The TEMPEST: Anticipating the Next, part 1

The TEMPEST: Anticipating the Next

[This post looks at Shakespeare’s play THE TEMPEST as a myth of the transition from the Medieval to the Modern to the Next. This links to the Teeter Totter of the Brain and other writings on this blog. This will be a two parter.]

Good artists express what it is to live in their time. Very good artists do this and express something universal about being human. Great artists express not only their time and the universal, but over the course of their artistic life evolve through the eras of human/artistic development to the point of anticipating what will come next. This can be found in the work of Rembrandt, Picasso, Martha Graham, Michelangelo, Tennessee Williams and others. [i]

Shakespeare charted this path. He began by revising a classical play (Comedy of Errors), worked his way through the Middle Ages (the History plays), explored the Renaissance (R&J through Merchant of Venice), and laid the ground for the Modern (Hamlet). In his final solo play, The Tempest, Shakespeare anticipated what is coming next for us, what I call simply for now the Next. This play gives us the background, challenge and blueprint for our transition from the post-Modern to the Next.

Back Story

Prospero was the Duke of Milan, an important city-state in Northern Italy. Prospero, by his own account, was considered a well loved and benevolent leader. However, he was more interested in research and developing this mind than running a city-state. He explored the powers beyond the physical through alchemy, sorcery or magic. These were right brain medieval endeavors in opposition to left brain modern scientific pursuits.

Prospero gave the mundane responsibilities of governing his fiefdom to his younger brother, Antonio, who excelled in the details and bureaucracy of governing. As he became increasingly detached from his people, Antonio developed his allies and longed to be the Duke. Antonio made a deal with the King of Naples to support a coup in exchange for subjugation and yearly tribute. [ii] One night, Antonio and his men seized Prospero and rushed him out of the Kingdom. He was set adrift in a lifeboat with his baby daughter, Miranda. A benevolent Neapolitan, named Gonzago, provided Prospero and his daughter food and more importantly his books.

This to me is a story of how the left brain usurped the right brain or the Modern dethroned the Medieval. The right brain was the elder and rightful ruler. It led during the medieval era. Prospero feels like a medieval ruler focused on alchemical pursuits and dreams rather than commerce and the details. The left brain is to be its lieutenant or emissary. During the Renaissance the left brain rose, driven by literacy and reason, to match and surpass the right brain. Antonio is analytical and pragmatic. He plots with Alonso, the dominate unified hierarchy, to grab power. Once in power, he exiles the right brain from the leadership including a propaganda campaign to demonize the workings of the right brain.

Prospero and Miranda were shipwrecked on a supposed deserted island. It had been the island of Sycorax, a mighty witch. There they found Caliban, the part human son of Sycorax, lost and alone without his mother. [iii] Prospero also found a magical sprite, Ariel, imprisoned in a tree trunk by Sycorax. By releasing Ariel, Prospero becomes his/her/its master.

Sycorax had been a witch who was exiled from Angiers when she became pregnant with Caliban. It is easy to think of her as evil and unnatural as described by Prospero and Ariel. It’s important to keep in mind that the rising left brain pushed the culture toward the patriarchal and the denigration of women. It wasn’t just the right brain, but the feminine that lost in this rise. As the medieval era gave way to the modern there were many witches burned at the stake for consorting with the devil. The other way to read this was that there were many wise women, midwifes and sages who were eliminated so the new patriarchal could rise. This also happened as the world turned from the primitive to the classical era; the earth mother was sacrificed to the sky father. The story of Sycorax is another shadow of the transition from the medieval to the modern.

Prospero goes underground when he arrives on the island. In the Hero’s Journey, our masculine hero must go underground to a deserted place after a significant defeat.[iv] In this time of despair and questioning, he slowly rebuilds his ego and recharges for the penultimate battle. This period usually coincides with mid-life. In the healthy passage through the underground, our hero focuses on tasks of life, gains wisdom and perspective to move forward into maturity. In the unhealthy passage, he puts his energy in returning to his youth with power symbols like the possession of young women and fast transportation. The healthy passage includes grief, loss, despair, and soul searching. It takes years, at least one cycle of seven years. For Prospero, this time was at least two cycles totaling twelve to fourteen years. Many men you meet in their forties and early fifties have gone underground.

Caliban and Ariel present the two poles that the right brain must balance. Caliban is the baser, more animal part of our nature. He initially lacks the higher functions of language or reason. He is of the earth and ground. He represents the baser desires for primary needs of food, water, shelter and sex. In contrast Ariel is gender neutral and of the sky. Ariel is spirit, magic and the ethereal. Ariel transcends the laws of physical time and space and helps Prospero expand beyond his physical reality. The third aspect that Prospero must incorporate is the feminine, what Jung might call his anima. It is easier to imagine this as Miranda. However, it is more incorporated than that. It is in some way the reason we have seen this explosion of women playing Prospero.

