Shakespeare's The Tempest

I am pleased with the responses so far that have been helpful for my consideration of what I should talk about with the student.

My greatest difficulty is my own experience of A levels over 50 years ago. They were very different then, and the questions about Shakespeare expected a very deep knowledge of the specified play in context of all Shakespeare's plays AND the Elizabethan theatre generally.

We would have known the set text in detail, and we would have been able to identify the Act, Scene and speaker from a short quote, to put it in context and discuss how that quote moved the action forward.

One of my set works was Macbeth. I attended a special production for schools (I won't name the company - they have improved their standards greatly in the last 50 years). It was a disaster. They had the most informed audience they were ever likely to play to, and messed it up.

Actors forgot their lines and even an entrance was missed. By the end of Act 1 the front row were acting as prompters even though they did not have the text with them. They didn't need the text. They knew it intimately.

We expected cuts, variations of interpretation, some stage business not in the text and an intelligent production. We wanted to consider what the producer/director had changed, why, and whether each change was a valid decision that enhanced our understanding of the play.

What we actually had was the company's under-rehearsed second tier actors fumbling their way through. It would have been a disgrace at a first read-through.

We had a master class in how NOT to perform Shakespeare.

At the end the producer came on stage to apologise. He needed to. He had drastically underestimated the audience.

Next year, the set Shakespeare play was performed by the same company AFTER they had already played it for a fortnight before the public. The difference was obvious even if it still didn't meet the expectations of the students.

Now? Several versions of almost any Shakespeare play are available on line and on DVDs. Students have no excuse for not knowing how a particular play can be presented.

But some students are still too lazy to seek out those productions...
 
Good story, Oggbashan, and all too familiar. I don't know if students are "lazy" or if they have instead been encouraged by a consumer culture to indulge themselves instead of challenge themselves. I don't mean to let them off the hook too easily, because you're right that just a little intellectual curiosity would lead them to multiple online versions of the play, as well as commentaries and histories. But I also think that adults ("adults") have tolerated and often encouraged a world of banal commercial consumption, and discouraged active thinking and curiosity.

Good luck with The Tempest. The play's the thing, obviously, and if we are such stuff as dreams are made on, then I hope you encourage those students to dream.
 
Why the rudeness? I was not endorsing post colonial theory, and in fact I'm no fan. The OP asked what a university student should know, and I took that to mean: "what's the current academic take on The Tempest?" I answered.

Seriously, why all the anti-intellectualism out here? I'm all for entertainment, though I also think we can reach a little bit when we encounter something complex, difficult, and challenging. Why not ask questions of a great work of art? The notion that we should discouraging thinking about art and "take it for what it is" or just "enjoy" it is fine if that's you thing, but why is it so offensive to want to talk it out, look at it from different perspectives, appreciate it in these other ways? Should the OP merely tell his daughter's class to ignore the plurality of meanings, as well as current intellectual trends, and see it only as a good night's entertainment? Doesn't that at least beg the question: what is a good night's entertainment? And why has The Tempest become a critical darling over the last twenty years? What's wrong with *thinking* about the play's extraordinary power?

I presume that some people out here take the Literotica stories as 99% entertainment and discourage any kind of insight or interpretation. But I think it's also possible to find *pleasure,* even erotic pleasure, in thinking about the stories, thinking about their cultural content, thinking about the craft and wordplay, thinking about the authorship, thinking about desire in a broader context, etc. Why put limits on how we approach and appreciate, even love, art?

Yes, of course I was rude - deliberately so, and I was attacking "the current academic take on The Tempest:" Not you, but the post colonial clap trap you referred to. When academics theorize such arrant nonsense, I think it is appropriate to attack them and their contentions in the most robust way possible. Unfortunately politeness implies respect and so in this instance a dose of unambiguous rudeness is, in my view, not merely warranted but absolutely necessary.

I don't think it is anti-intellectual to dismiss spurious nonsense in the bluntest terms. Not to do so gives foolish notions and the academic pedlars of them, a cloak of respect and validity they do not deserve.
 
I am pleased with the responses so far that have been helpful for my consideration of what I should talk about with the student.

My greatest difficulty is my own experience of A levels over 50 years ago. They were very different then, and the questions about Shakespeare expected a very deep knowledge of the specified play in context of all Shakespeare's plays AND the Elizabethan theatre generally.

We would have known the set text in detail, and we would have been able to identify the Act, Scene and speaker from a short quote, to put it in context and discuss how that quote moved the action forward.

