A couple weeks ago on Twitter I had an interesting conversation about The Tempest and I’ve been meaning to post about it. A reader directed me to the poem Fuck / Shakespeare and I was left head scratching a bit at the ending:
Play ends / Cali still enslaved / Bruh / that shit fucked
My first thought was, “Is that really how it ends? That’s not how I remember it. Caliban gets the island. Prospero leaves. Sounds like freedom to me.”
Then I went back and looked at the text.
PROSPERO
He is as disproportion'd in his manners
As in his shape. Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions; as you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.
CALIBAN
Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!
PROSPERO
Go to; away!
There is no moment of understanding between them. No “sorry for enslaving you, here, I’ll make it up to you by leaving and letting you have the island like you always wanted” exchange. Prospero’s last words to Caliban are, in fact, still those of master to slave.
I think my misunderstanding of the ending comes from two places. First, I’m visually thinking of Helen Mirren’s portrayal in Julie Taymor’s film version. If I recall that correctly, there is a clear moment (albeit in silence, since Shakespeare gave no words) that fills the need for what I wrote above.
The other is that I’ve just never really thought of The Tempest, my answer to “Which one is your favorite play?” in terms of slavery and racism and colonization. I love it as a story of fathers and children and forgiveness. That just goes to show just how good it is, that it can be both. You can read it as a happy ending fairy tale to your children about wizards and monsters and long lost princesses returning to their kingdoms. Or you can read it as a four hundred year old depiction of the darkest aspects of human behavior still on display to this day.
It’s given me a lot to think about. I’ve always known about those themes in the play, I’ve just never really focused on them, preferring instead to think of it as a positive book end to Shakespeare’s writing. Which is a bit ironic because in my modern reading I often chide books that wrap things up too nicely, and prefer those that give me something to think about and work on. If Caliban is forever enslaved because of what Prospero did, then how can we ever break the cycle?
Which ending do you prefer? Is Caliban free now to be king of the island? Or is he forever enslaved by what Prospero did to him, long after Prospero is gone?
This past summer I saw a near lifelong dream fulfilled when I went to Stratford and visited Shakespeare’s birthplace. I saw the church, I saw the tomb, I saw all the houses. I stood where Shakespeare stood.
Here we are a year later and most of those properties are closed because of the pandemic. When you’re a charity that generates 98% of its own income thanks to 850,000 visitors a year and the universe tells you “Guess what! No more visitors!” hard times are ahead for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT). People I met last year may no longer be employed soon.
The SBT has stated that they plan to reopen the Birthplace itself this summer, but the other properties – New Place, Anne’s Cottage, Hall’s Croft and Mary Arden’s Farm – will remain closed until “spring 2021” at least. There’s no mention of the church in this article (the SBT does not run the church, so that makes sense). Does anybody know its status? The whole question of church services here in the US has been a hotly debated question, so I really have no idea what’s going on in Stratford.
I don’t know what we can do to help. If we can’t show up and buy our tickets and browse the gift shops it’s going to be an uphill battle. For a second there I got excited thinking that we can storm the online gift shop! But no – the web page says they’re completely closed, unable to accept new orders. Now I’m really sad.
This past week we managed to get away for a little vacation down Cape Cod. Luckily for me the weather a little cold on our second day (I am *not* a ‘sit on the beach all day’ person!) we got to wander around and shop.
Look what I found! Well, look what my kids found. They’re well trained. I wasn’t even paying attention but one of them came out of a random store and said, “They have Shakespeare in there.” Show me, show me now.
In my many years of doing this I’ve seen and collected all kinds of Shakespeare stuff (the original name of this blog, long-time readers may remember, was called “Such Shakespeare Stuff”). Often as gifts, sometimes from random sources (my boss once bought me Shakespeare band aids because he saw them and thought I’d get a kick out of them), but rarely do I buy stuff for myself. Rarely do I justify spending money on myself, especially for stuff I clearly don’t need.
Unless it’s a tchotchke I hadn’t seen before. I suppose I must have known that this existed, somebody surely told me about it at one point or another. But it’s first time I saw one up close and personal and I had to have it. My wife asked, “What are you going to do with that?”
“Take pictures of it and put a post up on the blog,” I told her. “And then it goes in the candle drawer with all the other candles.” This one actually has some practical use 🙂
I took him to the register and the woman behind the counter said, “Did you see our other Shakespeare items?” It dawned on me that I was wearing my “Shakespeare’s England” hoodie and my “A plague on neither of your houses” mask standing here buying a Shakespeare candle, so I may have been wearing it on my sleeve a bit. Unfortunately, all she really had were things I’d already seen – finger puppets, refrigerator magnets, and so on. But I didn’t have the candle yet. Now I do! (Turns out he’s available on Amazon if you won’t be in Cape Cod anytime soon and, like me, simply must have him!)
I’ve been doing this blog for a long, long time. It’s been a natural crossover to look for ways that technology is used in innovative ways to tackle Shakespeare. We need to get back into more of that. I’ve been missing some good stuff.
An “Oculus” is a virtual reality headset. I know it as the Oculus Rift but I guess there are different models now. I think Facebook owns them. You’ve no doubt seen them, if even in a science fiction movie – you strap the goggles over your head, then the immersive experience that’s shown to you moves around as you do. I actually got to watch some Hamlet like this once, it’s pretty cool. My experience was only what they call a “360 video”, where you can’t move – you can only spin your head around like an owl. In a true VR setting you can actually move around.
