Sometimes it feels like history and current events are buffeting us around. Like we have no power or agency over what happens to us, like we are just pawns on someone else's chessboard being moved around. What is the relationship between our choices and reality? To what extent do we get a say in what happens to us? How do we find our way out of the storm and back to solid ground? I have to tell you (again) that I love The Tempest. I love the ambiguity of Prospero, how he somehow defies easy labelling as villain or hero. He shimmers back and forth between being our protagonist and our antagonist. I love the idea that Shakespeare uses Prospero as a mouthpiece for his own farewell to the London stage before returning to Stratford-Upon-Avon to be buried in a chapel with his family. "This rough magic I do here abjure." Word magic is the most powerful magic, so of course Shakespeare casts himself as the greatest of magicians. As far as Shameless Magpie goes, Shakespeare's work has been a never-ending well of inspiration to generation after generation of writers and artists of all sorts. From The Tempest specifically, we have text from Ariel's "Full Fathom Five" spell-weaving poem planted in the first section of T. S. Eliot's great modern masterpiece, "The Wasteland:" (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Aldous Huxley took Miranda's earnest exclamation at the widening of her horizons and twists irony into the words by calling his dystopian novel Brave New World, a novel that many have seen echoed in our own newspapers. For those of you who were in here and on the ball in PreAP English 1, Dumas modeled the character the Count of Monte Cristo after Prospero. Like Aldous Huxley and Alexander Dumas, you will be connecting the language and plot of The Tempest to our world. The whole idea behind a classic is that it crystallizes something fundamental about human experience, regardless of the time or place. The Tempest is a classic, and we will be working on tying it's themes to our current reality, today's current events. What storms will you find in our headlines?
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
Categories |