One of my set works was Macbeth. I attended a special production for schools (I won't name the company - they have improved their standards greatly in the last 50 years). It was a disaster. They had the most informed audience they were ever likely to play to, and messed it up.

Actors forgot their lines and even an entrance was missed. By the end of Act 1 the front row were acting as prompters even though they did not have the text with them. They didn't need the text. They knew it intimately.

We expected cuts, variations of interpretation, some stage business not in the text and an intelligent production. We wanted to consider what the producer/director had changed, why, and whether each change was a valid decision that enhanced our understanding of the play.

What we actually had was the company's under-rehearsed second tier actors fumbling their way through. It would have been a disgrace at a first read-through.

We had a master class in how NOT to perform Shakespeare.

At the end the producer came on stage to apologise. He needed to. He had drastically underestimated the audience.

Next year, the set Shakespeare play was performed by the same company AFTER they had already played it for a fortnight before the public. The difference was obvious even if it still didn't meet the expectations of the students.

Now? Several versions of almost any Shakespeare play are available on line and on DVDs. Students have no excuse for not knowing how a particular play can be presented.

But some students are still too lazy to seek out those productions...

I'm THAT way with music. Battalions of conductors and musicians have tin ears and fail to GET the score theyre performing. My all-time favorite organists are Feike Asma and the grandson of a composer named Jan Zwart. There's a vid of Asma on a tirade against an organ assistant, and it isn't pleasant. Asma was more than a perfectionist, he corrected Bach! Zwarts grandson is a powerful and sublime performer. It comes out in the sound.

THE ASMA ATTACK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkPEFFEBi9U

EVARHARD ZWART
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHrGagtkRpc
 
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Yes, of course I was rude - deliberately so, and I was attacking "the current academic take on The Tempest:" Not you, but the post colonial clap trap you referred to. When academics theorize such arrant nonsense, I think it is appropriate to attack them and their contentions in the most robust way possible. Unfortunately politeness implies respect and so in this instance a dose of unambiguous rudeness is, in my view, not merely warranted but absolutely necessary.

I don't think it is anti-intellectual to dismiss spurious nonsense in the bluntest terms. Not to do so gives foolish notions and the academic pedlars of them, a cloak of respect and validity they do not deserve.

Believe me when I say I'm no fan of postcolonial theory. If anything, I'm a formalist and an aesthete--old school that is now new school. But to dismiss serious critical exegesis as "spurious nonsense" without offering any real argument does risk seeming anti-intellectual to me. It sounds to me like "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it," but without explaining what's wrong with spinach or perhaps without even tasting the spinach. It's easy to attack high-end theoretical investigations of art as elitist or esoteric, and I would often agree with you. But to call it all "arrant nonsense" is not thoughtful argument but reactionary dismissal. And to say that practitioners of postcolonial theory are "academic peddlers" denies them even the sincerity of their beliefs. I can only repeat that I don't care for such theory, but I wouldn't mind hearing a more serious challenge to their work.

PS: I like this kind of discussion and mean nothing personal by it at all. I'm genuinely interested in what you have to say.
 
They mean what I intend to get across.

So the meaning of words is in your head, not in the word themselves? In that case it would be impossible to take a work "for what it is," since "what it is" is in the author's mind, not on the page ....
 
So the meaning of words is in your head, not in the word themselves? In that case it would be impossible to take a work "for what it is," since "what it is" is in the author's mind, not on the page ....

As you cant get in my head youre compelled to take it as it is.
 
Isaac Asimov: The Immortal Bard.

Since you mentioned Asimov, I might recommend that your daughter look up a book called (I think) Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. It's a two-volume work that explains much of the historical and mythological backgrounds of Shakespeare's plays, and explains many references in the plays to common expressions and political trends of the time that modern reader's wouldn't catch. His analysis of The Tempest was invaluable to my understanding of it.

And he does it with every single play Shakespeare wrote. I thought I knew the plays before I came across this book. I didn't, really.
 
Asimov comments that he wrote the story to get back at English teachers. Additionally he says, that the story is really about himself. Not being able to answer most of the questions he's posed on his works, he realizes he would probably flunk a test on himself.[/I]
I'm sure most of us would. Writers might protest (too much) that a cigar is just a cigar in their works, but if we have any talent at all, we do put in conscious or unconscious layers in regards to themes, messages, motifs, etc. That's why stories that last, last, because they not only strike universal cords, but can be discussed on more than one level.

