In week 27 of the humanities crash course, I experienced three more plays by William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest. All three dealt with romantic love in some form — but my mind was still on last week’s plays and the self-referential nature of these works.
Readings
Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest are among Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Still, short recaps are in order. Let’s start with the most famous of the three — and my least favorite – Romeo and Juliet.
The titular characters are teenaged children of feuding families. Romeo meets Juliet when he gatecrashes a party thrown by her father. Not knowing about each other’s background, they fall in love. After a short illicit courtship, they’re secretly married by Friar Lawrence, a friendly priest. Unbeknownst to Juliet, her father arranges for her to marry Paris, a noble gentleman.
A fight breaks out in the streets. After trying unsuccessfully to keep the peace, Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt. Romeo is banished upon pain of death. Lawrence suggests that Juliet drink a potion that makes her seem dead. Once she’s in the family mausoleum, he’ll summon Romeo so they can escape. Lawrence asks a monk to convey the message, but the plague aborts his mission.
Romeo learns of Juliet’s “death.” Distraught, he gets to her tomb, where he finds Paris. They fight and Paris is killed. Seeing Juliet dead, Romeo drinks poison. Just then, Juliet comes to. She sees Paris and Romeo dead, and stabs herself. After all this unnecessary death, their families reconcile.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also about love, but with a very different tone. Theseus, Duke of Athens, is set to wed Hippolita. Egeus asks the king to convince his daughter, Hermia, to marry Demetrius. She wants Lysander instead. Her best friend, Helena, wants Demetrius, but he wants nothing to do with her.
Lysander proposes to Hermia that they elope. They agree to meet in the woods outside town. Courting Demetrius’s favor, Helena informs him of the plan, and they both follow into the woods. They’re not the only ones there: a group of craftsmen — including the boisterous Bottom — meet in the woods to rehearse a play for Theseus’s wedding feast.
Also in the woods, Oberon — king of the faeries — quarrels with his wife, Titania. He commands a sprite named Puck to get a magical flower whose nectar makes a person fall in love with the first thing they see. He plans to use it to punish Titania, but when he sees the human couples in the forest, he commands Puck to use the nectar on them.
Of course, Puck gets it wrong, and much confusion ensues. Puck changes Bottom’s head into that of an ass and Titania — who has been “nectared” — falls in love with Bottom-as-ass. Because this is a comedy, eventually all these threads are resolved to everyone’s satisfaction: Titania ends up with Oberon, Hermia with Lysander, and Helena with Demetrius.
In the play’s final act, the villagers enact the play for all the human couples. The performance is unintentionally hilarious — and a fascinating meta-commentary on the play itself. Eventually, Theseus orders everyone to bed. The faeries clean up the palace. In an epilogue, Puck reminds the audience that what they just saw was an artifice.
The Tempest is also a romantic comedy. Prospero is a powerful sorcerer who lives in a remote island with his daughter, Miranda. He commands Ariel, a powerful yet airy spirit, to unleash a powerful storm that strands a passing ship. Miranda berates her father for causing the apparent shipwreck. Prospero tells her their backstory: he used to be Duke of Milan but was more into books than governance. His brother, Antonio, conspired with Alonso, the King of Naples, to usurp his title and banish them.
Prospero recognized that Antonio and Alonso were onboard the passing ship, so maroons them and other members of the court in different parts of the island. Ferdinand — Alonso’s son — lands close by and falls in love with Miranda. The others make their way to them, and much of the play deals with their interactions as they navigate their circumstances. A subplot follows Caliban, Prospero’s brutish slave, and as he conspires with the king’s drunken servants to overthrow their masters.
At the end, they all come together. Prospero forgives his enemies, frees Ariel, gives up his magic, and has his title restored. In an uncanny epilogue, Prospero breaks the fourth wall by asking the audience to release him by clapping. It works on several levels: by this point, it’s evident that Prospero is a stand-in for Shakespeare himself.
Audiovisual
Music: music inspired by these plays: Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s soundtrack to WEST SIDE STORY and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mendelssohn wrote the latter when he was just seventeen and it features some of the most famous passages in classical music:
Arts: Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1770) — a very famous painting I’d seen many times but had never explored.
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The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough - The Huntington Library via Wikimedia
There’s an excellent short video from the National Gallery in the UK that provides context on the painting:
I’d long assumed this painting was a portrait of a prominent person, and was surprised to discover it’s a “painter’s painting” made to engage in dialogue with other paintings through the medium.
