(sub)Text Prototype #1: Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: Poesis as Revenge Forsaken (Full Release)

0:07 Wes: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is a special bonus episode in which we'll be discussing Shakespeare's the Tempest. This is Wes Alwan, and joining me today is a friend of the Partially Examined Life, Bill Youmans. You've been on a few of these now, right? Well, you've been on Crito.

0:25 Bill: Yep, I've been on Crito and also Lysistrata. Or Lysistrata. And your Broadway actor at the moment? I actually am a Broadway actor. I'm in the current production of Carousel. Yeah, I've been an actor for 45 years. And actually one of the very first productions I was ever involved with was a production of the Tempest at the CSC Repertory Theater in New York City back in 1974, I think. And I was the follow spot operator. So I heard the tempest at least 50 or 60 times, watched it and saw it 50 or 60 times that year. And I've been in a production of the Tempest at Actors Theatre of Louisville playing Trinculo. I've worked in the theater all these years and studied Shakespeare in college at State University of New York at Purchase.

1:17 Wes: So, yeah, I had asked you to do something. I wanted to do a bonus episode with you, and we were thinking about fiction or a play. I forgot how this came about exactly. But you mentioned Shakespeare, and I also have a hu. Love of Shakespeare. Ultimately, I think I mentioned the Tempest just because the Tempest is something I have thought a lot about and I taught it a little bit at a small liberal arts college where I was an adjunct for a semester. And I've written about it. I happen to love this play and I know you immediately, when I mentioned it, were enthusiastic.

1:51 Bill: Oh, sure, it's one of his greatest plays. It's generally thought of as his last or one of his last. Now, partially to satisfy my curiosity, but also as a potential plug. Are your writings on the Tempest available online?

2:07 Wes: I actually, in preparation for this podcast, I started looking at it's kind of an academic paper that I had started writing and I haven't completed it. And I thought, you know, reading it, I thought, wow, I should really complete this because it turned into sort of an idea for a book. One of the reasons why I'm so interested in this play is I became interested in the relationship between revenge, fantasy and creativity or being a poet. This is, as you mentioned, it's one of his last plays. And at the very least, it's the last play he wrote alone.

Wrote it 1610-1611, and it was performed in 1611. And again, I think, through 1613. And it is regarded as one of his romances, which are part of the meaning of that is it's not really classifiable as a tragedy or comedy, a tragicomedy. And what's interesting to me about it is it's kind of a tale of aborted revenge. So you see a lot of. In Shakespeare's tragedies, you see a lot of vengeance going on or at least a lot of violence. But say in Hamlet, that's a whole revenge theme, and that has roots in English theater and I think European theater more broadly, and the comedies, generally standalone comedies, obviously, they have the same revenge elements.

So in this particular tragicomedy, the Tempest, you see something that could turn out to be revenge, but it doesn't happen. It's aborted. And we'll give a summary in a second for listeners about how all that unfolds. So the play is also widely regarded as a commentary, as sort of Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, and even as a comment on what it meant to be a poet playwright. And so those two things standing together, it got me to thinking about, well, what's the relationship between that we have this aborted revenge fantasy, and then at least some reflection in this on what it means to be a poet.

And I wanted to see if I could make connections between the two.

4:01 Bill: I've never heard that connection in anything I've read about the Tempest. I think that definitely will be a very fruitful area to look at.

4:10 Wes: I heard Marjorie Garber, so she's an academic, written a great deal about Shakespeare, and she is the rare academic who's also a really good writer and is a delight to read. I don't know that anything I've read by her sort of makes this connection, but I do. I think I remember an npr her being interviewed somewhere. It could have been NPR where she makes that connection. This was after I had started my paper, but I was like, yeah, okay, someone else is thinking about that. And she may have already published on it by now, because this was a while ago. So, yeah, so that's my interest in it. And what are you, in general, what has attracted you to the play in the past?

4:50 Bill: I think primarily I see it as Prospero moving from rage to forgiveness. So I think forgiveness is the thing that I'm interested in, how he gets from rage to forgiveness. And also the theme that's run throughout the play about appearance and reality, about reality versus dreams, about whether we can trust our senses regarding the nature of reality. You know, the whole we Are such stuff as dreams are made on everyone in the play at some point or another, is not sure whether, except for Prospero, is not sure whether they're dreaming or awake. A lot of them say this a lot of times. So the line between dreaming and waking, these two states of consciousness, I think is something really interesting in the play.

5:44 Wes: All right, so let's give a brief summary. So the play is about Prospero, who was the one time Duke of Milan and was.

5:54 Bill: I think it's usually pronounced Prospero.

5:57 Wes: Okay, Prospero. That's interesting because I've sounded. I'm so used to saying that in my head that. Okay, so Prospero. I know Caliban calls him Prosper. So I'm going to give the bag. So this is sort of a backstory that doesn't come out until he's talking to Miranda. But before the story begins, he is the Duke of Milan. And he becomes interested in liberal arts, interestingly enough, to the exclusion of running his kingdom, which basically awakes in his brother the desire to usurp him. And so his brother conspires with the King of Naples, Alonso, to basically get rid of Prospero and his daughter Miranda.

And so they do that by, I guess, abandoning them at sea in a tub, right? Him and his three year old daughter Miranda. No sail, no tackle, but some books left to him by the advisor. So he'd been an advisor to Prospero. And so he's the person who shows mercy on him. And then so they wash up on an island. Miranda and Prospero wash up on an island. And that's where they've been ever since. And Miranda, at this point, as the story begins, is about 15 or 16. And at this point, for some unexplained reason, Prospero now has magical powers. He's now a magician.

And you know, the very thing. And it's somehow related to his study of liberal arts. So this very bookish nature, which is part of the thing that got him in trouble, is now a source of power on this remote island. And by providence, by luck, his enemies, the very people who have betrayed him, are passing by. And he creates a storm and has them shipwrecked on the island. And then divides them up into little groups and puts them through various trials and tribulations. And ultimately will bring them all together and forgive them. And will marry Miranda to the son of Ferdinand of the King of Naples.

So one of his betrayers and then will give up his powers and ready himself for a return to the real world, I guess, to his kingdom. Anything you want to add to that?

8:01 Bill: There's also a subplot involving the comic characters Trinculo and Stefano and Caliban, who's not really a comic character, but is a comic character in a way, in which Caliban tries to get Stefano and Trinculo to murder Prospero and set Stefano up as king on the island. So Caliban wants to exchange one king for another, namely Prospero for Stefano. And how that comes about with a lot of drunkenness and slapstick humor, is the substance of a subplot.

