ŷ������

Crashing onto a mysterious island where things seem amiss and visions and isolation might just be orchestrated by a magical being to use the shipwrecked crew as pawns in his epic game of power. No this isn’t 1600s this is Shakespeare’s The Tempest and it is a maelstrom of monsters and men full of magic, manipulation, and, ultimately, forgiveness. Written around 1610 and considered to be the final play the Bard wrote alone, The Tempest is a tale of revenge as well as romance, a story of a deposed Duke who has become a hermetic island sorcerer commanding spirits and storms to seek justice like a game of chess where he is always one step ahead with even the flash-of-lightning romance between his daughter, Miranda, and the King’s son, Ferdinand, all part of Prospero’s plan. Witty and wildly fun with plenty of laughs and a repertoire of quotable lines that have become book titles and common sayings, Shakespeare’s line ��all the world’s a stage�� becomes true on the island itself as much of the play reads like a metaphor of artistic creation and narrative crafting itself with Prospero at the helm of his own story.

��What's past is prologue.��

Okay, confession time: I’ve only recently come to approach Shakespeare outside of a classroom and now I finally get what the fuss is all about. I feel like I just never had the capacity to really appreciate him when, say, reading Romeo and Juliet at age 14 but now I can revisit that play and realize its actually pretty funny and delightfully unhinged. I mean, I also recently enjoyed The Winter’s Tale as a pre-read for Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful modern retelling, The Gap of Time, and so I figured I should read this so I can launch into Margaret Atwood’s retelling of it in Hag-Seed. I’m glad I did because this play is fascinating and, well, kind of bonkers. I love the magical island setting and perhaps it could be joked that The Tempest walked so LOST could run (itself into the ground–I mean, I loved that show but let’s be real). Though for as cool and mysterious as the Man in Black was, Prospero is even more intensely interesting as he manipulates the people, dodges assassinations and tries to write his own sense of justice (though like, not a good guy for the record and is basically a slave owner of magical beings…not awesome) Also he’s been played by some really great folks:

Ralph Fiennes

Christopher Plummer

Patrick Stewart

A lot has been written on this and I’m no Shakespeare scholar by a million miles, but I did enjoy reading up about this one over the past few days. I was particularly charmed by the ways the play itself seems to read like a commentary on…well, writing a play. Prospero manipulates the tempest as well as The Tempest and all the people inside it towards achieving his own aims and even when they think they are in control of their own destinies, they are just following the path he laid out for them. Miranda, who is a gem by the way, feels her love for Ferdinand is an act of rebellion, yet Prospero has carefully rigged it so his cruelty towards Ferdinand and his claims of not wanting Miranda to see him will only push them together( I’ve always wondered if it were not for the high-stakes blood-feud drama of Romeo and Juliet’s taboo pairing would they have been all that intensely interested in each other after a day?). Which is also what Vonnegut is up to in Cat’s Cradle with Bokononism being outlawed to ensure people will want to believe in it. There is the chef’s kiss moment here too when Miranda and the Ferdster are playing chess together—an apt game of careful plotting and manipulating the pawns for the aim of king slaying not unlike the going on of this story—and Miranda playfully accuses him of cheating. Its a direct nod to the “cheating�� done by Antonio to take power.

But back to the idea of the play as playwriting, something that becomes extra meta with Prospero’s play-within-the-play, we have Prospero come across as the all-knowing bard of the tale able to know what other characters are doing due to the forced-labor of the invisible Ariel and always steering the narrative towards the conclusion he seeks. The story is rife with ideas on using illusion, imagination and constructed narrative to produce a desired effect in the “audience�� (the shipwrecked crew). There have been arguments made that Prospero is representative of Shakespeare himself, something Samuel Taylor Coleridge puts forth in an 1836 writing that Prospero is ��the very Shakespeare himself, as it were.�� Adding to this theory is the conclusion with Prospero giving up magic and quitting the island—��As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free’—being a direct message from Shakespeare himself to his audience. As Emma Smith write in This Is Shakespeare, ��for readers eager for biographical interpretations, the idea that Prospero articulates Shakespeare’s own farewell to his art has been irresistible,�� though there are many others who would assert that this is exactly that: an overeagerness leading to biographical fallacy. Plus, adds Smith, ��ideas of Shakespeare’s decisive retirement from the stage may have been exaggerated�� and in 1613 Shakespeare purchased property next to the theater in Blackfriars which is incongruous with the romanticized idea that he was retiring away from the city. Or maybe this is just Shakespeare pre-empting Zeno’s ��last cigarette!�� He wanted to, he just didn’t.

��Hell is empty and all the devils are here.��

Whatever your interpretation may be, this is a fun play with some great lines. One will find the origin of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World title, for instance with ��How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!�� or even Into Thin Air from Jon Krakauer. Though I found the famous to be particularly intriguing as a lasting reference source. First, we have the epitaph on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tombstone taken from the second stanza:

�� Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.��

Which alludes to his death at sea on a boat he had named Ariel. But I discovered just today that the term ‘sea change�� has its origin here in The Tempest, which sort of blew my mind a bit because it is also the title of the very sad I listened to far too much in high school when I had my heart broken by a girl who bears the same name as Shakespeare’s invisible spirit. It was quite the to my emotions at the time long after I should have realized it was a and this youthful love was , but at the I and can poke fun at myself in the nostalgia of youth. But damn, Shakespeare, you set me up for that one.

All jokes and Beck songs aside, The Tempest is pretty fascinating late play from Shakespeare and is a great early example of the now classic trope of (space)ship crashes on a mysterious island (planet) and some magical asshole is going to manipulate you to escape. Now I can’t wait to read Atwood’s version.

4.5/5

��Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.��