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What gives immediacy to the immediate?
The Tempest, the last of his plays that Shakespeare wrote entirely alone, was the only one that respected the classical demand for unity of time: the time of the story unfolded in the drama is the same as the passage of time in the action on stage. Thus, scenes from the remote past could not be enacted but had to be recounted as a present telling in order to inform the audience of what had led to the current moment.
To accomplish this, Shakespeare had Prospero tell Miranda the history of their situation, simultaneously offering the explanation to the theater audience. This speech, starting with “My brother and thy uncle” (I.ii. 66) runs on for forty lines, ending “Dost thou hear?” (I. ii. 106). Frye (1986) described a common reaction to the speech, calling this recounting of the somber tale of treachery “no really convincing general source” (p. 72). Indeed, Kermode (2000) was so strongly struck by Shakespeare's uncommon clumsiness in this speech that he conducted a linguistic analysis of it, trying to understand its “taut, compressed, anxious” quality, its “dissipated” and “relatively unimpressive” effect, its being “unnecessarily awkward” (p. 288).
What possible significance might there be in an exposition so awkward and unengaging near the start of so famously poetical a work? Offering his own answer, Kermode made a point fully as telling for us. He wrote that: