A street by any other name: Miranda and Seyton
Ilona
Miranda: “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t.”
The above words are the last lines Miranda speaks in the play, and are probably the best known quote from it.
Miranda is the only female character to actually appear on stage in this play.
A na¨ıve teenager, she has lived on an island with her father, Prospero, for 12 years, arriving there when she was just 3 years old.
Her father is a powerful sorcerer who was also the duke of Milan until his brother Antonio usurped him. Propsero and Miranda escaped from Milan in a boat and sought shelter on the remote island.
There Miranda grew up while her father spent his time refining his magic and planning his revenge. She has never seen another woman and has no idea of her own beauty.
It’s no secret Stratford’s street names all relate to the words of Shakespeare, a tradition dating back to 1878 when the then chairman of the Taranaki Waste Lands Board, Charles Whitcombe, gave instructions that all future streets in the town should have names connected to the works of William Shakespeare. In this regular column, editor
Hanne talks about the Shakespearean characters and references between Stratford’s street names. This week she explores the literary references behind the names of Miranda and Seyton.
When a storm causes a ship nearby to struggle, Miranda, knowing it is her father’s magic that conjured the storm, begs him to show mercy on those on board and not let them drown.
When the people on board the ship reach the island, Miranda meets Ferdinand, the prince of Naples.
Ferdinand is the only man, other than her father and his slave Caliban, that she has ever seen, and she promptly and passionately falls in love.
Prospero deliberately forbids them to marry, knowing this will force Ferdinand to fight harder for Miranda.
Miranda again stands up to her father and swears she will become the prince’s servant if she can’t marry him.
After much chaos, caused chiefly by Prospero, Caliban and the island sprite Ariel, Miranda does marry Ferdinand.
Her final lines are spoken when she, looking up from a game of chess with her new husband, realises there are more people in the world than just her father, Caliban and Ferdinand.
Seyton: “The queen, my lord, is dead.”
Seyton speaking to Macbeth Macbeth, Act V, scene v in
Of the total of five lines Seyton speaks in the play, these are the most important ones.
In telling Macbeth of Lady Macbeth’s death (which took place off stage), he prompts Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in which the grieving Macbeth says the lines “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow”.
Since the play was published in 1606, those lines have been referenced in numerous books, plays, television shows, films and musicals since.
(The line, plus the one after it, features in the song Take a Break in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton for example.)
While he is described as being a servant of Macbeth, his role seems to sit somewhere between that of butler and military officer — he is commanded by his master to bring him his armour, and at another point to “Send out more horses . . . Hang those that talk of fear”. (Act V, sc iii)
Given Shakespeare’s constant use of a variety of heaven and hell imagery to remind the audience of the
ever-present roles of God and Satan, and the consequence of committing crimes, in this play, it is probably no coincidence Seyton’s name rhymes with Satan.
To hear Macbeth call for Seyton, the audience might have perhaps expected the devil himself to come onto stage when it was first performed.
Shakespeare was known to like puns, so it not unlikely he invented the name for his character to create exactly that imagery, especially as the name Seyton doesn’t appear to have existed before Shakespeare used it as a character’s name.