The Tempest

June 12 play #2 The Tempest (Chesapeake Shakespeare Company)

Again, this is a play produced by my company- and though I didn't direct it, I can't expected to be objective about the production.

You know, in recent decades, we've created a new category for Shakespeare's plays. In the old days, they were divided up between tragedies, comedies and histories. Now, we have this fourth category- "romances." This includes Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Pericles and the plays we don't know what to do with. One used to hear the phrase "problem play" a lot to describe plays like Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well- now that term has fallen out of fashion, but now we talk about the romances.

What struck me about watching The Tempest last night is how neatly the dramatic and theatrical structure of The Tempest fit in with his earlier comedies. Sure, it's not non-stop laughs, but what Shakespeare comedies are? The Taming of the Shrew and Comedy of Errors, maybe- but look at Much Ado About Nothing- it has a very dark edge to it. The heartbreaking scene where Beatrice asks Benedick to "kill Claudio" certainly has style similarities to this play. Oliver's redemption speech in As You Like It feels like it could have taken place on the island on The Tempest.

Is there such a thing as visual rhythm? If there is, I recognized something about that in last night's production. Like many of Shakespeare's comedies (well, and other plays as well)- you have a great visual event with lots of people at the beginning of the show, then you have about an hour of those visuals being broken down into more focused images- to be completed at the end of the night by another giant tableau. Twelfth Night looks very much like The Tempest in this sense. Taming of the Shrew (sans induction) shares that quality.

People often speculate what happened to the writer of The Tempest after he wrote this play? This, we think is his last solo-written play (and if you've ever written a play that included actors speaking the lines, you'll know that no one ever writes a play by themselves).Right before and after this play, he (and his collaborators) really starts playing around with form- I believe to a less satisfying result. Another thing struck me about the Tempest is that he views his young lovers with less empathy. Romeo and Juliet, Proteus and Julia are enormously flawed people, and immature without a doubt, but interesting, complex people. By the time he gets to Miranda and Ferdinand, it seems like he has no patience left for young lovers. But who could blame him? They seem young and almost inconsequential- Miranda exists only as a vessel for Prospero's love.

I liked The Tempest very much when I was younger and didn;t care for most of Shakespeare. I think, only, because I could follow it relatively easily and it has a real strong sense of theatricality that I loved so much. I don't imagine the forgiveness quality or the parenthood themes made any impression. I assume that works that I cared about when I was younger won't have any meaning to me- but I was happy to see that this one did, although I think in an entirely different way.

Anyway, I don't think this play is a "romance" in any way. I think it's a comedy- using Shakespeare's classic form. It is my contention that scholars take it out of the "comedy" category only because they think it is more "important" than his other comedies. Whatever.