8:37 Wes: One of the interesting things about this play. So this play now is often written about in context of colonialism, postcolonialism, which is. I doubt it's something we'll get into a lot today. But one of the sources for the play is something that happened, I think, in 1609. Yeah.

8:54 Bill: The wreck of one of nine ships that set forth from England to the Bermudas, which I think must be the Bahamas. I don't know. I don't know if it means the Bermuda.

9:06 Wes: It's not the Bahamas, it's the Caribbean, but it's not the Bahamas. So it's sort of out. And the Bermuda is kind of more out in the middle of nowhere, out in the middle of the Atlantic.

9:16 Bill: I was looking at this. It's really hard to avoid the conclusion that the Tempest could not have come about without this.

9:24 Wes: Yeah. So there were some writings by survivors, right?

9:27 Bill: Yeah.

This man, William Strachey or something, was the. He's one of them, I guess, the captain or something. Or was aboard the ship that was wrecked.

9:37 Wes: Yeah. The Sea Venture is the name of the ship.

9:40 Bill: Yeah. And the document is called A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. Written by William Strachey. And right. In the very first sentence, it says, a most dreadful tempest. Manifold deaths whereof are here to the life described the wreck on Bermuda and the description of those islands. So, yeah, right away you get Tempest. And then all throughout this document, and particularly in the description of the wreck, you can see that Shakespeare really lifted Ariel, particularly Ariel's description of how she managed the wreck.

Right. From this document. And also there's. In the document there's a description of what we might call St. Elmo's Fire, which is this strange phenomenon that seems to happen during thunderstorms, particularly at sea, where you see, like, a ball of light dancing around on the. On the sails and about the ship and in the Document the repertory. He describes this thing and even says it looked like St. Elmo's fire, or what they call Castor and Pollux, which were the ancient gods that protected shipwrecked people wrecked at sea. And, you know, Ariel says, I boarded the king's ship, now on the beak, now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin I flamed amazement.

Sometime I'd divide and burn in many places on the topmast, the yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, then meet and join Jove's lightning. The precursors of the dreadful thunderclaps more momentary in sight outrunning were not the fire and cracks of sulphurous roaring. The most mighty Neptune seemed to besiege and make his bold waves tremble, Yea, his dread trident shake. So she's describing that she herself was this St. Elmo's fire, which is described very similarly in the original document. For me, this was kind of like a big thing because I had not been aware of this document.

And I beforehand, this is a marginal thing, but I beforehand, I had always been a de Verian, meaning I was pretty convinced that the nobleman Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the real writer of Shakespeare's plays. But he died in the early 1600s, and this document was not published until like 1610 or something. It becomes very hard to argue for de Vere as the author of the plays.

12:18 Wes: Yeah.

12:19 Bill: Or at least of the Tempest.

12:20 Wes: I mean, what's interesting about the account is the island in question was considered a dangerous place that people wanted to avoid. And it was either use that as a refuge or die at sea. And so they had to land there. But there had been stories that there were devils on the island and things of this sort. So they were very reluctant. And then they found. Well, actually, it's really, really nice. They basically ended up on a Caribbean vacation. And that's the story that they relate. This place that had been much, much feared was beautiful, and it was provident in the sense that they had everything they needed to eat and drink and so on and so forth.

That's the interesting thing about that account was the bounty of food and the climate and basically the fact that what seemed like it was going to be a tragedy turned out all for the. Well, in fact, the pamphlet, the writings that were the first hand accounts, they used the term tragicomedy for this. So it's an interesting idea for a play and it's, you know, and it creates a grade. And by the way, you were referring to Ariel's female and I often think of Ariel as male, but Ariel was never given a gender and is played by both males and females.

Yeah, that is absolutely. I can't think of any scenes where Miranda and Ariel are in them together.

13:38 Bill: At the very end. I think they have. In the very final scene, he had a task to get everybody to switch their characters. But it was part of the nature of the production that they were able to do that. And he just waved her hand over her and she would sort of nod off and then come back as Ariel. It was very well done. It was very interesting. So. But that's why I always think of Ariel as a she. And if I. There's only one woman in the play. So it's an excuse to cast another woman in the play or girl. So I would, if I were producing it, I would definitely cast Ariel as female.

14:13 Wes: So after we have this storm and we see Alonso, the King of Naples and his son Sebastian and Gonzalo, the counselor, basically this is a storm and the boatswain is reprimanding them because they won't do what they're supposed to do and get below deck. Then we transition. And so scene two, we are introduced to Miranda, who, yeah, she has an unusually small role for a woman in a Shakespeare play. So she has the smallest role, I think, of any major female character in a Shakespeare play, as far as I know. But she's really one of my favorite characters.

And we can talk a little bit more about the whole Ariel thing because that's really fascinating because Ariel is more of a. He's the spirit of the air and he's Prospero's servant. And he's much more self interested than Miranda, who is just this bundle of selflessness, empathy, and someone who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt and wonder. And her name is etymologically related to wonder and that's also mirror in Latin.

15:26 Bill: Well, she's fascinating because you're talking about Miranda. She's fascinating because she's completely without any of civilization's artifices that are associated with women in, say, European civilization. So, yes, she's full of a certain kind of wonder and purity and lack of like, self interested motives that you find in most other characters, even male or female, in all of Shakespeare. One of the great themes of Shakespeare, I think, is appearance in reality. People seeming to be one thing but being something else. Miranda is one of the few characters in Shakespeare who is exactly what she appears to be and what she says she is.

She never dissimulates in any way. Most Shakespearean I would almost say that the most salient theme in all of Shakespeare is people pretending to be something other than who they are. Who's there? The first line in Hamlet. Who really is there? Anyway, we could go through Shakespeare and I could come up with a lot of lines to support that.

16:32 Wes: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's she is what she is, which is unusual even for this island, which is sort of an enchanted realm. So in her first speech, she's reacting to the shipwreck which Prospero has arranged. And she says, oh, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer. A brave vessel who had no doubt some noble creature in her dashed all the pieces. Oh, the cry did knock against my very heart. Poor souls, they perished. Had I been any God of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth or ere it should the good ship so have swallowed, and the fraughting souls within her.

So this word brave, by the way, comes up more than once, and I want to discuss the meaning of that eventually. Later on, she'll say towards the end of the play when she sees the cast of characters, the villains that Prospero has all brought together. So she's met Ferdinand already. And at every point, every man she sees, she's like a 16 year old girl and she's like, wow, mankind. She and Ferdinand have all already fallen in love at this point. But she says, oh, wonder how many goodly creatures are there here. How beauteous mankind is. Oh, brave new world that has such people in it.

