A ship meets a storm at sea. The king of Naples and his party are aboard. The sails split and the men call to each other on deck.
The breaking up is visible from the island. Miranda runs to her father. She knows this is a storm he raised.
She asks him to stop it. There are people on that ship, she says. Nobody has been hurt, Prospero answers.
The Story He Kept for Twelve Years
He sits her down and takes off his cloak. Today there is something you must know, he says. It is a thing he has not said in twelve years.
He was Duke of Milan. His mind was on his books rather than on governing. So he left the work to his brother and stayed in his study.
His brother did that work a long while, and then decided to have the place itself. He joined with the king of Naples and pushed his brother out. Prospero and a three-year-old child were put aboard a boat at night. It was rotten, with no sail and no oar.
The boat was meant to kill them and the two of them lived. An old counsellor had secretly put water and clothes and his books aboard. Those books made the twelve years on this island. One man who is never named makes this whole play possible.
Miranda is hearing this for the first time. She answers.
“More to know Did never meddle with my thoughts.” (Act 1, Scene 2)
She stayed twelve years beside him without asking. In this play the one who opens the story is always her father. He decides when it is told as well.
The Day It Had to Be
Prospero says why it is today that he speaks. The men on that ship are the men who cast him out. His brother and the king of Naples are aboard together.
That the wind brought them past this island is chance. The chance will not come again. Twelve years of preparing are all spent inside this one day.
He puts his daughter to sleep and calls Ariel. A spirit of the island, whom he released from a tree. In payment the spirit has done his work ever since.
Ariel reports what he did with the storm. He made them leap from the ship, and set them about the island in separate groups. Nobody is hurt and not a garment is wet. The ship is not broken either, hidden safe in a harbour.
So the storm was not real. It was real only to the people in it. The men who jumped in terror now believe each other dead.
A Spirit Asking About Freedom
Ariel carefully raises one thing. When will the promised freedom come. Prospero’s face hardens.
He recounts what Ariel’s condition had been. Shut in a tree and groaning there twelve years, until he opened it. Then he says a few days more. The man who promised freedom keeps putting that freedom off.
The price between helper and helped divides here. To Prospero it is a debt that must be paid back. To Ariel it is a day still to be waited for. That story comes back in chapter 62.
The First Person She Has Seen
Ariel leads the son of the king of Naples inland. Ferdinand, believing his father drowned, is sitting alone. Following the music, he walks until he meets Miranda.
Miranda remembers seeing no one but her father. She asks whether he is a man or a spirit. The two of them give each other their hearts on the spot.
Prospero watches it. Inside, he thinks that what he wanted has happened. Outwardly he objects. What is won too lightly is held lightly, he says.
He sets Ferdinand to carrying logs. A king’s son moves timber all day. Miranda tries to help in secret and her father watches from a distance. Not one thing that happens on this island is unplanned by him.
A Day Already Arranged
In this chapter Prospero settles everything. He raises the storm, divides the men, and even arranges his daughter’s love. A man with power arranging other people’s day on stage is the shape of this play.
That is what makes it different from the five parts before. Hamlet put it off while he made sure, and Othello was caught in a scene someone else staged. Lear could not take back the kingdom he divided. This play has a man holding the board from the first minute.
So the question stands on the other side. The earlier plays asked what a person with no power can do. This one asks what a person with all of it does.
Today, A Man Who Prepared
Twelve years is a long time. In all of it Prospero did not tell his daughter his story. He tells it today because today is where the preparing ends.
People who are preparing keep their words until the preparing is done. And the person beside them lives those years without knowing why. It is not that Miranda did not ask. There was no place for her to ask.
This chapter is the first day after the preparing. The men are already on the island, and all the power is in his hands. What is left is only what he does with it.
In the next chapter the one who lived on this island first appears. He says the island was his. And there is a place in it where Prospero has no answer.