Act I

As the Modern era has developed, technology has allowed for the world to expand and become more interconnected. What was the other side of the world has becomes our immediate trading partner. This is represented by the King of Naples choice to marry his daughter to the King of Tunisia, or Tunis as they call it. This is the impetus of the encounter in the play. Alonso, the King of Naples, is returning from the wedding with his son Ferdinand, his brother Sebastion, Prospero’s brother Antonio, Gonzago and others of the court when their ship is diverted to the island by Prospero.

Prospero with Ariel’s help brings up a violent storm that separates different groups from the ship. All are convinced that the others are lost. Alonso, Antonio, Sebastion, Gonzago, and a few lords end up on one part of the island. Ferdinand, the King’s son, ends up stranded on another part of the island lamenting his father’s death. Two servants, Stephano and Trinculo end up in another part of the island with a butt of wine.

The ship remains safely at harbor with the crew asleep. Prospero’s revenge is ordered, measured and deliberate. Where he could have simply sunk them all, he has devises on how things will come out. This is a shift from a Hamlet who cannot fathom or accept the consequences of his choices. While Prospero does not see the future, he anticipates and plans for outcomes. What is not know is not so much what will happen as how he will be/feel/know and others will be/feel/know when they get there. There is a clear differentiation between actions and human experience.

After the storm, Miranda and Prospero visit Caliban.[v] It is here that you get a glimpse of the relationship between the sage father, ingénue virgin and the wild young male sexual energy. When Prospero arrived on the island, he found Caliban abandoned there after his mother’s death. He was a wild man. Prospero treated him with kindness and civilized him by teaching him language. Miranda as she grew up with Caliban probably treated him as a brother and actively taught him.

The civilizing could not overcome his young male sexual desire for the only female on the island and the only one he ever saw other than his mother. Something shifted in the relationship between Caliban and Miranda. At some point, he made a physical advance to her; whether this was a rape or something less, the sexual advance was unexpected and uninvited by Miranda. Caliban was exiled from the cell where they lived to a nearby cave. I imagine only happened a short time before the play begins.[vi] This clues Prospero into the maturity of his daughter and speeds the need to lure in a proper suitor.

That “proper” suitor is Ferdinand, son of King Alonso of Naples. During the storm, he was thrown overboard. He made his way, with Ariel’s help, to another part of the island where he is morning the loss of his father. He follows a dirge sung by Ariel that reminds him of his dead father. In this most vulnerable place of loss, he sees Miranda for the first time. At first sight, Miranda and Ferdinand are smitten with each other. Upon seeing Miranda, he believes she is the goddess of this island that commands music in the air. Miranda thinks him a thing divine and not natural. Though this is Prospero’s desire, he must slow this down because they are falling in love with image of themselves in the other. This is what Jung would refer to as a falling in love with the anima projection. To break this spell and give them time to see each other as they are so they might develop a true love, Prospero calls Ferdinand a spy and imprisons him.  

Act II

Alonso, Antonio, the King’s Brother Sebastion, Gonzalo and a few other lords are shipwrecked on another part of the island. While most of this scene is about being stranded and the King mourning the loss of his son, I’m interested in two exchanges: Gonzalo’s Commonwealth and the attempted assassination of the King by Antonio and Sebastion.

As an attempt to lift the King’s spirits, the wise old man Gonzalo describes how he could make this barren island into a utopia. He imagines a world where everyone is equal and shares the bounty of the land. In his commonwealth, there would be no need for sweat or treachery. This idea anticipated and inspired the philosophers of the Enlightenment and even the founding of the new world. It echoed a desire to make these newly discovered countries better than countries of the old world; basically scrapping the old and starting over. This thought inspired the birth of United States. It also holds the hope of the era that is to come. In a right brain dominated world could we all be equal and share the resources? Or, is this as much an illusion as the island of Prospero?

While the King and the others sleep, Antonio tries to coerce Sebastion into killing the King and Gonzalo. In this way, Sebastion would succeed his brother as Antonio took the reins of power from his own brother. (Sebastion would also owe Antonio giving him power over him.) Once the left brain, gathers power it continues to eat up all around him. Alonso’s grief (and leaning to the emotional right brain) over the loss of his son has made him vulnerable. Antonio also demonstrates that he has not changed or repented in the ensuing years. The unrepentant must be punished. Ariel thwarts the murder and assassination by waking Gonzalo who awakes the others. Antonio and Sebastion must make a story as to why they were standing over the others with their knives drawn.

