Shakespeare makes life better.
Pat Heywood, the veteran Scottish actress who made her film debut as Olivia Hussey’s nurse and confidant in Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, has died. She was 92.
For some, Zeffirelli’s version is the definitive movie adaptation, the one we were shown in school as our introduction to Shakespeare’s work. But for newer generations, it poses significant issues over the nudity of its young stars.
Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, Ms. Heywood.
Hey, hey, hey now, put down your torches, I’m not the one that said it. This guy did.
I’ve had a challenging relationship with The Tempest for almost 20 years. It’s how I introduced my children to Shakespeare. I told it to them as a bedtime fairy tale. Once upon a time, a girl lived on a faraway island with her father, a powerful wizard. She learns from him that she is a long-lost princess who was banished here, with her father, by his enemies. One day, a ship runs ashore on their island, full of pirates set on seizing control of their island, but her father is far too powerful for them. Among the pirates, however, is a good man, a handsome prince, who marries her and takes her away to live happily ever after.
Did I skip a few steps? Sure. But we’re talking about a 5-year-old and her 3-year-old sister, and I had to make adjustments. My youngest was still a baby when we started this, and it’d be a few years before he asked for Hamlet. He tried King Lear once, but it made him sad. I’m not kidding.
“But what about the whole colonialism thing?” I was asked right around the time Julie Taymor’s movie version came out. At the time, I answered honestly – I never really thought about it. To me, The Tempest can be read as the story of a father’s readiness to do anything for his daughter, including overcoming his desire for revenge.
But no one’s letting the colonialism thing go, and it’s only gotten more intense over the years. I don’t disagree that this is also the story of a powerful white man who showed up on land that wasn’t his, took one look at the creatures already living there, and said, “Mine. You’re all my slaves now.” That is also all true.
And, much like when a celebrity that’s been doing good things in the spotlight for decades suddenly has a clip surface of something they said once twenty years ago, Prospero is basically canceled. It wasn’t long before I saw articles arguing that he’s one of the worst fathers in Shakespeare. Sigh.
For years, I would answer the question, “What’s your favorite play?” with The Tempest because of the connection with my children. I stopped doing that. My children, now college-age, even stopped doing that. Because nobody wants to be attacked over it. You like that one? Therefore, you must agree with all historical instances of colonialism! That’s the only possible answer!
I still regularly skim my headlines and news stories for Shakespeare content. When I (rarely) see a Tempest story, I always check it out to see if there’s anything we can talk about. This is a good one. The author, Joseph Bissex, wants to talk about forgiveness. The Tempest makes sense, but Hamlet? I don’t think I’ve ever, to this moment, thought of Hamlet as a play with any forgiveness to be found or deserved. Claudius killed his father. We’ll assume for the sake of argument that this is a proven point and not still up for debate. There’s an audience that wants Hamlet to forgive him for that?
Prospero’s enemies actually didn’t kill anybody. I realize that was their intent, and it was only through Gonzago’s aid that they survived. But they did survive.
Here, the author focuses on Hamlet’s line to Ophelia, “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.” In that moment he sees her as a fair creature and asks her to pray for him. To Bissex, this is the crucial moment. Hamlet should have stopped right there. He hasn’t killed anybody yet. He should (my words) leave them all to heaven. We could have ended up in a comedy with a marriage at the end (his words).
I don’t really think The Tempest is better than Hamlet. Much of that is because of the magic element. The most interesting thing about Shakespeare to me is the depiction of human nature. Despite the royalty, swordfight and fine, ghost, it’s a more accurate and in-depth depiction of human relationships than one about magic spirits, even if I do like the father/daughter dynamic more for obvious reasons.
But this angle is an interesting comparison that you don’t typically see.
When my kids were young, I quickly learned about the Parents’ Guide section of IMDB. For any given movie or TV show, you can find out exactly what kind of sex and violence is in it and decide as a parent whether you want to watch it with your kids or have your kids watch it. Everybody’s got their own rules for that kind of thing. Kids come in all different ages and sensibilities.
