Category: Shakespeare

Sex, Drugs and Midsummer Nights

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When I study Shakespeare, my goals are more creative than academic. I don’t want to be an expert in Elizabethan England. The plays are starting points for conversations, for creative experiments. I don’t care to get the plays right. What I do care is to know them. I want to know as much as I can about how the plays work and what they contain. 

Midsummer Night’s Dream is not as much about sex as it is about sexual tension and attraction and the madness that can happen when young people have their sexuality policed. Hermia and Lysander want to fuck. They are extremely attracted to each other. Hermia’s father must take them to court to try and intervene. 

In the context of the play, the duke is the judge who will decide Hermia’s fate. It just so happens that this family court case is brought before him in the days before his wedding. So, he is full of sexual tension, too. When Hermia defiantly asks what is going to happen when she disobeys her father’s order to marry Demetrius instead of Lysander. Death or the monastery. 

Even the gods are horny and beefing. Oberon and Titania are feuding over a child and they use humans to act out their desires. This is where the drugs come into play. The drug that Oberon instructs Puck to apply to his victims while they are asleep will cause them to fall in love with whomever they first see when they wake up.

I keep thinking about casting this play and I imagine Joe Rogan as Oberon, Steve Will Do it as Puck, Chelsea Handler as Titania. I’m thinking that Natalie Cuomo would make a good Hermia and Kerryn Feehan would crush it as Helena. The cast of actors in the woods has to be some Gas Digital characters. Zac D’Amico as bottom would be great. The legion of Skanks would make up the other cast members. 

Such Stuff As Dreams is Cap

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The greatest lines in Shakespeare’s The Tempest happen after the worst part of the play. You have to understand the context to get why this is a funny line to quote. Prospero has just entertained his daughter’s future husband with a supernatural show. It’s the play’s Fantasia moment. Prospero has been orchestrating this whole scam perfectly up until this moment when he remembers that Caliban has bribed the sailors to try and kill him and he stops the show suddenly.

I had forgot that foul conspiracy of the beast Caliban and his confederates against my life.

This is strange. Your Father’s in some passion that works him strongly.

Never till this day saw I him touched with anger, so distempered.

You do look, my son, in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.

This is the exchange that happens before the strange rant Prospero deliver about the temporary nature of things. He is trying to distract Ferdinand from the red flag of his weird mood change. It is within this context that he says the famous quote.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero’s anger leads to a dramatic speech he used to try and hide his rage. It isn’t a philosophical reflection delivered in a soliloquy. It is a performative speech designed to hide his true intention. Such stuff as dreams is cap.

Prospero’s Wisdom: Power and the Greater Good

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The Tempest is highly relevant and relatable to our culture today. Especially after coming out of a pandemic, a kind of banishment, we can relate to Prospero’s situation. He had to make do with some very trying circumstances. It’s not just Prospero’s plight that connects this play to our culture, today. In an almost kaleidoscopic way, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a hall of mirrors for our times.

Prospero washes up on an island with an inhabitant who wants to kill him and to rape his daughter. This would be nightmarish, horrific, were it not for Prospero’s ability to control Caliban with his spells. There is a military imperative. Prospero’s interest in the literary arts led to him ignoring politics and opened the opportunity for his brother to betray him. Alone with his daughter on the island, he has no choice but to control its violent inhabitants. It is either control or be victimized for Prospero.

Still, there is something entirely creepy about Prospero’s controlling ways, necessary or not. Especially when it comes to his daughter. He orchestrates an encounter where she will fall in love. He manipulates the situation to arrange a marriage. In doing so, he is very deliberate about controlling their sexuality. He wants them to fall in love and to get married, but he is manipulating their sexual urges to do so. 

The metaphor of the island has a lot of significance to us, today. Islands have become symbolic of secrets, of illicit and illegal behavior. Prospero establishes a kind of law and order on the island. He is a benevolent master an anti-Epstein. He manipulates the players and works them up to do what he wants, but he is not doing so for personal gain but for what he thinks will be best for the greater good. It is only through Prospero’s ability to renounce his powers, to give up his competitive advantage that we come to trust him. Yes, he is controlling, but with good reason and as soon as he can give up his power, he does. 

The only way to trust someone is to see them in a situation where they have power and do not use it. Otherwise, we can only attribute good behavior to a lack of power. It is through restraint that we gain respect. For this past year and a half, we have all been banished to our own islands. The great hope is that this time of forced introspection, of limited mobility will have helped some of us, enough of us, to overcome our fears and hungers enough to see what a positive solution could be. We need people who are willing to give up their power for the greater good.

This summer will be a “brave new world” and we will do well to listen to the wisdom of Prospero.

To Conspire or Not: Prospero’s Forgiveness

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Conspiracy theorists should love Shakespeare. So many juicy plots are formed in secret. Conspiracy is daily bread. It’s how people live and how they die in Shakespeare’s dramatic world. In the Tempest, we have a series of conspiracies that unfold, and it is ultimately Prospero’s deception that leads to resolution if not redemption. 

In a world full of dishonesty and betrayal, where conspiracies are everywhere, it becomes a kind of test of survival to form conspiracies. To exist, you must conspire, and you must do it better than the parties who are against you. Prospero learns this lesson the hard way, after miraculously surviving an attempt on his life. 

He washes up ashore an island with his daughter and some books. It is not merely a stroke of good luck or divine intervention that saves their lives, but it is the secret decision of Gonzalo to help them to survive. Prospero is conspired against, and he only survives because he manages to solicit empathy from a double agent. Gonzalo betrays his orders and conspires with Prospero out of sympathy for his situation.

The timeline of the play, however, is ruled by conspiracies shaped by Prospero himself. Having lived on the island with his daughter, the spirits he controls with his spells, and the slave that he has do his bidding, Prospero has achieved a mastery of his situation. He uses this advantage to create an extravagant false reality to manipulate his enemies and to create new relationships with allies. 

The most interesting thing about the character of Prospero is that he forgives. He contrives this elaborate situation to regain his rightful place of power and to potentially punish his enemies, but when the time comes where he can have his revenge, he chooses forgiveness instead. Prospero becomes a figure of self-realization and actualization. He becomes bigger than an emotional need, more generous than his detractors.