Cinema: there are many cinematic adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, including WEST SIDE STORY. But I disliked that play. When I was wondering what to watch, my son said he wanted to see RAN, Akira Kurosawa’s take on King Lear. I’d seen this a couple of times before, but was happy to oblige, having recently read the play. Lady Kaede remains terrifying — and her comeuppance one of the great shots in cinema history.
For good measure (and taking advantage of the U.S. holiday,) I also watched Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth, THRONE OF BLOOD.
Both adaptations work remarkably well: Shakespeare’s themes transcend particular cultures. That said, I found THRONE OF BLOOD the more powerful of the two: its black and white cinematography is extraordinary.
Reflections
Although this week’s focus was on romantic love, that wasn’t the most interesting theme in these works. Romeo and Juliet, in particular, disappointed me. I first read it in high school, but this is such a familiar story that it just doesn’t feel fresh. It’s one of those stories where stupid characters do stupid things for stupid reasons. (See also The Sheltering Sky.)
What most got to me about these works — at least the other two — is how they use a performance within the performance to comment on the medium of the stageplay itself. It’s most obvious in Midsummer Night’s Dream, which ends with the craftsmen putting on a romantic tragedy that unwittingly — and hilariously — becomes a comedy through incompetence. The play’s other characters serve as their audience, bringing them closer to us. It’s an uncanny effect.
The Tempest goes further: Prospero has his servants put on a spirited performance for Miranda and Fernando, and as they wind down, he says,
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.
This feels very postmodern, especially when you consider Shakespeare’s theater was called the Globe. Here’s a master flaunting his mastery by commenting on the nature of his art using his art. This short speech is especially poignant given this was one of Shakespeare’s later plays. Prospero is a stand-in for the playwright, influencing others by summoning tempests and spirits.
Shakespeare also uses the play-within-a-play trick in Hamlet. There, it moves the plot forward while commenting on the nature of the medium. In The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream, the in-play performances are more explicit and knowing meta-commentaries. Again, a powerful reminder that people in the past were much more sophisticated than we “moderns” assume.
Notes on Note-taking
My approach to understanding classic works keeps evolving. Since I can’t easily transfer notes from the Shakespeare Pro app to Obsidian, I haven’t annotated these plays. Instead, I’m writing brief synopses in Obsidian shortly after finishing each play. Then, I ask ChatGPT (using 4o) for feedback.
By default, ChatGPT wants to re-write my notes. I’ve learned to explicitly ask it not to do that. Instead, my prompt asks for an outline that includes factual errors and improvements. Based on this feedback, I then correct my notes. I’ve pasted those notes verbatim in the “reading notes” section above. Knowing that I’ll be sharing these notes publicly incentivizes me to get them as right as possible, without losing the tone of my first impression.
A question that’s been on my mind this week is, what does it mean to “read” Shakespeare? These works were meant to be performed, not read. While I’ve experienced most of these works by reading written words, I’ve also watched performances and adaptations. Some, like RAN and THRONE OF BLOOD, focus on the story and jettison Shakespeare’s language. But it’s important to also watch performances of the plays themselves.
Lucky for us, some are available on YouTube. Last week, I highlighted King Lear starring Lawerence Olivier. This week, I took in a late 1960s performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, David Warner, Ian Holm, and other famous British actors early in their careers.
It’s astonishing that we can have access to these works for free. (Well, almost free — I pay to eliminate YouTube ads and recommend you do the same.) Watching these works performed makes them much easier to follow — and highlights the latitude directors and actors have to spin these words in different directions. Here’s David Threlfall doing the bit from The Tempest quoted above:
Threlfall looks exactly like I imagined Prospero, but his delivery is slower and more reflective than I had in mind. I could imagine a version of the play with his Prospero versus (for example) John Gielgud’s. Which is to say, stageplays are a performed medium. The text is essential, of course, but not sufficient. How cool is it that we can complement these readings with these performances — and annotate them all the while —in devices that fit in our pockets? Multimedia magic!
Up Next
Gioia recommends artist’s biographies by Giorgio Vasari (which I’ve read) and The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (which I haven’t.) Given I’ve already done the former, I might focus on the latter to make space for some extracurricular reading.
Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!