The present in Shakespeare…
A few days ago a group of local Shakespearians had their annual meet-and-read-and-eatand-share-the-bruit- of-the- day: “Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out/ And take upon‘s the mystery of things/ As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out/ In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones/ That ebb and flow like the moon.“
That’s Lear and his heartbreaking fantasy of reconciliation with his daughter Cordelia in Act 5, the act some of us almost wish Shakespeare hadn’t written, since he kills them both, as the logic of tragedy requires.
Our script for this evening, fortunately, was The Tempest.
The First Folio edition lists it as a Romance.—I bet you’ve just now quoted to yourself one of the play’s two most memorable passages, innocent Miranda’s “O brave new world that hath such people in it,” as she looks at Prince (of course) Ferdinand. Miranda is 15 years old, 12 years on a desert isle with father Prospero and his brutalized, native slave, Caliban.
Given the universal stench of our current national political atmosphere and international military whims, this American cultural moment had me free associating with some early lines in
The Tempest. Prospero, usurped and banished Duke of Milan, lectures his devoted, innocently bored daughter Miranda about how his nasty brother Alonso screwed him out of his dukedom.
It’s a long lecture, dramatically boring and therefore challenging. Some directors stage it with Miranda, trustingly leaning against her seated daddy’s knee, periodically drowsing off, which annoys the old guy: “Dost thou attend me?” “Sir, most heedfully.”… “Thou attend’s not.” “O good sir, I do.”
The staging is a comedic reference to the tragic tableau of Lear trying to kneel in repentance to his doomed, devoted daughter Cordelia, who stops him, “O Sir, do not kneel,” before that play rises to its ghastly climax.— Harold Goddard, one of my two favorite guides to Shakespeare, sees the two scenes as complementary, withThe Tem
pest, the later play, even un-writing the earlier King Lear, imagining a happy ending.
About 50 lines into his aggrieved narrative, Prospero glosses over his own executive fecklessness so that he could devote himself to “the liberal arts,… being transported/ And rapt in secret studies.”—Sounds Faustian, or Masonic, or Skull and Bones, or Dubya playing golf while Cheney and Condi invaded Iraq.—Top guy asleep at the switch. What happens?
The fraudster cons the system.
Take it slow and let Prospero’s old lingo express ageless political practice: “Being once perfected how to grant suits,/ How to deny them, who t’advance and who/ To trash for over-topping, new created / The creatures that were mine, I say— or changed ‘em/ Or else new formed ‘em, having both the key/ Of officer and office, set all hearts i’th’ state/ To what tune pleased his ear…”
Take a few moments to let our contemporary names go drifting by: 1) Manafort, 2) Flynn, 3) Cohen, 4) Giuliani, 5) Kilimnik, 6) Stone, 7) Gates, 8) Papadopoulos, 9) AG Barr, 10) U.S. Senator Graham, 11) Cipollone, 12) Mulvaney, 13) “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, 14) John F. Kelly, 15) Mad Dog Mattis, 16) DeVos, 17) Quondam Senator Sessions, 18) shirt-sleeve Congressman Jim Jordan, 19) . . .
You could make a fridge-door magnet game, matching those numbered, lick-spittles’ names to the tyrannical behavioral traits Prospero lists.—Example: “to trash for over-topping” suggests #s 15,16,18. “Set all hearts i’ th’ state/ To what tune pleased his ear… “suggests #s 1 thru 19 (tho 15 & 16 quit the band in mid- chorale) .
Prospero’s yelling now, and even gentle, bored Miranda becomes satiric: “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.” Still his tale is grimly suggestive today. His usurping brother Alonso “confederates” with the King of Naples, “to give him annual tribute, do him homage/ Subject his coronet to his crown, and bend dukedom, yet unbowed…To most ignoble stooping.”
D. J. Trump says ”’My people came to me… Dan Coats came to me and some others saying
they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia… I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.’” (Politico, 7/16/18). Ignoble stooping.
—Still & fortunately,
is a romance/ comedy. Amazingly, daddy Prospero favors Miranda’s marriage to Ferdinand-in comedy, daddies don’t do that- who in due succession will become King of Naples and, by marriage, ruler of Milan.
No more rumor of war. Repentance and forgiveness where each is due.
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
In a democracy the restorative magic is the right to vote.
Hmm.