Tempests

[miss_yt]

It's raining like crazy outside and I'm here typesetting a Penguin edition of The Tempest. It's like one of God's bad puns or something.

The Tempest is a very interesting play. It was Shakespeare's last work that he wrote on his own, and one of only two that he did not develop from a previously existing story (the other being A Midsummer Night's Dream). It might be as simple as the bard's fantastical last dance before his retirement, or it could be seen as a clever and rather disturbing satire on colonialism, racism, the editing of the past to suit the present, and the bizarre Euroamerican frontier mindset that both loves and loathes unspoiled nature and indigenous, "uncivilized" peoples.

I know a lot of people my age don't like Shakespeare (in fact, I think it's sort of fashionable these days to reject him), but he's much more interesting if you don't take his writing at face value.

Comments

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I love Shakespeare. My openly admitting this caused me a bit of grief in high school. . . not so much in college or the real world, thank heavens. After I joined a Shakespeare Reading Group, it turns out I like the comedies and histories even better than some of the tragdies I'd been started on.