Act II also introduces the drunken butler, Stephano, and a jester, Trinculo. They meet with Caliban through awkward circumstances and he believes, with the help of Stephano’s bottle of liquor, them to be moon gods. Besides for always needing to have clowns, I wonder why this merry trio is part of the journey. Did Prospero plan to have Stephano and Trinculo wandering around the island with Caliban plotting a coup? Or, this is this something Ariel did on his own for his amusement? It seems strange on well planned out day for Prospero to allow these clowns to possibly muck it up. For me, it demonstrates how the clown energy lives outside of the control of the dominate paradigm, whether it is the left of right brain.

In his drunkenness, Caliban sees a path to freedom. While this contains echoes of freedom from slavery and oppressed indigenous people, especially the Native Americans,[vii] also speaks to me about the enslavement of the cerebellum, the so-called reptilian brain, which controls our bodily functions, primary impulses and physical intelligence. This rear part of our brain is over-shadowed and controlled by the frontal lobe. Alcohol subdues the upper brain functions. Caliban in his drunkenness cries “Freedom, high-day, Freedom!”

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[i] This is one of my big thoughts. I plan to write the big book on this idea when I retire. It will take time and more perspective than I can muster while I work full time.

[ii] The Kingdom of Naples never spread as far north as Milan. This is another example that demonstrates the guy who wrote these plays never travelled to Italy. The writer of the plays lacked a basic understanding of geography that would be learned by travelling. The Earl of Oxford, who many believe penned the plays, is known to have travelled to Milan, Naples and Sicily. The writer of the plays seemingly never left Southern England, someone like the actor and son of a glove maker, William Shakespeare.

[iii] One version of this back story (though not supported in the text I.2.391-422) has Sycorax still being alive when Prospero hits the island. Caliban is the offspring of their union. Sycorax is dead at the beginning of the play. How and when she died is not part of this story. An interesting story to create would be Prospero’s arrival on the island, their affair and her death. I imagine it was fraught with drama. In this version, Caliban would be the half brother of Miranda, making his attempted “rape” of her double down with incest.

[iv] In the feminine hero journey, there is also a transition similar to going underground for women. For most women it occurs between child raising and coming into the wise woman archetype or the “crone”. (The term has too much western fairy tale baggage, but it is the appropriate term for both the beneficial and shadow aspects of the archetype)

[v] I’m not sure why. Getting more firewood seems to be inconsequential. Prospero says he has other business for Caliban, but does not ask him to do anything else. Symbolically, getting the fire wood to provide warmth and cook food fulfills a basic need. Perhaps, the idea is that even when performing great magic on a monumental day, you still need to attend to gathering firewood.

[vi] This incident was catastrophic for this little nuclear family of Prospero, Miranda and Caliban. They had lived like a family for a dozen or more years. It is reported in Act I Scene 2, lines 345-365. Prospero uses the text “thou didst seek to violate the honor of my child.” It sounds like “rape.” I put quotes around the “rape” because it is unclear if this was an attraction that was easily rebuffed by Miranda or Caliban’s attempt to physically take Miranda that was stopped by Prospero. There seems to be some disconnect between the actual incident and the reporting. This often happens in Shakespeare. Miranda is clearly upset in the play by what happened between them what feels like soon before the action of the play. Between the First Folio and last century, some scholar when editing the text decided that the “Abhorred Slave” speech should be spoken by Prospero rather than Miranda. Doing so really takes the teeth out of Miranda and the incident. Thankfully, the speech has been restored to Miranda in the last century.

[vii] The impact of the European arrival in the Americas on the natives is a story that has been watered down. It is possible that the diseases and warfare brought by Europeans killed up to 90% of the native population. A hundred years after Columbus “discovered” the new world, Shakespeare had to know about this genocide. (That phrase might be harsh, since most of the deaths were unintentionally caused by disease that the Europeans were unaware they carried.) Some productions of the TEMPEST want to make the play predominantly about the

subjugation of the colored man by the white man. Being part English and part Native American, the dichotomy of this relationship lives deep in me. However, it is a part of the large canvas of the play, though not the whole story.

As You Like It: What if Orlando knew?

As You Like It: What if Orlando knew?

Of all of the heroines in Shakespeare’s Canon, I have always loved Rosalind. Since I first read her at fifteen, she was my desire. But, I hated her play, AS YOU LIKE IT. The problem was Orlando. I could never be as stupid or vapid as he had to be not figure out this boy in the forest, Ganymede, was actually Rosalind, the woman he fell in love with at Court.[i] He’s wandering around the forest posting hideous poetry extolling the virtues of “his Rosalind”, then he meets her disguised as a boy and he doesn’t recognize her. What a dolt.

