Here enters ARIEL before; then ALONSO with a frantic gesture, attended by GONZALO; SEBASTIAN and ANTONIO in like manner, attended by ADRIAN and FRANCISCO. They all enter the circle which Prospero had made and there stand charmed, which Prospero observing, speaks:

PROSPERO     A solemn air and the best comforter

To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains

(Now useless) boiled within thy skull. There stand,

For you are spell-stopped.—

Holy Gonzalo, honourable man,

Mine eyes, e’en sociable to the show of thine,

Fall fellowly drops. (5.1.57SD-64)

It’s quite a big circle, then, especially if Adrian and Francisco’s parts have survived uncut: six men, although the suggestion in the stage direction seems to be that once they are in the circle, they stop moving, and there stand charmed. (Drawn with chalk? Or with coloured sand, perhaps? Or made by a gesture with the staff and remaining invisible? If the stage is covered with rushes—opinions vary—then it’s hard to think what could be done here.) Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian are frantic, maddened – flailing around? moving erratically? shaking? Each needs an attendant, and there’s a sense here of the careful order needed to get this little procession, led by Ariel, before, through what is presumably one of the narrower side entrances at the rear of the stage. The music has continued, a solemn air: low brass, probably, and shawms, possibly hautboys; not impossibly strings at the Blackfriars, but unlikely to have been at the Globe (too quiet). The music makes the enchantment and covers the entrance, but it is also healing: the best comforter to an unsettled fancy, a mind diseased (and in particular an imagination out of control; they have been seeing things). (Like Lear, and Pericles, woken from their madness by music.) There is a particular vividness in Prospero’s evocation of thy brains boiled within thy skull; we retain similar idioms, but with less colour (over-heated in an emotional sense is still current, and it was becoming so in the early seventeenth century), but the main sense here is probably alchemical. (No one then knew that the fumes of mercury cause madness, obviously….) They are spell-stopped, enchanted; probably, here, frozen. But Gonzalo weeps still, moved by the distress of his companions—and this moves Prospero too. This solitary, isolated man, who has such difficulty with emotion, begins to weep too; his eyes become sociable, his tears are fellowly. He has been father and master, teacher and scholar and magus for such a long time; here he remembers the possibility of friendship, of a sympathetic relationship between equals.