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So, did you ever read Michel de Montaigne's essays? Me neither. Although as it's possible that some of you actually did read Montaigne's essays, I should say, rather, that I hadn't read any of his works until recently. But Shakespeare would have known about about them, seeing as Montaigne's opinions on native peoples and colonialism were the talk of the town in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and his Essaies were translated into English as early as 1603.

Montaigne, you see, was a philosopher. He influenced lots of people you probably have read, including Rousseau (who borrowed at least some of his idea of the "noble savage" from Montaigne), and he claimed his motto was "Que sais-je?" (What do I know?). He argued that imperialism and colonialism were wrong because of their negative impact on the indigenous peoples, about which he said in his essay "On Cannibals", "These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naiveté. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours." Montaigne, raised to be a humanist, believed that nature was superior to man. "All our efforts cannot create the nest of the tiniest bird: its structure, its beauty, or the usefulness of its form; nor can we create the web of the lowly spider. All things, said Plato, are produced by nature, chance, or human skill, the greatest and most beautiful things by one of the first two, the lesser and most imperfect, by the latter."

This is a people, I would say to Plato, among whom there is no commerce at all, no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers, nor any judges, or political superiority, no habit of service, riches, or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, no occupations but easy ones, no respect for any relationship except ordinary family ones, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. From "On Cannibals"

Caliban:When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in 't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less . . .

Miranda: I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
. . .

Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on 't
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language! Act I, scene 2

Caliban
This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me. . .

. . . All the charms
of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me

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Welcome to The Tempest, one of those plays that is sometimes called a comedy and sometimes called a "problem play" or a "romance", because it's a bit of a mixed bag. These days, it'd probably be called a "dramedy", really, so let's go with that.

Here's my own abbreviated version of the play. It took hours to put together, not including the hour spent trying to find a good icon to go with the post. (In the end, I went with Puck's quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream, because I couldn't find one. Woe.) Named characters will be bolded when they are first introduced. Actions are between asterisks. Actual quotes are in quotations - all other dialogue is my own take on it. And for whatever reason, I've made more than one reference to Buddy the Elf ("Buddy the Elf - what's your favorite color?") in here.


Act I, scene 1: on a boat

Enter crewmembers, rapping: I'm on a boat, mothaf*cka, take a look at me!

Or not.

[There's a storm brewing. And various noble wanks are giving the crew crap. And the crew is thinking of jumping ship.]

Antonio: "Let's all sink with the king."

Sebastian: "Let's take leave of him."

Gonzalo: *sings* Give me land, lots of land, with the starry skies above.



Act I, scene 2: on an island, outside Prospero's digs

Miranda: WTF with the big storm, Father mine? If you stirred it up, you'd better calm it back down. I saw a ship sink, for Pete's sake!

Prospero: No harm, therefore no foul. You think I'm just your father, but you don't know the half of me. Allow me to bore you senseless with my backstory enlighten you. Help me remove my magic cape of magic!

*puts his magic cape of magic down*

Miranda: Are you really going to tell me our backstory?

Prospero: In detail. . . . and, to sum up, I was the Duke of Milan and you are a Duke's daughter, and my brother is a treasonous snake who stole my dukedom and he wanted us dead but instead we've been here on this island for 12 years. The end.

Miranda: What was that middle part again?

Prospero: I kinda turned things over to my brother Antonio to run while I studied magic. And he fell into cahoots with the King of Naples, and tried to have us killed, in a "huntsman and Snow White" sort of way. We were tossed into the sea in a wreck of a boat, but Gonzalo at least left us food and drink and wonderful clothing and lots of books, and we actually made it to this island.

*picks up his magic cape of magic again*

Miranda: Okay, so what's with the storm?

Prospero: Oh. Right. Every single enemy I ever had plus the guy who helped us happened to be on that ship, so I wrecked it off our coast, and now they're all here on Fantasy Island.

*Miranda falls asleep and Ariel enters*

Prospero: Did you do what I asked?

Ariel: Yep. I messed with their minds but good. Everyone but the crew jumped ship. And the King of Naples's son, Ferdinand, was an especially scaredy cat. I've got him in an isolation chamber, the crew enchanted on the ship, and everyone else in separate small groups.

Prospero: Good work, but why do you seem moody?

Ariel: Because I want my freedom. Duh.

Prosperio: Let me tell you your own backstory [*Ariel rolls eyes*] and that of Caliban, the ugly mutant slave-boy . . . and, in short, you owe me. No more whining or I'll peg you in Caliban's knot-hole or something equally unpleasant for a Very Long Time. Go do something useful.

*Ariel leaves to do something nymph-like and useful; Prospero wakes Miranda u

I know. I said I was moving on to The Tempest and I am. But I really wanted to talk about Hamlet's first soliloquy before moving on. It is usually performed as follows, which is basically the text from the First Folio (from 1623, put together after Shakespeare's death), cleaned up with modern spellings and punctuation:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

I have to say that I've always taken issue with how Ophelia is portrayed. And so has my friend, Lisa Mantchev, author of the books Eyes Like Stars and Perchance to Dream. In fact, Ophelia and Hamlet are characters in Eyes Like Stars, with Hamlet being a selfish prince (I almost replaced those last three letters with a "ck") and Ophelia being . . . well, I can't tell you if you haven't read it.