Remember, both Rosalind and Orlando were banished from the Court. They separately escaped to the Forest where Duke Senior is hiding out after being usurped by Duke Fred. When Orlando meets Rosalind in the forest, she is disguised like a teenage boy called Ganymede. Rosalind (as Ganymede) abuses Orlando for marring the trees with bad poetry and questions if he is a true love. She/he offers to cure Orlando of his love sickness by having him pretend that he/she is his love, Rosalind. Orlando accepts the cure, to pleasure and annoyance.

Everyone plays Orlando as if he doesn’t know Ganymede is actually Rosalind. Most play this misidentification until the end of the play when Rosalind returns in her female attire. Some Orlandos figure it out in Act V, Scene 2 when Orlando responds: “I can live no longer by thinking.” to Rosalind’s question: “Why then tomorrow I cannot serve your turn for Rosalind?”

How could Orlando be so stupid as not recognize her? Being in love with Rosalind as I was, how could I see myself in this dolt? I’m sure I would have figured it out. It doesn’t help that most Rosalinds do not pull off the boy disguise. I mean, who are they kidding? And, don’t start flinging phrases like the “throes of love” or the “willful suspension of disbelief”. I thought, if theater was to instruct me on how to live in my world (and find a girl like Rosalind), I needed a better example than Orlando.

I stage managed WOMEN OF WILL, PART II, Tina Packer’s exploration of the feminine in Shakespeare. These lecture/performances gave/give Tina the opportunity to discuss her big ideas about Shakespeare and the chance to play all of the leading women in Shakespeare.[ii] In the second part Going Underground or Dying Tell the Truth,[iii] Tina and Johnny Lee Davenport played Rosalind and Orlando in a section of Act IV, Scene 1. They were well past being the age of young lovers. While Tina’s Juliet was fully believable, Johnny Lee and Tina’s maturity deeply undermined the situation of Orlando believing that this Ganymede was not actually Rosalind. It didn’t work. He had to become more foolish to keep it up. And, she had to ignore that he was a daft.  Watching it night after night, I wondered: what if he knew?

What if Orlando knew that Ganymede was Rosalind upon their first meeting in the forest?

Part of the greatness of Shakespeare is that every line can hold many meanings. When you speak the text of lesser playwrights, there is usually only one or two ways to say it. Shakespeare can go lots of places. I started hearing Orlando’s lines with the thought, he knows. It worked for every line. He can know it is Rosalind and choose to play along. This makes him smarter and not an idiot. He chooses to play her game. The flirtation and getting to know you aspects of the scenes become more heightened and sexy.[iv]

The question that follows is: If Orlando knows Ganymede is Rosalind, does Rosalind know that Orlando knows? Either right away or at some moment? And, if she knows he knows, does he know she knows he knows? And does she know that he knows she knows?[v]

When I directed AS YOU LIKE IT at The Shakespeare Project in Frederick, Maryland, now called the Maryland Shakespeare Festival, we gave this idea a go. When Drew Kahl auditioned, he said he’d play anything but Orlando. He couldn’t play that idiot, even Silvius’ unrequited obsession with Phoebe is more playable. However, he became intrigued with the idea of Orlando knowing. It completely worked in the rehearsal room and added so much to the playing. Outside onstage in the big field I doubt many playgoers could figure out the convention, though it continued to inform the playing. I’ve always wondered how it would play in a more intimate space. We played that he knew Ganymede was Rosalind; she realized he knew; and he suspected she knew, though it was unclear if she knew he knew she knew. This added more fun. Don’t believe me? Give it a read with the thought that he knows: As You Like It: III.2 lines 294-435; IV.1; it informs IV.3 lines 74-183; V.2; and V.4.

What I liked best about the idea is that it made the play between Rosalind and Orlando smart. The lesson Rosalind was teaching Orlando was how to love. He was learning how to love her rather than be in love with the idea of her. This was not displaced courtly love. This was the love of two equals.

By learning how to love and come into balance with his own femininity, he could forgive and save his brother’s life when threatened by the lion. The realignment between the masculine-feminine in the relationship between Orlando and Rosalind led to resolving the masculine-masculine feuds between the brothers. Duke Frederick could meet the religious man and not attack Duke Senior and the people of the forest. The play could end in love, marriage and procreation, rather than in hate, bloodshed, and death.

I learned from an Orlando who could recognize the boy in the forest as the woman he loved. This was an Orlando that I could aspire to be. While he learned how to love, so did I.