Part of the irony is that really these people are the intrusion of the mundane and the intrusion of the villainous into her enchanted realm. It's her world that is brave and new and interesting, not theirs.

18:00 Bill: Yeah. Prospero even gives a little counterpoint. He. She says, brave new world. And he says, tis new to thee.

18:07 Wes: Yes, I love his. Throughout the play, the contrast to his sort of benevolent cynicism and her youthful naive enthusiasm. So on the face of it, brave just means splendid. But I think we could talk a little bit more about that later about what's so interesting about that word.

18:23 Bill: Yeah, I would be very interested in that. That has not occurred to me that that is a word associated with her and with play. Yeah, let's talk about it.

18:31 Wes: Yeah. But for now, it's just her empathy, which is so winning in the beginning, makes her such a compelling character and makes her someone who. Prospero from the beginning of the play, basically, his plan is to hook her up with Ferdinand, the son of his betrayer, because that's what's good for her, we can imagine if she weren't there. If he didn't have her with him, he might take a different path. Right. He'd be tempted simply to take revenge. Because the whole play involves him. And this is the sense in which he's a stand in for Shakespeare and the playwright as well. This whole cast of characters confined to this narrow realm, the island. Who he has complete control over and manipulates. Makes them do what he wants and.

19:13 Bill: Right. He's essentially a God on the island and a playwright. A lot of analogies have been made to Shakespeare, to this whole play is. Prospero is kind of like a playwright in a sense. He's arranging events to establish his idea of justice. Which is essentially the action of Shakespeare. Justice being a theme in many of Shakespeare's plays. The idea of marrying your daughter to the son of the perpetrator of a crime against you is. That's a pretty extreme act of forgiveness, I would say.

19:47 Wes: Yeah. That's really central to this play is the way in which Prospero forgives his enemies.

19:54 Bill: I think there's some debate about. I would debate about whether Prospero intends to forgive from the very beginning. Or whether he learns forgiveness or whether he decides later to forgive. You can make arguments for both. And in a way, both may be true. But there's that one sequence where he asks Ariel, do you have compassion for these people? I'm paraphrasing. And she says, yeah. My feelings would be empathetic toward them were I human. And he says, and mine shall hast thou that art. But e' er I don't know where it is. A thought or sense or feeling of their afflictions. And shall not I.

20:36 Wes: So this is Act 5, Scene 1.

20:38 Bill: He also says at one point that we can have somebody read this speech. But the rarer action is in virtue, not in vengeance. That seems to me a revelation to him.

20:51 Wes: Yeah. It's the same speech.

20:52 Bill: Is it? Yeah. That would be. As an actor, it seems to me the best way to play that is not as something you knew all along. But as something you kind of realized right there.

21:03 Wes: So I think at the very least, he seems to be tempted toward revenge at that point.

21:08 Bill: And he does. In a way, you can argue that he does take revenge. I mean, he puts these guys through a pretty hellish experience.

21:16 Wes: The other side of this is. I mean, I think as soon as we see him and Miranda happen upon Ferdinand. It's clear that he's planning to marry her to Ferdinand.

21:26 Bill: Yeah. No question. And he says, so My plans are growing just as I hoped they would or something.

21:33 Wes: He said, yeah, so maybe it's a question what will happen to everyone else? And at the very least, I think he's tempted there in the end, especially given the plot between Trinculo and Stephano and Caliban to kill him and take over the island. So I think that incites him at the very end.

21:52 Bill: Yeah, we've talked about Miranda. Maybe we should talk a little about the colonialism, business and slavery. So a lot of commenters have said that there's a theme of colonialism in the play. A European vessel land on an uncivilized island, which we should say, by the

22:14 Wes: way, is in the Mediterranean. Even though it's based on Bermuda, it's actually in the Mediterranean between Tunis and Italy.

22:20 Bill: That's right. But it's an uncivilized island with palm trees, probably, and that's been untouched by European civilization. And on the island is Caliban. And Caliban, the people who see the play as a look at colonialism see Caliban as the native of a sort of a colonialized region. And actually Caliban is often cast as a person of color to help point this up. So upon meeting the native Caliban, Prospero attempts to do what we find colonialists doing, which is to try to educate Caliban in the ways of European understanding and knowledge. Teaches him language, teaches him, I guess, to read, and tries to instill in him a European set of so called civilized values.

But then Caliban tries to rape Miranda at some point before the play begins. And this causes Prospero to give up on the project of civilizing Caliban and instead just turn him into a slave. And this has to do with Shakespeare, seems to be talking about an article written by Michel de Montaigne on the natural Man. It was called Of Cannibals. And it's an essay which is kind of paraphrased by Gonzalo in the first scene where the king and his train appear. And Gonzalo says almost exactly paraphrasing Montaigne from the Of Cannibals essay. And he says, how do I?

I'm gonna skip around. But had I plantation of this isle, my lord in the commonwealth, I would by contraries execute. For no kind of traffic would I admit no name of magistrate. Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty, and use of service, none. Contract, succession, bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none. No use of metal, corn, or wine or oil, no. Occupation, all men idle all, and women too, but innocent and pure, no sovereignty. And then Sebastian says, in a little parenthetical, yet he would be king on it. And then Gonzalo goes on, all things in common.

Nature should produce without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine would I not have. But nature should bring forth of its own kind, all foison, all abundance. This is basically a paraphrase of Montaigne.

25:06 Wes: And a parody.

25:08 Bill: And a parody. Right. And Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that this is nonsense. But it's strange, because Shakespeare can't resist giving Caliban very likable and lovable characteristics. But he seems to be refuting Montaigne with Caliban's Rape of Miranda and Prospero's this idea that everything would be better without civilization. Shakespeare seems to be with Hobbes in this, that everything would not at all be better without civilization. But some people read the play as Prospero enslaving poor Caliban and Ariel, too, and so read it as a criticism of colonialism. The way Caliban and Ariel are written and the way the word slave is used to them. Yeah, that's there.

25:54 Wes: Yeah. I just think it's not that well connected to the rest of the play. I do think it's kind of a stretch. So even Caliban, for instance, he's not really a native. He's the son of.

26:04 Bill: He's the son of Sycorax and the devil.

26:06 Wes: Right. And Sycorax was herself exiled to the island for misdeeds.

26:11 Bill: But we should say, though I do think a main theme in the play is the idea of dominance, of kinghood, kingship. There's a hierarchy. And Shakespeare seems to be wanting to have a look at this idea of hierarchy. Caliban, like I said earlier, Caliban wants to reject Prospero as a king, only to substitute a worse king in the person of Stefano over himself.

