Miranda (Shakespeare)

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. 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:

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)

In these lines—which many editors have transferred to Prospero—she sheds her usual passive role, and scolds Caliban with her tongue. As one can see, Miranda is usually a naïve, sheltered girl. She has great intelligence, but seldom transcends her passive role.