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[i] Short synopsis if you need more: Duke Frederick has led a coup to oust his brother, Duke Senior. Duke Fred allows his niece, Rosalind, to stay in the court with his daughter, Celia. They’re besties. Duke Senior has fled to the forest where in my view he is hunkering down and preparing for the coming battle against his brother. Orlando is the youngest son of the deceased Sir Roland de Boys. His older brother, Oliver, rejects him. The action in the play is driven by brothers who hate each other. Orlando decides to go to Court to win money by wrestling the champion, Charles, the Wrestler. Oliver pays Charles to kill Orlando. Rosalind meets Orlando. They are smitten. Orlando wins. He beats the champion. When Duke Fred learns he is the son of Sir Roland de Boys, he exiles him. Orlando also learns that Oliver is planning to kill him. He escapes to the forest to join up with Duke Senior. Meanwhile, Duke Fred tells Rosalind she has to leave the court. Rosalind and Celia, who won’t be separated, devise a plan to go find Duke Senior. Due to the perils of young women travelling alone, Rosalind decides to disguise herself as boy. It is in this garb that she meets Orlando in the woods. When she meets him, she abuses him for marring the trees with bad poetry and being a lover. She offers to cure him of his love sickness. Orlando, supposedly believing this is a youth, accepts his cure which involves him treating the boy as his Rosalind.

[ii] WOMEN OF WILL was/is brilliant. It has impacted everything I think about Shakespeare. I count myself lucky to have worked on it. Tina still performs it, sometimes as one part, other times as a six or seven part series. If you have a chance, see it!

[iii] Going Underground or Dying to Tell the Truth – Tina’s thesis is that in the middle plays, the heroines have two choices: disguise themselves in some way and live in a comedy (Portia in Merchant, Viola in 12^th Night, Helena in All’s Well, or Imogen in Cymbeline) or stay in their womanly robes and end up dead in a tragedy (Juliet in R&J, Portia in Julius Caesar, Ophelia in Hamlet, or Desdemona in Othello). They can’t speak the truth as women and stay alive. To survive, they must subvert the system and disguise themselves to speak the truth. The feminine must go underground to survive. It’s pretty bleak, but get’s better in the later plays when the daughter’s redeem the fathers.

[iv] By having him know he is a she you avoid the homoerotic foibles of Orlando falling for Ganymede who is a guy, though secretly played by a girl. He likes a girl, but now he is falling for this boy. Does he like boys or is it because the boy is playing the girl he loves? In Shakespeare’s theater, a boy played a girl pretending to be a boy. Ambiguous sexuality makes for a good telling of this story, but becomes a bit of red herring in any production that does not exclusively want to be about that.

[v] There is a great RSA Animate by Steven Pinker on this topic of communication. I don’t agree with him on all things, but this is shall we say spot on. In it, he talks about the politeness of being inexact in our language. What is implied is different than what is spoken directly. http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-language-as-a-window-into-human-nature

Richard III: The Last Medieval Man

This essay is part of my look at Hamlet and the "To be or Not to be" speech.  Why not start with the first one: To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern.

Before HAMLET, Shakespeare’s first big hit was Richard the Third: Richard, Earl of Gloucester, the Hunchback, the Crook-backed toad, Tricky Dick. Richard marched through the Henry VI plays killing everyone in his way to get the crown for his father, York, and then his older brother, Edward the fat and horny. At the end of Henry VI part III, Richard assassinated King Henry, the Sixth, the pious, the boy who should have been a Saint rather than a King. King Henry tells Richard what a horrible devil he is, how he infects the world and how the world would have been better if he had never been born. Richard gets fed up with listening to this and murders him in the Tower saying: “Die, prophet, in thy speech. For this, amongst the rest, was I ordain’d.”

In the opening soliloquy of the play, The Life and Death of King Richard the Third, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York“, Richard has a dilemma. Edward is now King Edward IV. Peace has returned. What’s a villain like Richard to do during this summer of peace? Dance with the ladies? Right, the hunchback will become a courtier. Well, if he is to be true to his nature and honor God, being a good Medieval Man, he must continue to become the best villain ever.

In the Medieval era, there was a belief that a man had his place in the wheel. He had his place, function and duties. They were pre-ordained by God. A man stayed in his track. If he thought he had a choice or stepped out of his path, he would be damned. He might have a little glory and power for a while, but fate would finally catch up with him. He would be sentenced to eternal damnation. Richard realizes that he has no other option than to be what God made him to be. “For this, amongst the rest, was I ordain’d.”

Hmm, let’s see what would be the height of Villainy? To become King. How audacious would that be for the younger brother, the hunchback toad to become a king? He kills a brother, marries the wife of the previous prince whom he killed, he kills his nephews. He is a great villain, a pious villain.

