Miranda (The Tempest)

This article is about the character from the Shakespearean play The Tempest. For other uses, see Miranda (disambiguation).

Miranda and the Tempest (1916) by John William Waterhouse

In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Miranda is the beautiful daughter of the old Duke Prospero.

Cast away with her father since she was three years old, she has lived an extremely sheltered existence. Though she has received a well-rounded education from her father, she is desperately lacking in real world experience. The fifteen year old does not choose her own husband; instead, Prospero sends Ariel, his spirit servant, to fetch Ferdinand while Miranda is asleep, and arranges things so that the two will come to love one another. Her sexual experience is limited to fighting off the lustful advances of her father's slave, Caliban, who tried to rape her. From her limited knowledge of the world, she assumes that all men are good:

With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had no doubt some noble creature in her,
Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. (I.ii.6–9)

Another aspect of her is her tendency to get emotionally attached. Even as she watches the massive storm caused by her father she becomes emotionally entwined with the fates of the mariners, Miranda is very prone to emotions:

O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer! (I.ii.5–6)

Miranda with Prospero by William Maw Egley

However, even though she is thought typically as a naïve girl, she also displays moments of great strength. For example in these lines—which many editors have transferred to Prospero—she sheds her usual passive role, scolding Caliban:

When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known ... who hadst dissevered more than a prison (I.ii.354–359)

Miranda also challenges her father when she begs for the life of those on the ship, telling him: "Had I been any great god of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere the good ship so have swallowed, and the fraughting souls within her!"