26:37 Wes: You mean Antonio?

26:39 Bill: No, Caliban wants Stefano to be his king. You will be my king, and I will worship you. Even makes him into a God. Caliban also rejects learning, which in the play is the key to power, the books. And also, you know, the king thing is all over the place.

26:58 Wes: I think it's really important because a lot of this is about the. If it's about the psychology of vengeance, it's about the psychology of power.

27:07 Bill: Well, in the very first scene, it's very interesting reversal of power, where the boatswain is actually the guy in command. Right, Right. So here we have an actual situation where the natural power overrides the power created by artifice. Namely, the dukes and the king have to take orders from this lowly boatswain. Boatswain or whatever, however you want to call it.

27:36 Wes: Yeah.

27:36 Bill: Because he's the one who's going to be able to save them. So he has the power, even though they're kings and dukes.

27:43 Wes: Yeah. There's a point in the beginning where Alonzo says, where's the master? Boatswain says, I pray now. And then he says, play the men. Boatswain says, I pray now. Keep below. And then Antonio says, where is the master boatswain? And boatswain says, do you not hear him? You mar our labor. We hear from the master in the very first line, where the master is ordering the boatswain to go do his bidding on the ship. After that, the master disappears, I think.

28:10 Bill: Yep. It's the guy who knows what to do.

28:12 Wes: Yeah. There's some irony to this. Alonso and Antonio saying, where is the master? And these are the guys who have they got rid of Prospero. They got rid of the master of that domain. And in a sense, even though supposedly they've taken on mastery there, they actually don't know who the master is. And in this case, in the storm, they obviously don't know that Prospero is the master of the storm. So there are all sorts of things going on there.

28:38 Bill: And the play kind of runs the gamut of human rank, I guess you could say, from the subhuman to the superhuman even. It even exceeds the gamut of human. The subhuman being Caliban, and the superhuman being Ariel. And there's just about every level of personal development, or maybe you might call spiritual development. In between, there's Trinculo and Stefano near the bottom with Caliban. And then there's. In the middle, there are the nobles, the best of whom being Gonzalo. And then there's Prospero. And then there's Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero and then Ariel. Yeah. It's a hierarchy. Yeah.

29:17 Wes: And I think it's really important, ultimately to the psychology of revenge, which I think is really important to the play. You know, Prospero was the duke. He was the head guy, and he was deposed, which is basically. It's a form of humiliation, but it's sort of the most extreme example. And this is something you see a lot in Shakespeare's histories, with kings, you know, who go from the highest possible position to the lowest possible position, and it's total humiliation and loss. But in Prospero's case, what this Humiliation has led to, strangely enough, is not tragic loss in the sense that he has developed these new powers.

He becomes king of a new domain. He went from having servants in Milan to having absolute power over these underlings on this island. And he went from being basically not interested in his job, not interested in being a ruler in Milan, to being in total, total control on this island. And psychologically, you can see that as sort of a reaction to the most severe wound to pride. One could get the most severe humiliation going from being leader of everything to potentially being with just this guy and his daughter alone, washed up on an island. If you thought you could read the play that some people have as sort of Prospero's own fantasy, Prospero's delusional fantasy.

In fact, we never learn where these magic powers come from. We never learn how you can transmute a study of the liberal arts, which is so impractical that it's the thing that got him in trouble into this absolute power. So I think the power thing is important because it's going to speak to the psychology of vengeance. Vengeance is the thing that we want when we have been humiliated. And I think part of the point of vengeance is to take control of the story, take control of the narrative. It's one thing to lose power. It's one thing to lose one's kingdom, but it's another thing to lose the status associated with that and the sort of the self concept and the self image associated with that.

And to see oneself through the eyes of the deposers, through the eyes of an Antonio, through the eyes of an Alonzo. To see oneself as small and powerless through their eyes. And vengeance, I think, is the attempt to re establish power. Typically, we do that by violently lashing out. And I think the point of that violence is to say, look, I'm not powerless. And I'm going to prove it to you. And I'm going to prove it by making you feel it. You're going to feel the pain, and you're going to realize that your story is wrong. Your view of me is this small, powerless, humiliated being.

I can disprove that. I can tell my own story, and I can make you a character within my own sadistic, vengeful fantasy. You thought you put me in your story. Well, I'm going to put you in my story, which is the way things begin, with all these guys being washed up in a way to depose him was to tell a certain kind of story. And then Prospero is going to reverse that story.

32:20 Bill: His power is magic. So tragedy in this play is avoided by magic. This is part of Shakespeare's pessimism. He seems to be saying happy endings are not possible except through magic. And the nature of power is also examined, you know, I mean, in terms of. I don't know if this is too wide a connection, but you can say in terms of power over Caliban. Was Caliban made brutish by oppression or was he inherently brutish? Right. Like in the state of nature, his brutishness wouldn't be evil, it was. Would just be natural. But because civilization has come, he's now evil. And this is one of the, you could say one of the effects of Prospero's power.

33:08 Wes: And this is the way a psychologist would read it. And I know the way some of the postcolonial literature has read it. You can read Caliban as sort of a cast off aspect of oneself. Right? So Caliban is the way that Prospero felt. That's the way that being deposed from Milan made him feel. And it's the thing that he doesn't want to be. And obviously there are many ways to read this. And so this is one sort of speculative branch of that. And so that's really why he's so hated and despised. And of course, many people will give similar explanations for racism or any sort of ism, any sort of treatment of the other as this sort of malign evil thing.

It's a way to make sure that that evil thing is not inside oneself or make sure that powerless thing is not inside oneself. You have to put it outside of you and then you have to be large in comparison to it. So as small as fish like and as deformed as Caliban is. That's meant to be the ultimate contrast. What Prospero would want to be after being deposed and what he fears he might be after being deposed. Which explains the hate. I mean, I think Caliban gets more hate than he deserves. You know, there is the story that he tried to rape Miranda, which, you know.

Yes, that would create, you know, there's

34:30 Bill: a continual punishment for that in his slavery. But even he's set free and he's back. He goes back to ruling the island in a state of nature at the end of the play. So even Caliban gets what he wants by the end of the play, he's forgiven as well.

34:45 Wes: And that forgiveness, interestingly, it's premised on very little. Right. Prospero says, well, everyone's expressed remorse, of

34:52 Bill: course, everyone has not.

34:54 Wes: Right. That's remorse.

34:55 Bill: Certainly his brother hasn't.

34:57 Wes: And, yeah, his brother doesn't express it at all. And everyone else, you know, and Caliban just.

