Here I was, already an English major, a reader, a wannabe librarian, a junior in college, and everything I had read or studied up to this point had all just been preparation for this: I read �The Tempest�, by William Shakespeare.I had already enjoyed the other Shakespeare I�d read recently, most especially �The Taming of the Shrew.� But in this play I saw so clearly the genius of the writer, the grasp of the totality of the human experience as a single (yet complex) concept. He knew everything there ever was to know. He had it all figured out. He was the man.
I began to write my final paper for the course using this as my topic, basically, that Shakespeare had stopped writing after this last play because he had it all figured out and he didn�t have anything else to say. The world had opened up; I would write this paper and then all I had to do was read every word that Shakespeare had ever written and I would know everything, too. I was writing like a demon, poring over the texts of his different plays for examples to illustrate my world-shaking (and certainly brilliant) conclusion.
In the last act of the play, the wizard/magician Prospero describes how he has manipulated people�s lives in the past, causing lovers to fall in love and then be separated, causing armies to go to war, bringing both suffering and joy to so many, raising great storms. So it doesn�t take a lot to see here that it�s Shakespeare writing about himself and all the plays he�s written. And then, Prospero says �This rough magic I here abjure�, and it�s Shakespeare saying, �I�m done now, I can retire, I�m not doing this anymore.� Exactly, exactly what I�m saying. This is going to be a kick-ass paper.
I�m working, I�m working, and then all at once, I read over the Epilogue that I�ve already read dozens of times, using it to support my position, and I read, as if for the first time: �Release me from my bands � or else my project fails, which was to please. �My ending is despair � let your indulgence set me free.� Uh oh.
I�m wrong, I�m so wrong, I couldn�t be more wrong. He�s not saying he�s got it all, so he�s earned a nice retirement. He�s saying he didn�t get it at all, and since he�s just figured that out, he�s not doing it anymore. He�s saying that all he ever did was entertain and amuse, and he knows he was okay at that, but as for all those big questions, folks, he�s as clueless as the rest of us.
A day or two of panic here, a conference with my professor, and I begin to re-write the paper. Only now I�m more fascinated by Shakespeare than I was before, when I thought he had all the answers. Now I know that what he really had was an incredibly complete and thorough search for all the answers, and maybe that�s the journey we�re all supposed to be on, anyway. No one says we�ll find anything or get anywhere, but we all have to keep looking.
And since his search is the best one I�ve ever come across, I figure it�s always a good place to keep looking myself. His stories are the best, and are repeated on TV, on soap operas, even, in movies, and everywhere, cause no one set up these plots and characters better than he could. If there were no words to say what he wanted, he made them up, and you�ve got to admire that kind of chutzpah.
When my kids were little, and we had time to kill, like sitting in traffic, I�d tell them a Shakespeare story, not with the original language of course, but just the story. (�So there were these two guys, a boss and the guy who worked for him, and they were on a ship and it went down in a storm. They got to shore, and what do you think they found? Two other guys, a boss and the guy who worked for him, but they looked just like the first two! It turns out they were two sets of twins, separated when they were little. Their parents were a little strange.� And so on.) Both of my girls are also big fans, have both appeared in Shakespeare on stage (for some reason, multiply in �A Midsummer Night�s Dream�). K is taking her Intro to Shakespeare this semester, and R and I are both jealous. As for �Shakespeare In Love�, don�t get any of us started.
If I were lost on a desert island and couldn�t get cable, I�d be happy with �The Complete Works of �� Everything is there. And if you read a play again, you�re likely to find something you didn�t see the first time, or the last time, you looked at it.
There are those who say the real William Shakespeare was an uneducated country boy and couldn�t have written all those plays. I could not care less if that is or isn�t true, and what the real name was of the man (or woman, perhaps) who wrote them. Undeniably, the same genius wrote them all, and we have come to call that genius William Shakespeare, whether he really was or not. It works for me.