A great example of this is Act III, Scene 7. Edward has died. Richard and Buckingham put out a rumor that Edward's sons were bastards and illegitimate. The Lord Mayor and the Citizens come to plead for Richard to assume the throne. They demand to see Richard. The mob is told that Richard is at prayer. After many summons while Buckingham riles up the crowd, Richard appears with prayer book in his hand and a Bishop on either side. In some ways this is a farce and a sacrilege that the audience is in on. In another way it is absolutely correct. Richard is doing what God ordained him to do: be a Super Villain. After much begging, Richard finally capitulates. He becomes King Richard the Third of that name. This is a triumph. He is gaming the system while he is abiding by the system. It’s quite brilliant.

Attaining the crown is one thing. Keeping it is the next challenge. He continues to kill everyone in his way, including his friends. Buckingham who helped him to the throne is executed. A villain has to keep up his skills. In time (three plus hours in the theater), an army amasses against Richard at Bosworth Field.

Prior to the penultimate battle, Richard has a dream where all of the people he killed or had killed return to curse him: “despair and die”, you shithead. In that moment, he asks if he is a murderer? He realizes that he might have had a choice. Maybe he didn’t have to be a murderer. But, he’s a Medieval Man. He can’t change his stripes. 

The next day, “A Horse, A Horse, my kingdom for a Horse”, is the end of Richard.

Hamlet, of the "to be or not to be" fame realized that to his downfall he had a choice, but that's another play.

To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Thus begins the big speech from the play Hamlet. This speech and play are universally accepted as being the best, most profound, most significant (add your superlative here) play in the English Language, or of the Millennium, or the History of Man (add your frame of reference here). 

The big question has been: Why is to be or not to be, the question?  Like most people, I’ve always focused on the “to be” and “not to be” parts.  Lately, I’ve come to understand the most important word in the sentence is the “or”. The speech offers two opposite and mutually exclusive options.  It’s not sort of this and sort of that.  It is this or that. It is a choice.  Hamlet has a choice.  It is for him to make.

The version of the play we know is not the first rendering. The story originated in Germany in the 14^th Century.  It was retold many times and performed as a play.  Each writer changed it. Shakespeare based his version on a lost play scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. It was performed in London in the late 1580s. Shakespeare started writing his Hamlet in the early 1590s. It seemingly was performed many times over the decade. One of his early drafts of the play was stolen and printed in 1601.  Scholars call it the “Bad Quarto.”  The thief was capitalizing on the success of the Shakespeare’s newly revised work that was burning up the stage of the newly built Globe Theatre.  Shakespeare’s company quickly printed a “true and perfect copy” of the play the next year, called the “Good Quarto.” [Follow this link to: Ay, there's the point: the Bad Quarto of Hamlet]

The Bad Quarto, like the early renderings of the play, was a straight forward revenge drama.  The Ghost of the King, Hamlet's father, tells Hamlet that his uncle has murdered him and taken his throne and wife.  He commands his son to revenge him.  Hamlet plots his revenge, acts crazy as a diversion, and eventually gets the job done.  There are dramatic twists and plots (otherwise the play would be about fifteen minutes long), but in the end Hamlet exacts his revenge as any good Medieval son should do.

The Good Quarto of Hamlet is a different play.  Sure, it’s still a revenge drama, but it is about something else.  Earlier Hamlets did not question whether they should revenge their dead fathers, the question was how.  This new improved Hamlet (or as I like to think, the Hamlet Reboot, since the treatment he got from Shakespeare is not unlike the current reboots of superhero franchises we see today: Hamlet, the Dark Prince.) questions everything especially whether he should kill the king. 

Whether to revenge or not creates the huge difference between the Bad and Good Quartos. Shakespeare changed the play. This was more than a few additions and notes from a producer. While the plot remained essentially the same, the play changed. He added complexity. The play got longer. The text got sharper, but also more complex. Hamlet’s path is less clear. He watered down Ophelia and made her weaker. Gertrude’s is more of an accomplice to Claudius. Every place where he could Shakespeare made the play more ambivalent.  Yes, he made a better play.  But "why" is the question? 

The biggest change is that the “to be or not to be” speech is moved from the second act to the third act after he has made the plan with the players to perform the a play like the murder of his father to catch his uncle.  (It's all very Perry Mason, if you remember that sort of thing.) In the Bad Quarto: Hamlet says he's going to act crazy; he does the speech acting crazy, the Players show up, he makes a plan to catch Claudius and he stops acting crazy.  In the Good Quarto: he does the speech after he has made the plan with the Players.  This speech is not an acting crazy speech. It's different. This speech is an argument for himself and the audience.

