PROSPERO                                         Be collected;

No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart

There’s no harm done.

MIRANDA                                          O woe the day.

PROSPERO                                                                 No harm! (1.2.13-15)

Just a little fragment, this, Prospero’s first words in the play. The stichomythia, the line sharing, is important: yes, Prospero’s interrupting Miranda’s anguished response to the spectacle of the storm and the shipwreck and he could deliver Be collected, calm down, compose yourself, as a much more impatient or dismissively authoritative ‘pull yourself together’. But it seems gentler than that. Amazement is wonder but also confusion and distress, quite literally being in a maze (and wonder, wondering, being prone to amazement: these are all characteristic of Miranda, whose name – Shakespeare’s own invention – means wondrous, she who is to be wondered at). She is tender-hearted, full of pity: her response to the shipwreck has been, as some editors point out, a mixture of pity and fearful wonder, a kind of Aristotelian catharsis – and the place of Aristotle’s theories in this play is interesting, not least in this scene of exposition. But more of that later on. Miranda is so upset – o woe the day – lamenting like a child who’s worked herself up (flashback to the Nurse and the Capulets when they think that Juliet’s dead…) – and Prospero calms and consoles her like a child, repeating himself: no harm done… no harm. Shhhhh, shhhhh, it’s alright really.