35:02 Bill: Well, he at least learns. What a fool. He says, what a fool was I to think of this person as a God. This idiot as a God. So he learns something. He progresses a bit.

35:14 Wes: Yeah, except Caliban sort of will grovel in front of anyone if he thinks it'll get him what it wants. And the others. Yeah, just like all of us. So everyone shows a little contrition in the end, except for Antonio. It all wraps up so quickly. It's not very convincing contrition. And you kind of worry that Prospero, because he's given to give up his magic powers in the end, is essentially putting himself in danger, or at least I do.

35:39 Bill: He was a poor ruler and he intends to give up rule again.

35:43 Wes: Yes.

35:44 Bill: He tends to go back and set up the exact same situation that he had that got him in so much trouble to begin with. Also, someone, one of the commentators I was reading, and you will know more about this than I will, talked about the interdependence of the ruler and the ruled in Hegel. Does that ring any bells? All I can think of it is the ruler has no power without someone to rule over, I suppose. And the people who are ruled over get something out of the being ruled in some way. Do you know anything about.

36:14 Wes: Yeah. So this is the master slave dynamic. It's meant to say something about the development of self consciousness in which we. And by the way, I think this whole idea is very important to the concept of revenge as well. But the development of self consciousness where in which we internalize the recognition of others. So to be conscious of myself in a way is to be conscious of another being conscious of me. And then the temptation is to control that. The temptation is to try to become master of the other's recognition in order to become master of my own self image. And the desire for vengeance comes about when the other. So in Hegel, in the master slave dynamic, the master can't simply eliminate the slave because the master is dependent on that recognition. So the master is in some way a subject himself. So there's that very interesting dialectical relationship between the two.

37:10 Bill: That's fascinating. That's really cool.

37:12 Wes: The way, for me, that's connected to vengeance in the sense that we're all dependent on this to some extent. Right. We all are in some depend upon

37:22 Bill: each other for our self image, for our sense of validity to some extent.

37:28 Wes: Exactly. And when it fails, the threat is felt as existential when it completely fails. So for instance, one of these mass shooters, one of these young kids who's totally emotionally isolated, they are powerless, they are socially powerless in the sense that they have failed to get any sort of recognition from their peers. Sometimes I think they probably think of it in sexual terms. They might think of it in terms of being bullied, but it's a fail to connect to others. It's this radical feeling of having no one. You might think of it as love too, but not being loved by anyone, but really not being seen, not being seen by anyone.

And if we're not seen by anyone, we don't exist. It's felt as an existential threat and people retaliate violently. So if you look at a lot of second degree murder cases and the reasons behind them, it's usually someone has felt humiliated. It's usually someone has been put in a situation where the recognition of the other, again, tells a certain story in which they, the one who wants to retaliate, are made to be powerless and small and humiliated, and the desires to reestablish power for the sake of reestablishing the recognition of the other.

So you engage in vengeance in order to reboot the recognition of the other. Oh, you think I'm nothing, I'm invisible. You can't see me. Well, now you see me. If it takes pain to make you see me, that's what I will do. So, yeah, I think that's very interesting, your connection there to, to Hegel and the master and the slave, because I think this whole anywhere where you have, as you mentioned, the hierarchies and this whole dependence of Prospero on this really, really debased slave figure.

39:13 Bill: That's right. They depend on him for all kinds. Prospero even says we depend on him for things that we need. Bringing in wood and water and things.

39:22 Wes: Obviously they could get their own wood and water. The dependence is deeper than that. Right. They need someone to abuse, essentially. Yeah.

39:32 Bill: Right, right. That's right.

39:34 Wes: And you could see the rape story as a rationalization or just so maybe it happened. But it doesn't matter in a way because there would have been some reason since Caliban was uncivilized, quote, unquote uncivilized or savage, you would have found some reason to say, oh, you've broken the norms that we hold dear, therefore we now have the right to treat you this way. But the desire to treat someone that way is prior, especially after you've been Kicked out and deposed and gone from being the top dog to the lowest. Now, Prospero doesn't have to be lowest, so, yeah.

Caliban, maybe we should talk a little bit about the whole. The comic stuff that goes on with Trinculo and Stefano and the play. Of course, there's a lot that's comic to it, and of course, that's by design. And that's the tragic. I don't know how you explain it. It's a comedy. There's sort of a tragic, potentially tragic structure to the whole thing.

40:29 Bill: Yeah. The theme of revenge, as you said earlier, usually belongs to tragic plays.

40:34 Wes: You have Alonzo and Gonzalo.

40:38 Bill: Yeah. The role of Gonzalo and the other guy are often conflated into one. They're often amalgamated into one part.

40:46 Wes: You have that cast, that group of characters wandering around, and Gonzalo is talking too much and irritating everyone. And then there's the plot between Sebastian

40:57 Bill: and Antonio's plot to kill Alonzo and seize his. Sebastian is what, the brother of Antonio? Is it a. I can't remember.

41:07 Wes: Sebastian is the son of or brother of Alonzo.

41:12 Bill: That's right. So it's a mirror of the relationship of Antonio, of the conflict, the relationship between Antonio and.

41:19 Wes: So, yeah, so Antonio is to. Going. Going to try to incite Sebastian to do the same thing to his brother that Antonio did to his brother. It's an interesting recapitulation of this traumatic thing that happened that is going to now not happen. Right. It's a retelling, in a way, with a better ending. Prospero masters this traumatic thing, in a sense, through this little substory that happens

41:46 Bill: within this domain and the other substories we said earlier involves the same thing, except it's killing Prospero. Caliban tries to convince Stefano and Trinculo to kill Prospero and seize his books. That's the main thing. Get his books, he says.

Yep.

Because that's his power. Yeah. I mean, Stefano and Trinculo and that whole thing, as I say, is slapstick comedy. It's just physical comedy. They're drunk, they're hitting each other, they're doing physical antics. So Shakespeare, you know, even entitled a lot of his plays as you like it or what you will. He tried to give something for everybody. You know, people who like the high stuff. You've got the nobles and the verse. People who like the low stuff, the groundlings. You got Trinculo hiding under Caliban's gabardine and appearing to be a monster to Stefano and It's almost like the Three Stooges.

The two of them. The three of them, you know, Stefano slapping Trinculo, hitting Trinculo when Ariel is fooling them into thinking. Trinculo is saying mean things and stuff. I mean, Shakespeare. Trying to entertain Shakespeare at one point. I don't know where he says it. It's in one of his plays. He says my purpose, both at the first and now, was and is to please. He wants you to like it.

