Miranda is the character who says “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” in Shakespeare’s *The Tempest*.
She speaks the line in Act 5, Scene 1, when her father Prospero reveals the shipwrecked visitors and she sees the wider human world for the first time. Miranda has spent most of her life isolated on an island, so the newcomers fill her with wonder and hope.
Her innocence also creates the line’s dramatic irony. The audience knows that many of the visitors are flawed, ambitious, or guilty of betrayal, while Miranda sees them as astonishingly new and admirable. The phrase therefore expresses genuine amazement but also invites questions about naivety, colonial encounter, and whether a supposedly “brave new world” deserves her admiration.
Miranda is Prospero’s daughter and falls in love with Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. Their relationship helps reconcile the older generation after Prospero abandons revenge. The quotation later inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel *Brave New World*. It is sometimes misattributed to Prospero because he controls the island, but Miranda is the speaker.