I was mainly looking to rule out too much sex and violence. But that’s just my house. I wasn’t crazy about salty language, but I wouldn’t ban a movie from the house because of it. I used to laugh at how people would count the number of times that “g_ddamn” was used or “the lord’s name.” But I suppose fair’s fair, that’s important to some people, too. Then they started counting things like whether the bad guy smoked.
I never really thought of these as trigger warnings, but I guess that’s what they were. The difference is that the movie didn’t lead with them. I, as a parent, chose to seek them out. They don’t pop up in front of me before my movie starts like some EULA disclaimer when I’m installing software. “This movie contains people smoking. Check here to confirm that you’re not offended by this.”
You perhaps see where I’m going with this. The Globe has doubled down hard on trigger warnings lately, including:
I’m with Gregory Doran, who hates them, and Ralph Fiennes, who thinks audiences have become “too soft.” If somebody doesn’t already know the content of a Shakespeare play, and worries about these things, it takes no time to search online for the information. Maybe we should put an AI in charge of answering precisely this kind of question.
There’s an irony here that kills me (trigger warning). Shakespeare is supposed to portray what it means to be human. I often tell people variations on the idea that “the whole of human emotion is at one point or another depicted in the complete works of Shakespeare.” And in real life, there’s violence, hatred, and people dying. Thinking that you can avoid these things by being alerted about every optional fictional situation that contains them, you’re surely missing the bigger problem. Shakespeare also shows us how to deal with those things. It doesn’t glorify the violence and the hatred. It holds a mirror up to nature so we can see how horrible it is for ourselves and gives us time to think about it instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Shakespeare makes life better. You may have heard me say that once or twice. It’s sad to believe people think they’re doing the right thing by coming up with reasons to have less Shakespeare.
Off the top of my head right now I couldn’t tell you how many copies of Shakespeare’s sonnets I have. I get them for review, people give them to me as gifts. A common topic on the Reddit Shakespeare sub is, “How much is my copy of the sonnets worth?” And the answer is, typically, not much. Shakespeare has been published by a lot of different sources over a lot of years. It’s hardly rare and thus scarcely valuable.
Unless it’s one of only twelve copies of the 1899 Roycroft Press edition printed on vellum. In this case, according to the experts at Antiques Roadshow, it is worth up to $10,000.
So maybe there are some needles in those haystacks after all? Given that I just lost my job, perhaps I have to look through those stacks of mine and see if any Elizabethan lottery tickets are waiting for me!
Pardon the interruption for a moment for some news from real life.
I lost my job this week.
I’m in the tech industry and have been for decades, and we deal with it from time to time. The big companies like Amazon and Google often lay people off by the thousands. This isn’t my first time being here, but after a good nine years at my most recent job, I honestly thought I’d seen the last of these times. I thought I’d be retiring there. I guess the universe had other plans.
I’ve always lived a double life online, keeping my day job as a principal software engineer separate from my passion project of being a Shakespeare Geek (even though they overlap more than you’d think). But there are things you do when you find yourself looking for a job, and one of those things is to use all your resources. With that in mind:
It’s weird being out of work. You feel like there’s a million things to do – update your resume, call your network, set up appointments, search search search online. But also, sometimes you’re incredibly bored because you don’t know what to do with yourself. It’s times like that when I turn to my pet projects, like Shakespeare. Hopefully, you’ll see more content from me over the coming weeks, but hopefully, not too many weeks, if you know what I’m saying.
As a software guy, I’ve also always used Shakespeare as my portfolio for learning new technology. I’m going to have to update my skills in a few key areas, and show that I know what I’m talking about. The obvious way to do that is to make extensions to my work here at ShakespeareGeek.com. Will that bring anything exciting? Who knows. Maybe! Stay tuned!
Thanks to everyone for all the support over the years. It’s easy to put stuff up on the web and just think of the people that will see it as “traffic” but that’s not true here. I know many of you. I’ve had conversations this month with people I first met through ShakespeareGeek over ten years ago. We’re all trying to make life better with Shakespeare. Sometimes that means helping each other out, too. Thanks again. Sorry for the interruption.