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them, to die to sleep

No more, and by a sleep, to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished to die to sleep, [i]

This is no revenge drama speech. Hamlet's questioning whether he should kill Claudius. He realizes he has a choice. He will also bear the responsibility for his choice. He has two opposite paths. His “to be or not to be” is:

TO BE (to Live)

OR NOT TO BE (to Die)

TO BE (Suffer through one’s life dealing with whatever the world throws at you)

OR NOT TO BE (End your life or the life of someone else, to murder, to kill)

TO BE (Be in civilization and absorb the pain of being in community)

OR NOT TO BE (Be a violent barbarian forcing your will on others)

TO BE (Live and be present, feeling everything that it is to be human)

OR NOT TO BE (To shut off one’s feelings/emotions and be numb in the world)

Or it could be all of the above, plus anything you can imagine “be” to be, all at the same moment.[ii]

The “to be” and the “not to be” are very important, however, the “question” is in the “or”.  There is a choice. Hamlet must make a choice.  This is the difference between the two versions of HAMLET. In the “bad”, Hamlet doesn’t question whether he should revenge his father’s death. It’s his duty. In the “good”, he realizes he has a choice. This is huge. Hamlet has a choice. He has control of this decision. He, not God, has control of his fate. Either choice is valid. He can go either way.

Four hundred years later it’s hard for us to appreciate how remarkable choice is for Hamlet. We post-modern folk, or post-post modern folk or postie-tostie modern folk make decisions and choices every day. But for someone coming out of the Medieval Era, for Hamlet to have a choice and realize it, it is world changing.

Over the ten years of writing this play, Shakespeare came to this understanding because choice was the story of his life.  He understood how new, complex and amazing choice actually is. He had made a choice about becoming a poet and player that changed his life. In the time between starting to write HAMLET and it being a huge hit in the newly opened Globe Theatre some ten years later, Shakespeare’s life changed.

• He had left his small town, his wife and kids.
•  He had turned his back on his father’s trade as a Glove Maker and had become an actor and a poet. (One step above prostitute)
•  He had matured in age from 27 to 37.
•  He had gone from being a minor playwright, an “upstart crow”, to the chief playwright and an actor in the top theater company in London.
• His only son has died at home while Shakespeare was away in London.
• He had made a fortune.
• He had become an Elizabethan Rock Star.

Shakespeare made a choice and his life changed.

Choice was profoundly new for Shakespeare and his age. The Medieval era did not contain options and choices for people. The Medieval Man (I use the term generically though it would have never occurred to the Medieval Man to do so. I’m also speaking in broad generalities. I know this and can argue with myself on any of these points, so please hang with me); the Medieval Man understood his place. He knew where he was in the world. He knew what his job was. If he stayed in his place and followed his predetermined fate, he would go straight to heaven when he died. Life was preordained. Fate was set. Everything was clear. If your father was a stone mason, you would be a stone mason like your grandfather was a stone mason. If you were a serf, you would spend your life working in the dirt, eating the dirt, you would return to the dirt. A Serf was a Serf. A Duke was a Duke. Even the royalty had their place in the wheel, the “great chain of being.” 

You had a responsibility to stay in your path. Life was ordered. There was surety, but no control. A higher power outside the system had control and responsibility for each and every life. There was a minimal concept of individuality and personal identity. Everyone was a cog in the wheel. You were identified by your place in the system. It even became your last name. (The Medieval version of “We are the Borg”) Within this pre-ordained world of fixed hierarchies every person, high or low, would look around and be able to say with absolute certainty: “I have my place in the system.” Life was fated; time was fixed; space was insurmountable. A thing was what it was. This led to that! This was this!

If a person questioned or failed to follow God’s will, he would end up damned for eternity in Hell. You might get there anyway if you were fated by God to go to Hell, but mostly it was reserved for those who didn’t stay in their place, those people who thought they had choices. You could make a choice to be a villain, rogue or actor, but the consequences were completely clear. [Richard III made the most of this. God made him a villain and he committed to it in a big way.  Read: The Last Medieval Man: Richard the Third]

The transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance began as early as 1200. The Crusades, the discovery of Classical writing and rise of the merchant/middle class helped. In England, when King Henry VIII decided to toss out the Catholic Church so he could marry Anne Boleyn, everything went into disarray. Which church do you follow, the Pope’s or your King’s? It created doubt and choice. It didn’t help that the monarchs switched religions back and forth for the next twenty-five years. When Elizabeth I took the throne, she also did something that impacted the creation of the English Golden Age more than anything: Literacy. Due to the installation of public schools, the literacy rate in England went from 20% of the men to 80% in thirty years.[iii] (Only wealthy women were taught to read, even a female monarch couldn’t change things that much.) These elements and many others affected this idea that a man could make a choice about his life. It was a rising tide. [Look for my coming article on Left and Right Brain Architecture: The Teeter Totter of the Brain.]

