Yes, faith, and all his lords, the Duke of Milan
And his brave son being twain.(The Tempest, I.2.439)
The sky was clear, the breeze fair, the sea calm as a clock: King Alonzo's ship had set its course for Naples and home. It should be possible, now, to forget that island where the party had been so mazed and befuddled by masques, sleights and deceits. Indeed those dreamlike adventures already seemed far distant. Gonzalo sniffed the salt air, peered rheumily at the wheeling seabirds, and wondered why he had all along felt a sense of unfinished matters; of something still taking its course.
And now the King's foolish, cowardly brother was gone. Fallen quietly overboard, perhaps, in a simple lubberly accident. Or perhaps not. In the old days, Gonzalo had helped unravel small intrigues at the court of the old Duke (now the restored Duke), while missing Antonio's larger treason until too late. If his wits were not too tattered with age, it would be good to pluck out the truth of Sebastian's passing and so make amends of a sort.
Exiled on his wondrous island, Duke Prospero had prepared a revenge twelve years old, twelve years cold. That strangely convenient tempest had delivered his enemies--Antonio the usurper, Alonzo the co-conspirator--into the hollow of his hand. The old scholar had gloated over them as they swayed helplessly before him, bereft of sense by what Gonzalo suspected had been potent drugs. And then ... grudging words of forgiveness. An end to strife. Homeward bound. Was Prospero's heart really so melted by the sight of young Prince Ferdinand burning hot for his daughter?
A shadowed figure moved between him and the sun. "Mumbling your prayers, old windbag? Or devising another ideal commonwealth?"
Gonzalo blinked. Antonio might no longer be Duke of Milan, but he still wielded a ducal arrogance that gave weight and savage edge to the man's habitual pose of mockery. But there had been a time when Antonio's mockery failed. "We all become windbags in the last harbour of life," Gonzalo said comfortably. "The secret of being a windbag is to tell everything; and so, to have no secrets. This provokes telling in others."
"Winged words, as ever; winged like a fat capon. And what would you wish to be told?"
"I have studied Prospero's book--" the aged councillor began, and was briefly taken by a sudden convulsion of Antonio's thin features.
"I have studied it too." The words were edged with ice.
Prospero grandiloquently spoke of having destroyed his books of scholarship and grammarie (if indeed these were different things), but had brought aboard an account of words and doings during those few wracked hours upon his island--written down, he hinted, by those unseen servitors in whom Gonzalo could not quite believe. Alas, Prospero's scribe was sadly accurate, reproducing each and every shaft of mockery directed against Gonzalo by Antonio and his now-vanished crony Sebastian. The strange book also recorded when that mockery had fallen silent.
Even windbags can be blunt, Gonzalo told himself. "I wondered that, for so long at the last, you kept silence. The tongue of Antonio is a weapon where other weapons fail; yet as Prospero strutted in his hour of triumph, you hurled not a single jest at him. One commonplace barb for the beast-man and his stink of fish, but no more."
Antonio looked at him indulgently, like a duelling-master who acknowledges a pupil's feeble sally. "Perhaps I was struck dumb by brother Prospero's generosity. You recall the words with which he prefaced his so gracious forgiveness: 'For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother, Would even infect my mouth...' What a gift he has for pretty compliments."
Gonzalo, with sudden certainty, said: "That is an easy story, to tell children and old windbags. Behind it I feel there is a hard story."
)
What was the real crime committed in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and by whom? Unsatisfied with the happy ending, Gonzalo investigates.... There's a subtle clue in the epigraph quotation, which genuinely comes from Shakespeare's play.
