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!

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.

Yesterday I was looking for the story about the very first time I told The Tempest to my daughter as a bedtime story.  I remember how it went, how they knew Shakespeare as “the name of the song that Daddy’s phone plays” because I had David Gilmour’s Sonnet 18 as my ringtone.  She asked me who Shakespeare was, and I told her that he wrote the greatest stories anybody has ever written.

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. 

“And did she understand it?” 

“She asked me for it. Repeatedly.”

I don’t know if they ever found her body. 🙂

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.

Am I reading too much into this?

You may have noticed this week that Caitlin Griffin’s 2012 “Everbody Dies” poster has gone viral (again) this week. Caitlin’s been a reader/contributor to this blog for quite some time, so if you’re talking about that graphic please make sure to give her the proper credit and links!

Of course with that much Shakespeare content all in one place it’s got to stir up some conversation. I was curious about “The Fool just disappears”.  I thought he was hanged?  I went back to the text:

Lear. And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips!
Look there, look there!

And then Lear dies.  It’s even in Sir Ian McKellen’s version of King Lear that came out on video a few years ago. Not the quote, the quote’s always there – I mean you witness Fool being hanged in that one.   (Found a link!)

But I asked Bardfilm and he pointed me to the Arden footnotes (and I mean that literally, he messaged me a picture of him pointing to the footnote) that says Lear is referring affectionately to Cordelia (who, obviously, was hanged). It seems odd that all of a sudden he’d pull out a pet name for his daughter that wasn’t used previously in the play, that also happens to be the name of a character. But, the footnotes argue, Lear is basically confusing the two characters at this point and thinks them to be the same person. (I imagine this to be much like when you visit a relative who suffers from Alzheimer’s and discover yourself being called by the name of someone long dead).

Until right now I’d just always assumed that the fool was hanged, possibly even right in front of him.  I don’t know when or where or how (it’s strangely awkward in the McKellen version, and really dark), but it just always seemed to me like one more sorrow to be heaped upon us.  After all, what exactly did the fool do to deserve hanging?  He’s not even a soldier who could or would have defended himself. It’s like hanging a child. I just always imagined Lear having to watch his fool die.

What do you all think? Isn’t Shakespeare typically better at tying up his loose ends? Would he have just forgotten to tell us the fate of that character? Or is this his way of finding a place to squeeze it in? Have you just always read it as referring to Cordelia?

We can talk about whose button it is later. 🙂