Theo Logos's Reviews > The Tempest

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Six years past I commenced to read through Shakespeare’s complete plays. I experienced most as audiobooks, so as to get as close to the theater experience as possible. The Tempest, at that time, left me cold. Being that, not only was it Shakespeare, but one of his most celebrated plays, I didn’t give it a star ranking, as no ranking seemed preferable to a low one.

Six years later I am revisiting this famous play. Honestly, I still don’t love it. I suspect that the very reasons that make it a favorite of Shakespeare scholars are responsible for my antipathy.

The Tempest is widely seen as Shakespeare summing up of his life work — referencing his previous plays, showing his writer’s tricks, and bidding farewell to it all. In modern parlance, it is full of Shakespearean Easter eggs. While this makes it a gold mine for aficionados’s study, it is problematic for actual performance.

I’ve seen this play once, and now listened to two different full cast audio performances (reading along in the text the second time). It is so busy with characters and action that, when experiencing it as a performance, it is difficult to follow the action with understanding. There are too many characters, the principle characters are all either under-written or unsympathetic (Prospero is a right bastard whom I’ve never warmed to), the clowns are sub par (some of the weakest in Shakespeare), and the plot lacks the focus and drive of Shakespeare’s best work. I believe that all, or at least most, of these problems can be attributed to the play being used as a clever summation rather than being focused on a unique tale.

The Tempest does have mitigating graces. Already mentioned is its cleverness as Shakespeare’s summation of his work and implicit farewell. Beyond that, it contains many of Shakespeare’s most brilliant lines, genius flashes of lighting among the too loud and busy thunder of this play. Yet I have still to experience a production of it that can focus that lightning so that it overwhelms the din of its confusing thunder, and I don’t believe that it is all the fault of the players.