Reflections After Seeing The Tempest

Royal Shakespeare Society, March 2017 Everything you have heard is true: the story has a princess, too innocent even for a fairy world. It has a revenge fantasy, side by side with the vision of a utopian commonwealth. Like all fairy tales, it has a monster at its center. But which character plays the monster? How will you answer me? Should we fear that place because one man rules it? Should we fear him because he is a necromancer, or because he is a grievously wounded man with revenge burning in his heart? Should we fear this man who claims he can revive the dead, or is that just a poet's fancy? Or should we rejoice instead because this place is so real as we watch in wonder? It has weight and presence, and creatures of infinite joy cavort under its changing light and fill its ambient air with the sweetest music. And intelligent stars that know our fates shine over it with unforced kindness. Shakespeare fell silent after this play. At the end he speaks of despair being relieved by prayer and he asks us to set him free to go. We must make our own closure: There is an island you can reach only by risking a storm at sea. There must be a history of grief you carry within, and a willingness to make forgiveness your permanent state of mind and heart. But the hardest task is to toss Prospero's books into the sea, and watch them as they sink past touch, past vision, past any hope of retrieval. Thus must be done yet again when one of us dons Prospero's robe, and finds another set of books just waiting. There is an island that could be paradise, there is a pure woman waving from the shore, and there is a monster at the center, wherever you turn.