43:10 Wes: This reminds me of Prospero's Epilogue, which

43:13 Bill: I think maybe that's where it is. We should have somebody read that. I'll have my Shakespearean actor just before you read it.

43:19 Wes: I just think this is truly a stunning. And we'll say why in a second. But this is really one of the most stunning moments in all Shakespeare to me. But go ahead.

43:28 Bill: Oh, it is now. My charms are all o'. Erthrown. And what strength I have mine own, which is most faint now. Tis true I must be here confined by you or sent to Naples. Let me not, since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver. Dwell in this bare island by your spell. But release me from my bands with the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill. Or else my project fails, which was to please. Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant. And my ending is despair. Unless I be relieved by prayer which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be. Let your indulgence set me free. And the final couplet recapitulates the main theme of. Of the play. Which I think is one of the proofs that it's not really about colonialism. It's about revenge and forgiveness.

44:39 Wes: What's so stunning is it's reversed now. Right. Prospero is now putting the audience in his place.

44:46 Bill: And Shakespeare is putting his whole all of history saying, set me free from having to write plays anymore. I'm done.

44:55 Wes: Right. I think expanding on that, this set me free from writing plays. So this is part of the back to the whole recognition element that you brought up with Hegel. Which is that the artists is sort

45:04 Bill: of dependent upon his viewers, right?

45:08 Wes: Yes, exactly. And so in a way, is trapped within that little sphere of possible. Of potential recognition for his artistic production. And the idea is that that can go wrong. Right. The audience can be put in the role of the betrayer and the role of an Antonio. In the sense that they may disapprove, they may criticize. And they may prevent you from having a name, they may prevent you from being successful. So your relationship to the audience is always this. You're putting yourself in the position of possibly being humiliated. And in that sense, the whole party, the whole cast of characters, Antonio on down, can be seen as a stand in for the audience.

So the audience is the. In this fantasy, the audience is the potential betrayer, the potential rejecter. It's the audience who is washed up onto the island that now Prospero, Shakespeare's playwright, has in fantasy, taken control of. And his temptation is to punish the audience and by way of punishing his own characters. Right. So the temptation as a writer is to get political or to get moral, to get judgmental. Right. You might want to write a Richard III and not make him charming, not make him powerful, not make him interesting, give in to one's desire to express one's disapproval.

That's the sense in which one is tempted to punish one's characters, I think. And in this case, the temptation is to punish the audience by punishing the characters. So an act of forgiveness is actually required as an artist, an act of forgiveness of one's own characters to be able to forgive them their humanity and let them have their humanity. And an act of forgiveness towards the audience for their potential position of judgment. And then reciprocally, he's going to ask for that forgiveness in return. As you from crimes would pardon be, Let your indulgences set me free.

47:19 Bill: And I guess we should say, you know how the Tempest itself is a symbol of, I think, rage. They keep saying rage. The Tempest is raging. And that also comes from the William Strachey true repertory. He talks about the Tempest as raging. And so the rage becomes calm finally and forgiveness prevails. Forgiveness becomes the calm after the storm. And I guess that ties in with Plato and Christ. I guess these ideas as you from Crimes would pardon me. That comes right out of the New Testament. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Meaning to the extent that we forgive those who trespass against us in like proportion as we forgive those who trespass against us. Judge not lest ye be judged. And Shakespeare doesn't is one of the playwrights who really never judges. And I think in a way he's different from that. That sets him aside from the prevailing ideas of evil in his time in the Christian world, that he comes from evil as a choice, some conception of free will. But Shakespeare accepts cruelty as an unavoidable part of human nature, which therefore has to be forgiven. And he always does.

He always. Even his worst characters, Iago, Richard iii, you have to love him. They're just great.

48:48 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is why I love the Tempest so much, because I see it as a very, very deep reflection on what it means to be an artist. Not just his farewell as a poet, but a very deep reflection on what it all means. And the point is that the act of forgiveness is sort of an essential part of the creative act. So it's not just a way of saying farewell to being a poet. I forgive and you forgive me. It's essential to the creative act as such, the forgiveness towards the audience, the forgiveness towards one's own characters, so that one can write them empathetically and realistically and give them form, which ultimately, by the way, I think is a form of braveness, form which I want to get to, but I think to make them brave, essentially, to make them splendid, to make them beautiful, and the only way to do that is to engage in this act of forgiveness, which is to say there's something about the creative act which always starts out in revenge fantasy, which sounds like an odd thing to say, and maybe that's not true.

49:49 Bill: You can make over the world according to your vision of justice. I suppose you could see that's what all creative impulses would be.

49:59 Wes: Yeah. I think in the beginning, arguably, there is a grandiose element to it. I'm going to be great.

50:04 Bill: I'm going to be the God.

50:06 Wes: Yes, I'm going to be the God. I'm going to create my own little universe or an aesthetic object that is universally appreciated by others. And again, it's sort of temptation to give in, to let that sort of run amok, to let the sense of power that comes with creativity to go too far and become sort of a tyranny, whether it's over one's characters, whether it's over one's artistic process, something that sort of kills off the vitality of it. And the way to get away from that, again, is this the forgiveness aspect of things, I think this internal act of essentially relinquishing power. So he also talks about giving up his rough magic. Right?

50:47 Bill: Rough magic, I here abjure. Right. That's in the big ye elves of Hills, Brooks, standing lakes and groves speech. Right. Yeah. I mean, we might want to talk about why he wants to give up the power. And I think you're onto it. You have to give up control in art in order to produce anything of value. It almost has to come from an unconscious place that you're not controlling. And the more control we have, the more we tend to screw things up. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The play is an abdication of power itself.

51:20 Wes: Yeah. So let's see what he says towards the end here in Act 5, Scene 1. You've mentioned this part before, but the

51:28 Bill: yeals of hills, that big speech where he promises he's going to drown his book.

51:32 Wes: No, I'm thinking of that. If you now beheld them, your affections would become tender. Dost thou think so, spirit? But mine would, sir, were I human. And mine shall. Hast thou which art by air a touch of feeling of their afflictions? And shall not myself one of their kind that relish all as sharply passion as they be kindlier moved than thou art. Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, yet with my nobler reason, gainst my fury do I take part. The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, the sole drift of my purpose not does extend not a frown further.

Go release them, Ariel My charms I'll break their senses I'll restore. And they shall be themselves. So they shall be themselves. Which is another way of talking about, again, one's characters letting the characters be themselves. So to say that the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance. Within the narratives of the play. What does he want exactly? He wants something for Miranda. Right. He wants it to be the case that he's not the only man that Miranda is ever going to see.

