Miranda (Shakespeare)
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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)
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)
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