ALONSO                                 If thou be’st Prospero,

Give us particulars of thy preservation,

How thou has met us here, whom three hours since

Were wrecked upon this shore, where I have lost

(How sharp the point of this remembrance is!)

My dear son Ferdinand.

PROSPERO                                         I am woe for’t, sir.

ALONSO         Irreparable is the loss, and patience

Says it is past her cure.

PROSPERO                                         I rather think

You have not sought her help, of whose soft grace

For the like loss I have her sovereign aid

And rest myself content.

ALONSO                                             You the like loss?

PROSPERO     As great to me as late; and supportable

To make the dear loss have I means much weaker

Than you may call to comfort you, for I

Have lost my daughter. (5.1.134-148)

 

One way in which the strangeness of this scene rings true, in its depiction of these unlooked for encounters and resolutions, is its rapid switching from point to point, as the characters say what seems to be the first thing that pops into their heads, and ask their most pressing questions. No comment, then, from Antonio, or from the King to Antonio, but rather what begins as a wondering request for information from the King: how on earth did you survive? Give us the details. And how is it that you’re here, right here? It’s only three hours since we were wrecked upon this shore(only three hours; a reminder for the audience too, although in 1611 they wouldn’t, presumably, have made a surreptitious time-check at that moment)—and then his grief, perhaps momentarily forgotten, returns and overcomes him: how sharp the point of this remembrance is! I have lost my dear son Ferdinand. It’s to this that Prospero responds, prickly, sensitive, emotionally maladroit Prospero: I’m so sorry to hear that. (Like he doesn’t know; maybe he can respond sympathetically because he’s still in control; he knows that Ferdinand’s alive and exactly where he is.) There’s no way I can recover from it, says Alonso, as long as I live: patience says it is past her cure; this is a grief that time cannot heal. (Patience, conventionally imagined as a woman, like the patience on a monument, smiling at the grief of Cesario’s imagined sister in Twelfth Night; in Henry VIII, Shakespeare and Fletcher give the name to Katherine of Aragon’s waiting gentlewoman. And Winter’s Tale, the self-inflicted suffering of Leontes, the torment of Hermione, sixteen years, not twelve, let alone three hours, resonates here.) Prospero, slightly insensitive (reverting to type): you haven’t tried hard enough, then; I’ve had to learn patience in my loss, and I’ve now come to terms with it. The like loss, he says, that is, Prospero tells the King that he too has lost a child; Alonso can’t believe it. You the like loss? Yes, very recent and very terrible (as great to me as late) and (terrible, opaque syntax) either, I’ve got fewer comforts available to me to aid me in enduring my loss than you have (because he knows that the King has another child, Claribel), or, perhaps, the loss is dear, precious, bittersweet, ultimately positive, because it is the loss of Miranda to Ferdinand in marriage. I have lost my daughter, Prospero says, and yet I am content. And perhaps we wonder where Ferdinand and Miranda are now, and how long it will be until they reappear; how much longer Prospero will allow Alonso the King to suffer this anguish of presumed bereavement.