We had a discussion about Ophelia this morning, and this is how it went:

Lisa: As a teen reader (and a student in AP English) I never had any use for Hamlet. In my mind, he was the same sort of melancholy introvert as Holden Caulfield, one of those moody emo boys with floppy hair and a tattered copy of some book I'd never heard of shoved in his back pocket . . . the sort of guy I would try to speak with during lunches in the tri but could never get to talk to me.

Thus (but not just by default!) all my affections and sympathies aligned with Ophelia. Here was a girl, I thought, being bossed around by her father and brother for their own advantage. If ever there was a girl trapped by time period and conventions and socio-political obligations, Ophelia was that girl. And, as a teen reader, I desperately, desperately wanted her to tell everyone to bugger off. I wanted her to sprout a spine and tell them all to get bent. I wanted her to have a life outside the role that had been written for her. When she couldn't manage it, I was angry; with her, with the world, with the constraints women in the past have had to deal with, and with myself for ever thinking that a boyfriend would be just the thing to solve all my problems.


Kelly: I didn't read Hamlet in high school - we did Macbeth and Othello and Julius Caesar, but not Hamlet. So my first exposure to him was my own leisure reading of the play when I was in my 20s, prior to the Mel Gibson release. I was drawn to Hamlet the same way I was kind of drawn to Heathcliff - that tragic, brooding guy who couldn't have what he wanted and was therefore a bit of a bastard. That said, I am with you in wishing that Ophelia would have developed a spine, or at least shown a bit of spunk - and really, Helena Bonham Carter's version of Ophelia managed to show a bit of sass: even though she was constrained to follow Polonius's command, she obviously did it grudgingly. And she sure as heck didn't go quietly into that good night.

The problem with so many depictions of Ophelia is that she's too tame, and then too crazy. That's certainly true of the Ophelia in the Tennant/Stewart production - she seems a bit wooden to me, and then completely crazy-cakes, and it was true in the recent Broadway production, where she appeared all unfocused and then shrieky. I don't really care for a feckless Ophelia. My preferred readings of that character are more nuanced. Kate Winslet was awesome in the Branagh movie version, bringing a fragility to the role and displaying so much confusion early on that her descent into madness didn't seem like a complete hop off the cliff, but I'm still waiting for the reading I most want to see. I mean, I know that Ophelia drops her basket (to borrow a term from the Ya Ya Sisterhood), but "though this be madness, yet there is method in it" - the songs she sings and the flowers she references (in conjunction with their recipients) show that she wasn't completely out

Death is one of the major themes in Hamlet. I find it interesting that most of the deaths were not anticipated by the characters – kinda notable in an age when warfare was common. And given that Hamlet spends most of the play deciding to kill Claudius and Claudius spends it thinking Hamlet might be out to get him, it's kind of funny that Claudius doesn't truly see it coming until it's there (since he's so smug that he thinks Laertes has it all under control and that will be that).

Want to test your knowledge of who dies and how? You can always take this quiz.

Meanwhile, nearly all the main players die except Horatio. I figured I'd tackle them in order of death.

How do they all die? Let me count the ways:

1. King Hamlet: murdered prior to the start of the play by Claudius through the cunning use of poison in the ear. In real life (to the extent that the play is based in fact, after all), the brother stabbed King Hamlet and there were witnesses. Shakespeare's decision to switch up the mode of death accomplishes two things:

  a) It shows that Shakespeare was familiar with the latest scientific discoveries of his time.
  (Check out this New York Times article from 1982 for further details.) and

  b) It makes the means of death less obvious, thereby creating some doubt in Hamlet's mind as to whether the
  ghost is truthful or a liar, and as to whether Claudius could have commited "murther most foul".

Since King Hamlet had not made his final confession before his untimely death, his soul is doomed to purgatory, or so his spirit intimates in Act I.

2. Polonius: stabbed by Hamlet because he thought it was Claudius. Not that Hamlet had any love for Polonius, but neither did he have it in for him. Hamlet "lugs the guts" from the chamber and stashes it in a stairwell. Polonius is buried in "hugger-mugger", a term encompassing both notions of secrecy and of confusion or muddle. We must assume that Polonius can't go straight to heaven, either.

3. Ophelia: drowned. Not of her own volition, really, so it's not technically a suicide, but when she fell in the water, she didn't try to save herself, either; hence, the church's quarrel with burying her in sacred ground, and the conversation between the gravediggers about what does and does not constitute a drowning by suicide. If she truly wanted to die and ended up dead, then she would never, ever get to heaven (under the Elizabethan understanding of things). Poor Ophelia was so terribly depressed, what with Hamlet forsaking her and her father dying and Laertes skipping about Paris and all, that she probably didn't have the energy to fight the current. To say nothing of the weight of her robes/gown/whatever. Or the fact that noblewomen in Denmark might not have been taught to swim back then. I could go on, but I won't.

4. Rosencrantz & Guildstern: executed in England as a favor to Denmark. The English court thinks they're responding to a request from Claudius, but it's Hamlet who signed their death warrant, assisted by his father's ring (which bore the requisite seal). Hamlet doesn't feel any remorse for these deaths, since he's all Hammurabi about it (kind of "an eye for an eye", even though it's a two for one exchange).