If thou be’st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since Were wreck’d upon this shore; where I have lost–
How sharp the point of this remembrance is!–
My dear son Ferdinand.
And then, shortly after:
ALONSO
What is this maid with whom thou wast at play? Your eld’st acquaintance cannot be three hours:
Is she the goddess that hath sever’d us,
And brought us thus together?
Maybe that technically counts as one because it’s Alonso both times. Earlier, though, Miranda had said this:
MIRANDA
Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard: I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoin’d to pile!
Pray, set it down and rest you: when this burns,
‘Twill weep for having wearied you. My father
Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself; He’s safe for these three hours.
She’s clearly not talking about the same window of time there. Not only does it happen earlier in the play (when Alonso’s three hours won’t have passed yet), but she’s talking about her father being out of their hair for at least the next three hours.
Just one of those interesting things you spot from time to time. If Romeo and Juliet is “two hours’ traffic of the stage,” and a full text Hamlet is four hours, how long would The Tempest have been?
Went over to talk to a coworker today who is getting married at the end of the month. Another coworker was also there.
“How was your weekend?” asked coworker #2 of engaged coworker, whose fiance travels.
“Good,” she replied, “Scott’s home. He told me he wants to read The Tempest.”
My arms shot into the air, fists raised, like I’d just scored the winning goal. “Woo!” I exclaim, “Tempest!” I tend to do that. “Is there a particular reason, or is that entirely random?”
She informs me that he “heard there’s a boat in it.” I’m ok with that. The boat may only be in one scene, but it’s a good one. 🙂
Original coworker then comments something to the effect of, “I could only ever read Shakespeare when it was assigned to me. If I just pick it up and start reading I get totally lost.”
“You’ll need to read my next book,” I tell her. “It comes from this very situation that’s happened to me so many times, where grownups tell me that they’ve got nothing against Shakespeare, it’s just that they feel like if they walked into trying to read it or see it they’d be completely lost because they have no idea what’s going on.”
Coworker nods, “Well, exactly.”
“So what I’m doing is working on a series of small guides, just a few dozen pages, that speak directly to this situation. They describe character, plot, famous quotations, important concepts and ideas to watch out for, that sort of thing. Not in a help-you-study-for-your-English-exam kind of way, but just enough so that you can go to a performance of The Tempest and actually feel like you’re going to understand what the heck is going on, and maybe even enjoy it.”
Engaged coworker tells me that maybe her soon-to-be-husband should read it. Other coworker tells me that it’s an idea that “sounds awesome.”
I should have asked for their credit card numbers. 🙂 Always Be Closing!
It’s a little weird running a blog like this one for as long as I have. You eventually get to a point where you realize that you’ve been documenting your own life, and you come back to your own notes as reference points.
What many new readers may not realize is that this blog existed in a different form, long since offline, before even June 2005 when Shakespeare Geek was born.
I found this post in my offline archives, from June 20, 2005:
I want my kids to learn Shakespeare, just like I want them to learn about computers. But at 3years old, I have to pick and choose what Katherine is exposed to. So if I’m going to pick the first play for her to learn, which should it be?
The tragedies are all right out because she doesn’t get the concept of people dying yet.
I think The Tempest is perfect. One of the main characters after all is Miranda, a naive little girl. Sure, maybe she’s a teenager in most interpretations of the play (and, I believe, according to Prospero’s math), but I don’t think that matters in fairy tale rules. All the princesses always end up getting married to a prince and living happily ever after in those. And that basically happens here, too.
So, it must have been after that :). But check it out, from January 8, 2006! A story about finding some Shakespeare books at a dollar store.
“Before leaving I came up with Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear (!), and The Tempest. I’m particularly pleased by those last two, because I am not nearly as familiar with the plot points of King Lear as I would like (who is?), and I have in the past attempted to tell The Tempest to my daughter as a bedtime story, and having a mini freeform script of the play in a pocket reference like this will possibly help me succeed in that attempt.”
In June I was thinking about it, and by January I’d done it. My plan was in full swing, apparently, by August 2006 when we went to see Taming of the Shrew with some friends in Boston. The poor woman made the mistake of telling me that Shrew was better than Hamlet, because people like comedies, not dark depressing stuff. No, wait – it gets worse:
“Know what else I hate?” this woman continues, perhaps not realizing or caring how much she has fallen in my eyes. “The Tempest.”
“I’ve read The Tempest to my 3yr old as a bedtime fairy tale,” I tell her.
This post has almost nothing to do with Shakespeare, but I think it’s an important and related topic that I don’t want to go by without a mention.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
-John Keats, Ode To A Grecian Urn
The unexamined life is not worth living.
-Socrates
When I say that the mission statement of this and my other sites is to prove that “Shakespeare makes life better,” it is these thoughts that inspired it.
But there are many ways to seek truth and to examine our lives, and our opportunities to do so grew substantially this week with the return of COSMOS, Carl Sagan’s legendary trip through the universe, now hosted by his student Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Quite honestly I don’t care if you watched it. I’m almost 45 years old, I know what I know, for the most part I’ve made what marks I’m going to make on the world, and any new knowledge is going to be interesting to me, but I don’t expect to reach the stars with it.
Neil Degrasse Tyson puts it all in perspective.
What I care about is whether the kids watch it, because they are the ones who will change the world (sounds exactly like the reason I teach Shakespeare to my kids :)). Tyson himself was inspired by Sagan originally, and we can only hope that a whole new generation of future astrophysicists and Nobel Prize winners is inspired by Tyson.
If you’ve got kids, did you sit down to watch the show with them? It is available in any number of online formats, so “I missed it Sunday night” will not work. It was on at 9pm, after my kids’ bedtime, but I recorded it and we watched it last night. The year 1599 came up, and I did pause to comment on what Shakespeare was doing that year. 🙂
At one point I explained to my kids, “Listen to how this man talks. When we know something he states it like a fact. When we don’t, he says we don’t. He says things like ‘It sounds strange but the observable evidence thus far leads us to believe it must be true.’ That’s how science should be. Question everything.” Tyson showed up once on the Daily Show to tell Jon Stewart that the globe in his opening credits was spinning in the wrong direction. He also told the story for years about meeting Titanic director James Cameron and asking him why, despite all the time and money they spent getting all the facts and details exactly right, that they got the stars in the sky wrong. Later, in the re-release of the Titanic DVD, the stars were fixed. Mr. Tyson has no interest in letting anyone get away with incorrect science.
Not for you? Then maybe ask your kids whether their science teacher in school brought it up. If not, maybe ask the science teacher why not. I know that the wireless network in my daughter’s middle school is criminally poor, so they cannot get very much online video, but I plan to download it and bring them each episode on a flash drive if I have to.
Sorry for the interruption, but I simply had to use my soapbox for this very important time in education. The search for knowledge, truth and beauty comes in many forms, not just Shakespeare.
Surely you’ve heard the misquote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” It’s actually “on”. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” says Prospero near the end of The Tempest, “And our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”
If Google is to be believed, the ratio is about 5 to 1 (200k or so misquotes to about a million instances of the actual quote).
I got to thinking, is this just a typo? What makes people think it’s one over the other? Who reads it as “on” and thinks, “No, that’s not right, it should be of?” Does it mean the same thing and this is just a minor nit?
We are such stuff as dreams are made of.
Dreams, like the magical spirits Prospero conjures forth, are just little bits of nothingness. They don’t exist. They are an illusion. If we are the stuff that dreams are made of, then our lives too are little more than illusion that will one day end.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Dreams follow reality. You dream because you are conscious of what you experience. If we are the stuff that dreams are made on, then we are the source of limitless creative possibility.