I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a reader of mine knew more about a story than I do. I don't re-read my stories that frequently and when I do, I sometimes say, "gosh, I forgot I wrote that..." Likewise, I don't always catch things I put in my stories and sometimes, again, surprise myself on a re-read. Shakespeare, who wrote these stories probably under a deadline, might be the same. Especially as he was also focused on working with the actors, dealing with props, scenery, music, a demanding audience, family and finances, and getting onto the next play...

Then again, he was a genius and might have had a mind like a steel trap (the folios were created from actors' memories and people did rely on memory far more than we do now). Maybe Asimov underestimated Shakespeare and he would have remembered all he wrote and why and it's themes, etc. Or not. I wouldn't be surprised either way.
 
I attended a special production for schools (I won't name the company - they have improved their standards greatly in the last 50 years). It was a disaster. They had the most informed audience they were ever likely to play to, and messed it up.
I'm a long-time King Lear fan and when I was in college I got a chance to take extension classes at Cambridge. As it happened, some student company was putting on King Lear, and I eagerly went to see my first play done on a British stage.

I assumed it would be first rate and straight-forward like the RSC productions I'd seen on television. It was, however, "experimental" theater and you can imagine my surprise when, at one point, the actors surrounded two duelers and began to howl, pound the floor and do their best wolf-pack imitation. There were other bizarre things that had me wide-eyed though the entire play wondering what the fuck I was watching. :D And some of the student acting was none too good.

BUT I have to say, I never forgot that play. And I also have to say, I've never seen another Lear that captured the "heart" of that play so well, even if, story-telling-wise, it was the most bizarre. It's rawness tapped into Lear in a way I've never seen duplicated...but the play itself was very hit and miss. Quite a shock to a poor, naive American student who thought all Shakespeare plays put on in Britain would be amazing. :cattail:
 
I'm a long-time King Lear fan and when I was in college I got a chance to take extension classes at Cambridge. As it happened, some student company was putting on King Lear, and I eagerly went to see my first play done on a British stage.

I assumed it would be first rate and straight-forward like the RSC productions I'd seen on television. It was, however, "experimental" theater and you can imagine my surprise when, at one point, the actors surrounded two duelers and began to howl, pound the floor and do their best wolf-pack imitation. There were other bizarre things that had me wide-eyed though the entire play wondering what the fuck I was watching. :D And some of the student acting was none too good.

BUT I have to say, I never forgot that play. And I also have to say, I've never seen another Lear that captured the "heart" of that play so well, even if, story-telling-wise, it was the most bizarre. It's rawness tapped into Lear in a way I've never seen duplicated...but the play itself was very hit and miss. Quite a shock to a poor, naive American student who thought all Shakespeare plays put on in Britain would be amazing. :cattail:

My late wife taught English and she once stood in for another teacher who was lecturing a course on feminism in literature. She set her class - almost entirely composed of very politicized young women the task of analysing Lear's famous diatribe on women - the one that begins:

"Behold yon simpering dame , whose face between her forks presages snow, who minces virtue" etc etc.

To their credit they produced some very good work on the issue.
 
...There were other bizarre things that had me wide-eyed though the entire play wondering what the fuck I was watching. :D And some of the student acting was none too good.

...but the play itself was very hit and miss. Quite a shock to a poor, naive American student who thought all Shakespeare plays put on in Britain would be amazing. :cattail:

I used to be the 'friend of a friend' who was called upon to help out with an amateur Shakespeare society's performances. Usually I was just one of the extras in a crowd scene, and/or a scene shifter.

But sometimes I was actually asked to act when they were absolutely desperate. My worst experience was a production of Everyman. I had the frantic phone call because someone vital couldn't perform. They had shuffled all the real 'actors' around but they needed more people. I arrived ten minutes before the curtain was to rise, not knowing what play I was in, nor that I was actually to speak some lines.

I was to be 'Goods'. My first lines were off-stage, in the wings. I read them with a small torch. My next lines were on stage. I shuffled on, laden down with money bags. My lines were pinned to one of the bags. I made a production of how heavy the bags were while trying to get the script in a position where I could read my lines but the audience couldn't see the paper. I couldn't. Either my paper was visible, or the lines were unreadable because of shadows. I produced my torch and read them by its light.

My impromptu performance was considered to be no worse than some of the others who had been understudies for one role and ended up delivering another.