52:41 Bill: Right. I think he wants peace. I think he wants the tempest to stop raging. He finds that in order to affect that result, he has to relinquish power. He gets satisfaction through power. But ultimately, to realize the final.

52:59 Wes: Yeah. There are enormous costs to the kind of power he has on the island. The cost is isolation. The cost is what if Caliban says something like, I am the only subjects that you have? Or something like. Or I am all the subjects that you have. Right. The entire kingdom that he once had has been condensed into this one creature. So he's lost. So for himself, he's lost any real relationships. He doesn't have anyone to go out to dinner with. He doesn't have anyone to go out to drinks with. He's isolated. And his daughter, you know, even more critically is on the verge of suffering the same fate.

Right. It's no accident that she is right at the age of her sexual awakening. And the men that she ultimately one of whom she's going to need is going to wash up on the island. You Might you could have called this play Miranda Needs a Man, and her father is going to help her find a man, even if it means making up with his enemies and so on. Because, I mean, what are the alternatives? The alternative is to sort of. I guess to destroy them all and go back to his kingdom and try to take over, something like that. Or to stay on the island and be alone and to have his daughter be alone.

The first alternative also comes with a lot of costs. I don't know how to articulate those exactly right now. But there's a sense in which all his peers, I think his entire social circle is implicated to some degree in what happened to him. So it's not just about, you know, it's like one's family. You're sort of stuck with them. Right. It's not like you can simply strike out and find a new set of family members. You can find friends, but it's not the same sort of thing. And so his choice is between returning to the fold and not returning to the fold and.

54:46 Bill: Yeah, well, also. But it goes for. I think it goes even further than that. I think the peace that he's actually looking for is the peace of the grave. I think he's looking forward to death. He says, after they. Where I hope to see the nuptial of these our dear beloved solemnized. And thence retire me to my Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave. This is right before the epilogue. So he's going to relinquish life itself. And throughout Shakespeare, the desire to relinquish life is everywhere. Hamlet, just to cite one of millions of examples, Hamlet saying, Polonius says, I take my leave of you, my lord.

And Hamlet says, thou canst not, sir, take from me anything. I would more willingly part with all except my life. Except my life. Except my life. He repeats it three times. It's all over Shakespeare. Better thou hadst not been born. The ultimate peace he's looking for. I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it extends beyond life, that his pessimism. He's the most pessimistic writer in English and the second most pessimistic writer in the world, next to Schopenhauer. He just thinks life is horrible and you can't live without suffering, which is said by his 10 million philosophers, particularly the Buddhist philosophy.

So the piece that he's looking for in relinquishing all this stuff isn't just, I think, about going back to Milan and having a decent life. It's about giving up life altogether. I Think that's Shakespeare's highest and dearest ambition. I mean, there really is no way around that. He does celebrate life in all of its colors, but. But all sprinkled everywhere is this sort of death wish.

56:41 Wes: Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. So I guess we might talk about. Or there's one more thing I would touch upon before we quit. And maybe there's other things that you want to talk about as well, but I just wanted to talk about the word brave and Miranda's use of it. I mean, it's used elsewhere in the play as well.

56:57 Bill: Yeah, tell me about that. That's something that I haven't come across.

57:00 Wes: So in the beginning, she talks about the brave vessel who no doubt had some noble creature in it. And when she first meets Ferdinand, she says, what is it? A spirit. Lord, how it looks about. Believe me, sir, it carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit, which, again, I think, fits into the sexual awakening part of things. It's sort of the being stunned by the first man she's attracted to, basically. And then towards the end, Act 5, Scene 1. Oh, wonder how many goodly creatures are there here. How beauteous mankind is. A brave new world that has such people in it. I know. I read that before. And then Prospero says, tis new to thee. And that's her reaction to seeing again all her father's enemies congregating. So it's a wonderful irony there. And of course, it's something that Huxley picked up as the title to his book. And so it's something, I think, that is so culturally resonant.

57:53 Bill: Oh, yeah. It's one of those phrases like into thin air that Shakespeare thought of that are now just in current use every day in England.

58:03 Wes: And Huxley is sort of keyed into the irony of its use here. Right. Because this is a laugh moment. Right. All my father's enemies are, oh, my God. These are all such beautiful. What beautiful people. And it's, you know, for Huxley, it's brave New World Fascist. Right.

58:18 Bill: Or it's authoritarian society.

58:21 Wes: And there he's sort of capturing some of the. I mean, the sense in which it means courage. And it does here, you know, this. The same etymological, like the courage. The idea of the association with brave, with courageous is also there for Shakespeare. It's. It's one of the older etymological roots for it, even though it literally here means splendid. And when you think of splendidness, even, there's sort of a martial connotation to it. So say military parades or Another way of thinking about it is through the use of the word bold, which gets at the sense in which something stands out, something is impressive, something is awesome, but also a way in which if a person is bold, when I was growing up in Ireland, when kids were bad, you'd be called bold.

Oh, you're so bold. So the sense in which you can be, whether it's courageous or just pugilistic in a foolhardy way, or reckless or something like that, unruly.

59:17 Bill: And is there also a sexual connotation to bold? I mean, that there is now. Oh, you're so bold.

59:23 Wes: I don't know.

59:23 Bill: I don't know. Anyway, there's something there. Maybe not. Yeah. All these resonances have to be there.

59:29 Wes: So daring and even I had looked at the etymology of all this at some point. So it possibly comes from the medieval Latin bravus, cutthroat or villain, or from Latin pravus, crooked or depraved. So there is that element of also someone who's sort of an outlaw in a sense. And then there's the Italian bravo, originally wild, savage.

59:52 Bill: So that applies to. It means wild and savage as well,

59:56 Wes: but Middle French, it's brave. I don't know how you pronounce it, but splendid, valiant, all these different connotations. But I connect it to the aesthetic in some sense. I connect it to the sense in which or to the connection of power and the aesthetic. Because one of the things that all the martial or the violent military stuff, which some of these associations give us, I think the nexus of all that, again, is power, which is such an important part of this play. But then the splendid part is the aesthetic part. So I think of this, I think of like a military parade, or say, let's take some scene from a medieval parade of medieval knights or warriors where the sun is glittering off their spears.

And it's all, isn't this all very splendid? Isn't this all amazing and beautiful? So that sort of nexus of the aesthetically beautiful and the powerful is what I think brave really gets at. I mean, for Miranda, I think it's just these are creatures who are fine, they're good looking, or some of them are. They're beautiful, as she says, beauteous. And also they come from another world. They might be spirits, they might be gods. They are. At some point, I think Caliban is convinced that they come from the moon. And I think Caliban uses the word brave as well.

