PROSPERO [Traces a circle.] Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight-mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew… (5.1.33-40)
It is very difficult to know where to break this speech, because it is an astonishing tumble of vivid, strange, fleeting pictures. First: the stage direction is editorial, but it’s clear that later in the scene there is a circle, and this seems the logical place for it to be drawn, an expected part of magical rituals, seen (for example) on the title page of the 1620 quarto of Doctor Faustus (which might not impossibly have been influenced by the staging of The Tempest). Prospero is doing magic. His spell—calling on spirits, here named as elves—takes the form of vividly imagined, fleeting vignettes of a natural world made strange in even its familiar details. As is well known, the speech is based upon the incantation of Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is nature magic, but it is also intensely literary, and dangerous by association: Medea is a witch. Akin to the poetry of the masque, and Prospero’s earlier, heart-breaking evocation of the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces even in the moment of their vanishing, it asks the audience to imagine. It begins with a kind of warm-up, with straightforward hills and brooks, standing lakes and groves—although even their rapid listing asks a certain mobility of the audience, swift flight (like the masque) from one imagined location to another. And then, gorgeous, ye (elves, spirits), unnamed, unspecified, unbodied, who yet run and dance on the sands (these yellow sands, evoked in song by Ariel) with printless foot, leaving no trace, so light, so incorporeal, chasing the waves as they ebb and running ahead of them as they flow back. (Ripples, dapple, dazzle; the imperceptible, inexorable tide.) You demi-puppets– tiny elves (a swerve to Midsummer Night’s Dream territory; tiny, mischievous fairies, sprites) who make fairy rings in the grass, poisonous to sheep. (Sour is brilliant here, a sudden swerve from sight to taste; more to imagine.) And the magic of mushrooms (not magic mushrooms as such, but, well) which spring up overnight, cued by the curfew bell. Prospero enchants the audience, through the attentiveness this speech demands of us, the quick, invested, cognitively intense work of imagination. But so far, here, there have been these four apostrophes, to ye, and ye, and you, and you, visually distinct, immersive, evanescent, rich and strange – but no main verb. We wait. What kind of magic is this? What spell will Prospero cast now?