So I’m trying to understand what this game / performance called The Under Presents is, but it sounds pretty neat. They’re doing The Tempest next, and it’s a live show – you need to get tickets.
The play will feature a single actor who, in the play’s narrative, was supposed to play Prospero in a proper stage show. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, their in-person performance was canceled.
I have no idea what’s actually going to happen within the show but I can see them taking the whole “These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air” thing in a whole new direction. I am imagine the actor as Prospero pointing his staff into blank space, conjuring up a Miranda or Ferdinand, and *poof* your headset comes to life, you are in the show, you are Ferdinand. Maybe you get a script? This is all technology, maybe it just goes ahead and walks and talks for you, driving you like auto pilot and you’re just along for the ride. I can think of all kinds of crazy things that might happen.
Anybody out there got one of these headsets and can spend the couple of bucks to check it out?
We have Disney+ in the house, and we also have a teenage girl in the house who hasn’t ever outgrown what I call the “Broadway Baby” phase of her development where she doesn’t just know every word to every song, she knows the back story of every ensemble dancer. So when she bounded downstairs this morning (while everyone but me is still asleep) asking, “Can we watch? Or do we have to wait until everybody is awake?” it was like Christmas just for her. So I sat down and let her fire it up, like opening a present on Christmas eve.
Yes I totally stole a “Hamlet” graphic for this, I dont have any Hamilton images.
Within five minutes I decided I didn’t like it. So, always in search of fresh Shakespeare content, I’m not throwing away my shot. I did not expect my world to be turned upside down. (Yeah, I’m probably gonna keep doing that.)
This will actually be the third way we’ve seen Hamilton. I’m not counting buying and memorizing the soundtrack. I mean seeing.
The first came very early, when it was still in its “phenomenon” phase and everybody was going crazy. Knowing that we were never going to see it on Broadway, yeah, we watched the bootleg version. People have mixed feelings about this, I understand. Personally I always want to know what the buzz is all about, and am willing to pay the tradeoff of having at least some information. When you memorize a soundtrack before you see the play your brain often does funny things as it tries to piece together what’s happening. Getting to see it, even in poor quality, gives you some scaffolding on which to hang those songs.
Well, then it came to Boston, so we had to go.
THAT, my friends, is an experience. Shakespeare has generally taught me a habit – I like to know the story before I go in to live theatre. Too much dialogue and plot can be easily missed in an environment where you can’t pause and rewind, or even leave over to ask the person next to you what just happened, because then you’ll miss something else. So I sat down to Hamilton knowing all the rooms in which stuff happens.
The lights go down, the actors come out, the music starts….and it was fucking amazing, pardon my non-PG13 language. I heard I’m allowed one F-bomb. The opening number of this show is a “Holy shit, we’re here, this is happening, this is beautiful” experience. The way the sound echoes around you. The way something is happening on every part of the stage. It is an absolute spectacle. (Not enough people talk about the choreography in this show. I think it’s one of the best parts, to be honest.) It is overwhelming. You could watch again and again, paying attention to a different background dancer every time.
And now this morning, here I am watching that same scene on tv. With closeups and camera work. The whole sensory bombardment is just gone. The scale and grandeur of the huge opening number is replaced with closeups on faces, presumably so the audience that’s never seen it can go, “Oh, ok, that’s Burr…and that’s Washington, and that’s Jefferson….” and file it away for later. Meanwhile there’s fifty people behind them dancing their lives off and all you see is a couple of them crossing through the shot every now and then.
It’s then that I realized, this is exactly what we’ve been talking about with Shakespeare for years. What’s the difference between a live Shakespeare show and seeing it on film? I have always been a big defender of film versions. Now I’m rethinking that whole position.
Shakespeare isn’t a musical, though. And there aren’t background dancers, usually. The focus is generally on the one or two people that are talking, or killing each other. I think that does translate well to film. Unless there’s a spear carrier having a left shark moment, you’re probably not going to miss much if they’re not in the shot.
Big modern stage musicals like this are very different. Everything is happening at once and the audience has to say “What am I going to look at?” and try to take it all in. Now it’s all about direction. Somebody’s made that decision for you. One of the best choreographed scenes in the play – the “rewind” song (my daughter has everything memorized, I do not) – is an obvious example. Live, it takes a number of seconds to realize what’s happening and the magnitude of what they just did on stage (it is quite impressive). On film, Angelica looks in one direction and the camera cuts in that direction to let the audience know, “Here. You need to look here, here is the important bit.”
There are advantages here, of course. I remember once reading a quote from Ian McKellen about the difference between theatre and film. He said, paraphrased, “In theatre it’s all about the voice. On film it’s all about the face.” That makes perfect sense and it’s still true here – I spotted Angelica rolling her eyes and thought, “The people in the background wouldn’t get to see that.” Rarely though does the plot of the story hinge on an eye roll.
I’ve always said that we have to treat Shakespeare on stage and Shakespeare on film as two different things (even when it’s “Shakespeare on stage, filmed” :)). Usually, I mean the expectations of the moviemakers, and how they have to appeal to a different audience (much like turning a book into a movie and how you have to appeal to the people that have read the book while not losing the people who haven’t). Only now do I think I really understand the difference between have been talking about when they behave like seeing it live is really the only way to go, and film is a very distant second.
I wonder how this experience is going to change how I see Shakespeare now? Hamlet, King Lear, and the other great tragedies don’t count – I’ve seen so many of those now that it’s more about seeing each individual interpretation. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. But I haven’t seen most of the histories live (or at all, really) and I’m curious now how different the experience might be.