When Richard Burbage, playing Hamlet, spoke “To be or not to be” on the platform of the Globe Theater in 1601, he embodied the major question of the age. Shakespeare charted the path for the creation of the modern era. For it all begins with having a choice and the challenge of consequences.

Following Hamlet, Elizabethan Man embraced his control over his life. Everything changed. He was on his way to becoming Modern. He now had to choose his path. He had to deal with the consequences. His choice made him unique, an individual. This was the birth of individual identity. “I am a person. I chose this over that. I made this choice. I caused this to happen. I created my life. My future is created by my present." Time became linear. Space could now be crossed in time with effort. Distance became fixed.

(Of course, in a few decades after Shakespeare a group of people thought this was all bullocks, beheaded the King and started to follow God’s will.  It was the type of backlash that always happens when people think they have control over their lives.)

If there was no Shakespeare, then we might not have had a Newton. Classical Mechanics is the physicist expression of Shakespeare’s work. Without Shakespeare, we probably would not have had the Enlightenment. Or, the United States. We don’t get to the Modern. I know I’m overreaching, we probably would get to now without Shakespeare, but it was his clear embodiment of causality and individual choice that gave us the path to the Modern.

With choice came consequences. Hamlet really got this. He became paralyzed with the consequences of his choice. It is the source of modern angst, depression and schizophrenia. Hamlet says so much at the end of the “to be or not to be” speech.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

In the end of the play, Hamlet’s confrontation of causality and his cowardice cause him to throw up his hands and accept that he has no real control of the circumstances.  He needs to remain true to what is right.  Toss the dice and see the way they come up.  He does this, get’s his revenge, kills a few more people and dies, “the rest is silence”. [for more on this read: The Readiness is All]

It has been a four hundred year journey from that day in the Globe Theater to our time that some call post-modern. We are leaving the Modern because about a hundred years ago the painters and the physicists started to suggest that the world works in a different way than we thought. Rather than fixed, everything behaves in a relative way to everything else. It depends on observation which causes entanglement, because as soon as we are involved in the observation it changes the observed. The same thing can be two opposite things at the same time. An electron can be a wave or a particle depending on how we look at it. Time, light and space can bend upon itself. Time is spontaneous and simultaneous. Space bends and can be transgressed instantaneously. “I am both separate and equal. I am both an individual and fully part of the community, I am universal. [I'll have to say about this in the coming month.]

Our experience of our world is changing. The challenge for the writers, dramatists, screenwriters today is to embody the question of our age in the same way Shakespeare embodied his age. For us to get to the Next, the quantum era, we need the human example. Since theatre, films and television are the most human of the art forms, it is dependent on us to lead to the new era.

Knowing that the question is no longer one of choosing opposites, the new question is living in the duality of opposites being true at the same moment. This and that, rather than this or that. The new question might be:

To be and not to be, that is our challenge.

---

[i] Full text of Quarto 2 “To be, or not to be” speech, in original text:

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer

The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune,

Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them, to die to sleepe

No more, and by a sleepe, to say we end

The hart-ake, and the thousand naturall shocks

That flesh is heire to; tis a consumation

Devoutly to be wisht to die to sleepe,

To sleepe, perchance to dreame, I there's the rub,

For in that sleepe of death what dreames may come

When we have shuffled off this mortall coyle

Must give us pause, there's the respect

That makes calamitie of so long life:

For who would beare the whips and scornes of time,

Th'oppressors wrong, the proude mans contumely,

The pangs of despiz'd love, the lawes delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurnes

That patient merrit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himselfe might his quietas make

With a bare bodkin; who would fardels beare,

To grunt and sweat under a wearie life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country, from whose borne

No traviler returnes, puzzels the will,

And makes us rather beare those ills we have,

Then flie to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience dooes make cowards,

And thus the native hiew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard theyr currents turne awry,

And loose the name of action. Soft you now,

The faire Ophelia, Nimph in thy orizons

Be all my sinnes remembred.

[Adapted from Internet Shakespeare Edition: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/Q2/default/]

[ii] This list of “to be’s” are inspired by the work of Tina Packer, Founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company and one of my mentors. While she has spoken often of this speech often, this bit was taken from Women of Will, Tina's lecture/theatrical on the feminine in Shakespeare.

[iii] The actual percentage of increase in literacy is highly debatable. A low number would be an increase of 5% to over 30%. I picked a higher number. The basic idea is that far more men could read and write in 1600 than could in 1560. And this made a huge difference in the culture.