their frail shins. A neat touch: they are not calves, or horses, but humans, with frail shins– and one thinks of ankles caught by an unseen briar cable, and the way in which a wound on the shin bleeds and stings, the skin being so thin there. At last I left them– of course you did, Ariel, when they were lacerated and bleeding and exhausted – in a nasty scummy pond, the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, covered with slime. (Comedy staple: falling into a pond and then rising up slowly out of it, soaking wet with slime – or indeed duckweed – on the head.) This pond is deep, Ariel confirms, almost as an afterthought (they’re dancing up to their chins) – and, in a final flourish, the foul lake smells so terrible that it o’erstunk, out-stinks, their feet. (When Trinculo first encountered Caliban, he spent considerable time describing how badly he smelt, like very old dried fish. Now all three of them stink.) Two things: one is that the vividness of Ariel’s description here is qualitatively different to Iris and Ceres’s evocation of landscape; it’s not visual, primarily, but rather aural, olfactory, tactile, a beating drum, colts, calves, raucous music, a chase through thickets of thorny bushes, and ending up more or less submerged in a stinking bog. And the location of that bog is beyond Prospero’s cell. Ferdinand and Miranda are at the cell already. The characters, and the strands of the plot, are beginning to converge. And Prospero is pleased: well done, my bird! Ariel can fly, as we know – but it’s a tender, if perhaps belittling, epithet.