I was a 'bloody sergeant' in Macbeth, a soldier in some plays when I didn't even know (nor care) what play it was. In one scene I had to take a sudden step backwards and stand behind the throne leaning against it to stop the King's Throne collapsing through the back drop.

It was Coarse Acting at its worst - but the beer was free.
 
Lemme me illustrate howcome all the speculation about purpose is nonsense.

In 1984 I sold a parcel of land with a large pit on it. The pit was fulla crap...old cars, old appliances, and construction debris dumped into the hole. The conventional wisdom warranted the pit as a dump tho the pit was what was left after dirt was removed.

Then a man came along, looked at the pit, and saw an empty pond beneath all that crap. So he bought the property from me, excavated the pit, and had it made into a pond with a fountain.

The Pieta wasn't in the hunk of marble Michaelangelo carved, it was in Michaelangelo. The marble was just marble.
 
Then a man came along, looked at the pit, and saw an empty pond beneath all that crap. So he bought the property from me, excavated the pit, and had it made into a pond with a fountain.

And now he has five nifty alligators too. :)
 
But to dismiss serious critical exegesis as "spurious nonsense" without offering any real argument does risk seeming anti-intellectual to me. It sounds to me like "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it," but without explaining what's wrong with spinach or perhaps without even tasting the spinach. It's easy to attack high-end theoretical investigations of art as elitist or esoteric, and I would often agree with you. But to call it all "arrant nonsense" is not thoughtful argument but reactionary dismissal. And to say that practitioners of postcolonial theory are "academic peddlers" denies them even the sincerity of their beliefs. I can only repeat that I don't care for such theory, but I wouldn't mind hearing a more serious challenge to their work.

PS: I like this kind of discussion and mean nothing personal by it at all. I'm genuinely interested in what you have to say.

I enjoy a good argument too but you are suggesting that I take the proponents of this theory seriously and deal with them point by point. That would be to conduct the argument in conformity with an agenda of their making and I decline to do that. To win this argument it is strategically sounder to insult the argument (and by association, the pedlars of it (I'm well aware of the pejorative tone of 'pedlars' - it's deliberate) My approach will elicit one of two basic responses: either the academic will state his case in detail giving me the opportunity to snipe at him at will, or, as appears the case in this instance no one will take up the cudgells which leaves my "arrant nonsense" as the last word. My "reactionary dismissal" is in my view a perfectly reasonable argumentation strategy.

As an aside, the single thing which irritates me most about modern academic commentary on plays is its excessive concentration on analysis of the literary aspect, almost forgetting that this is performance art, engaging feelings , emotions, movement and the interpretation of the cast to the audience. There was rather a sad comment earlier in this thread (I think) where someone said the play was on their shelf to read - I thought, fer chrissake, go and see the bloody play - it'll teach you far more than a mere reading of it.

The best way to appreciate a play is to take part in the cast, second best is to be in the audience, a very distant third is to merely read it.

Apologies Og - all that had nothing to do with your original request!
 
...

The best way to appreciate a play is to take part in the cast, second best is to be in the audience, a very distant third is to merely read it.

Apologies Og - all that had nothing to do with your original request!

No apology is necessary. I consider it very relevant.

To some extent I share your feelings on modern academic analysis of Shakespeare. The older commentaries tended to deal with the problems of production, how to make the play effective in performance and relevant to a then modern audience.

One series of Shakespeare books I have found very helpful is the Applause series. They deal almost wholly with details of HOW the play could/should be performed with multiple possibilities for some lines.

[Applause Books 211 West 71st St, New York; 406 Vale Road, Tonbridge, Kent - my copy of The Tempest is an eBay purchase ex-library with the title page ripped out so I can't give an ISBN ]
 
I've been digging in my library and I have found a book I wanted:

Shakespeare's Workmanship by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Q), first published in 1918. The last three chapters are about The Tempest, the texts of lectures he delivered in 1915.

As usual, Q's lectures are well worth reading.
 
I enjoy a good argument too but you are suggesting that I take the proponents of this theory seriously and deal with them point by point. That would be to conduct the argument in conformity with an agenda of their making and I decline to do that. To win this argument it is strategically sounder to insult the argument (and by association, the pedlars of it (I'm well aware of the pejorative tone of 'pedlars' - it's deliberate) My approach will elicit one of two basic responses: either the academic will state his case in detail giving me the opportunity to snipe at him at will, or, as appears the case in this instance no one will take up the cudgells which leaves my "arrant nonsense" as the last word. My "reactionary dismissal" is in my view a perfectly reasonable argumentation strategy.