So that these are aliens, basically, who have landed. They might as well have landed in a spaceship. On the island, yeah.

1:01:26 Bill: Caliban thinks of his potential children with Miranda. Oh, no, I don't, he says, and bring forth brave brood. It's Stephano as king, having children with Miranda as. And thou shalt bring forth a brave brood, he says.

1:01:43 Wes: Caliban also says of Stephano and Trinculo, these be brave spirits. And, you know, both Caliban and Miranda are reacting to the novelty of all this.

1:01:53 Bill: So you're saying that brave has almost two meanings that are actually opposite. On the one hand, it refers to power and civilization and splendidness and beauty. On the other hand, it refers to wildness and something degenerate, even.

1:02:11 Wes: Not exactly, I think, you know, and I'm reading, you know, I was just giving a lot of different threads to the etymology. I don't know the extent to which wild or something like that is live, but I was using it to sort of. I was connecting that actually to courage and to the sense in which there might be implications for something martial or for the exercise of power. And then the other side of it, I was thinking purely in aesthetic terms as having a well defined form of being splendid and beautiful, being overpowering in that sense, awe inducing.

So the wildness, I think, that I would connect to people doing either villainous or courageous things, which are both sort of these violently exercising one's power in order to overcome a foe, Something like that. When we think of courage, I think the prototype for that is thinking of courage in war, courageous soldiers doing their thing. That's why it's associated with the marshals. And in this case for Miranda specifically, it's about beauty, it's about splendidness, but it's also about power in the sense that these might be divine creatures, these might be.

And again, this is really fraught with irony because she's living in the enchanted realm with the magician. But it's the idea that these might be superior beings, powerful superior beings. And that's again, the synthesized combo there, power and beauty. So that's my view of that, which is not. It's kind of a speculative way of thinking about it, but I sort of became obsessed with trying to figure out what brave meant precisely in the context of the play. And I think it's important, again, because it goes back to this relationship between power and being an artist that we've discussed.

It goes back to the idea that one of the moments in the creative act is, in a way, the relinquishing of power, as you put it. And the power is really transferred in some sense to. There's still Power in the sense one has the power to delight an audience and has the. You know. And is still engaged in the creative act. But it's transferred away from the initial grandiose moment where one might be a tyrant. And it's relinquished to the artistic object itself. The power is given to the aesthetic. The power is given. And that's what braveness captures for me.

The sense in which power, power becomes aestheticized. Power is given away to the aesthetic object and is not retained by the artist.

1:04:39 Bill: Well, I mean, that might dovetail into the theme of dreams. And we could maybe wind up with that and the theme of death. Again, ultimately, we have to relinquish life, relinquish all power, which is life. And this comes this most powerfully enunciated, I think in the play, in Prospero's speech after the little show he puts on to celebrate Ferdinand and Miranda's nuptials. And Prospero says to Ferdinand and Miranda. Well, he says to Ferdinand, you do look, my son, in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended.

These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air, into the. And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

1:05:58 Wes: Yeah, it's just. It's wonderful.

1:06:00 Bill: I mean, it's a brilliant speech, but I mean, he's really saying that life itself is nothing but a dream, which is a huge philosophical. It's the whole underpinning of, let's say, Advaita Vedanta, a non dualistic Vedanta, which I've been studying lately. The whole thing is impermanent. It's going to go away. And therefore it really partakes of the nature of a dream. Something that really isn't real. This whole life, the whole substance of our life here on earth has no actual reality because of its impermanence. And here again he's using the image of actors, as he often does on the stage. So we're, you know, just as all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. Again, we're just acting this part. And you know, it's been said that there's one situation in which evil is fine. In fact, we even love evil when it's in a play or a movie.

1:06:56 Wes: Yeah.

1:06:57 Bill: And Shakespeare is essentially saying, that's what all this whole thing is. It's just. And everybody in the play, as I said earlier, is constantly trying to shake their heads and say, am I dreaming? This island has provided a place where the line between reality and dreams has been permeated in some way or is hard to distinguish.

1:07:23 Wes: Yeah, it's very hard to distinguish because it looks almost like a function, like I said before, of Prospero's own omnipotent

1:07:30 Bill: fantasy and of his creativity, which is he's the playwright again, creating a world that's not real. So the whole world, all of his power and all of our human power, as well as his supernatural power, is all illusory. The whole world is illusory, he's saying. Seems to be saying here.

1:07:49 Wes: Yeah, that's exactly. I mean, and I think part of it is simply temporality. Right. So talking about cloud capped towers and gorgeous palaces and temples, all of these things will ultimately go. The great globe itself, the world will eventually.

1:08:04 Bill: Eventually the name of his theater as well as the name of the world.

1:08:07 Wes: Yeah. So it'll all come to an end. It'll all die, essentially.

1:08:11 Bill: It's all going to be gone. It's going to just fade away into nothing. Which physicists tell us is probably more or less what's going to happen.

1:08:19 Wes: Right. And I think part of the significance of that is there's a certain pretense to often unconscious, but to immortality, I think. Often unconscious in the way we think about status and power in our own lives. As if we can sort of transcend our own mortality by acquiring power and acquiring recognition from others. Again, there's that theme. And I think, you know, if we were to truly understand our own mortality, we would understand the futility of trying to acquire all of that stuff which isn't going to perform the function that unconsciously we seem to think it's going to perform.

It's not going to keep us alive forever. All the people that we're impressing and have power over are going to die as well. We're going to die. And even if he become quasi immortal through your writing, as Shakespeare has, one day the entire earth is simply going to be destroyed as well. There will be no more Shakespeare.

1:09:19 Bill: Yeah.

1:09:19 Wes: Where rack means wreck. So not even the wreckage will be there. Not even the.

1:09:23 Bill: Yeah, that's right. In the sonnets he writes a lot about how in mortal verse. And unless this miracle happens, might that in black ink my love shall still shine bright. You know, he's saying earlier in the sonnets that his writing is going to be immortal, but here he seems to have realized nothing's going to be immortal at all. It's a baseless vision. Baseless fabric of this vision.

1:09:47 Wes: All right. Well, I think that's a very good way to. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

1:09:51 Bill: We have to ask our audience to forgive us for failing to plumb the depths of this play. But we've done our best in our time upon the stage, upon the podcast.

1:10:03 Wes: Well, I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks, Bill, for coming on. And that was great.

1:10:07 Bill: Yeah, thanks for having me, Wes. This is great.

1:10:09 Wes: So I can't remember the stuff Mark does at the end, so I'll just leave it at that. Good night.

1:10:14 Bill: Good night. Thanks for listening.