As an aside, the single thing which irritates me most about modern academic commentary on plays is its excessive concentration on analysis of the literary aspect, almost forgetting that this is performance art, engaging feelings , emotions, movement and the interpretation of the cast to the audience. There was rather a sad comment earlier in this thread (I think) where someone said the play was on their shelf to read - I thought, fer chrissake, go and see the bloody play - it'll teach you far more than a mere reading of it.

The best way to appreciate a play is to take part in the cast, second best is to be in the audience, a very distant third is to merely read it.

Apologies Og - all that had nothing to do with your original request!

I'm not sure how to respond, and I'm guessing you have little actual exposure to contemporary literary and cultural theory. I'm also guessing that you're simply not interested in anything that smells of political or cultural interpretation. You believe that art is something very specific and narrow, to be enjoyed in specific ways and discussed only by specific people. Your a priori dismissals of all things academic make it hard to have a serious conversation about the topic. It's like talking to a a climate-change denier who refuses to acknowledge the work being done at the very highest levels of academic research--like Sarah Palin rejecting the "elites." Your dismissive notion that literary critics attend only to the "literary aspect" of a play is tautological, and silly. And you show your lack of understanding of much contemporary work when you say that it ignores feeling; the study of "affect" is quite hot these days.

Oddly, you seem to assume that theater itself is above interpretation and theoretical investigation, as if directors and actors were transparent mediums for the playwright's words. But obviously--or I think obviously--the ideas that circulate through a culture are made manifest on the stage. In fact, the reason that The Tempest has become such a hot commodity over the last twenty years is exactly its depiction of otherness and ethnicity, and many productions have emphasized these "post colonial" ideas. Many actors and directors *embrace* the kinds of interpretive moves that you think are beneath contempt. We never see some pure incarnation of a play; it's always filtered through both a production's and a culture's values and interests. And this does not diminish the emotional reach or experience of the work, nor even the notion of an individual genius subverting dominant values.

I find it funny that I am standing up for much theory that I loathe, but I also find it sad when someone clearly intelligent simply dismisses whole bodies of inquiry without a second thought. It's also astonishingly prescriptive and patronizing to tell people the right way to enjoy and appreciate art. You're doing what you object to in others. It would be like saying that writing about sex is a ludicrous activity; we should just be having sex. But writing and fucking are different (if wonderfully intertwined) activities, and both have merit. The same is true of acting, watching, and reading. And while I agree that there's nothing like watching a marvelous production of Beckett or Ibsen--it can be earth-shaking--I also think that studying the "literary aspect" (the history, the author, the textual variations, the wordplay) has merit, and if it's what gets you off, that's fine with me.
 
headdoctor - like history and all forms of art, Shakespeare's plays are constantly being re-invented and re-examined for a modern audience.

It is a sign of his genius that they can be.

What I find slightly depressing is that each generation seems to think that the current interpretations and the current criticism are the only feasible ones, and that past interpretations and critics were just wrong.

When I was studying English Literature, the critics of the 1950s were the latest modern craze among teachers and academics. I read them, but I also read critics and commentators from the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries as well. I didn't accept that latest always equals best.

Perhaps that's why I got honours for English Lit?
 
headdoctor - like history and all forms of art, Shakespeare's plays are constantly being re-invented and re-examined for a modern audience.

It is a sign of his genius that they can be.

What I find slightly depressing is that each generation seems to think that the current interpretations and the current criticism are the only feasible ones, and that past interpretations and critics were just wrong.

When I was studying English Literature, the critics of the 1950s were the latest modern craze among teachers and academics. I read them, but I also read critics and commentators from the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries as well. I didn't accept that latest always equals best.

Perhaps that's why I got honours for English Lit?

I simply couldn't agree with this more. Johnson, Sidney, Hazlett, Ruskin, Wilde--so many brilliant voices that get turned away for absurd reasons. (Just as it's absurd to turn a blind eye on any smart, perceptive interpretation.)
 
It's all tea leaves and chicken entrails and bones when chalky perfessers go looking for buried treasures. There are no buried treasures.
 
Done it!

I have just spent five hours discussing The Tempest.

Thank you to all those who contributed to this thread. You were very helpful.

Now the student wants to discuss:

Webster's The White Devil,
Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
T S Eliot The Waste Land, and
Blake's poetry.

She has gone away with a small library of books and some texts downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I have just doubled the number of books the household owns.

How can you study English Literature without your own copies of books?
 
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