Real-time Tempest?

Does The Tempest take place in real-time?

There are several references to "three hours"  -

ALONSO

If thou be'st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
Were wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost--
How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--
My dear son Ferdinand.

And then, shortly after:

ALONSO

What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?
Your eld'st acquaintance cannot be three hours:
Is she the goddess that hath sever'd us,
And brought us thus together?

Maybe that technically counts as one because it's Alonso both times.  Earlier, though, Miranda had said this:

MIRANDA

Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard: I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoin'd to pile!
Pray, set it down and rest you: when this burns,
'Twill weep for having wearied you. My father
Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself;
He's safe for these three hours.

She's clearly not talking about the same window of time there.  Not only does it happen earlier in the play (when Alonso's three hours won't have passed yet), but she's talking about her father being out of their hair for at least the next three hours.


Just one of those interesting things you spot from time to time. If Romeo and Juliet is "two hours' traffic of the stage," and a full text Hamlet is four hours, how long would The Tempest have been?

O, Serendipitous!

Went over to talk to a coworker today who is getting married at the end of the month.  Another coworker was also there.

"How was your weekend?" asked coworker #2 of engaged coworker, whose fiance travels.

"Good," she replied, "Scott's home. He told me he wants to read The Tempest."

My arms shot into the air, fists raised, like I'd just scored the winning goal.  "Woo!" I exclaim, "Tempest!" I tend to do that.  "Is there a particular reason, or is that entirely random?"

She informs me that he "heard there's a boat in it."  I'm ok with that. The boat may only be in one scene, but it's a good one. :)

Original coworker then comments something to the effect of, "I could only ever read Shakespeare when it was assigned to me. If I just pick it up and start reading I get totally lost."

"You'll need to read my next book," I tell her.  "It comes from this very situation that's happened to me so many times, where grownups tell me that they've got nothing against Shakespeare, it's just that they feel like if they walked into trying to read it or see it they'd be completely lost because they have no idea what's going on."

Coworker nods, "Well, exactly."

"So what I'm doing is working on a series of small guides, just a few dozen pages, that speak directly to this situation. They describe character, plot, famous quotations, important concepts and ideas to watch out for, that sort of thing.  Not in a help-you-study-for-your-English-exam kind of way, but just enough so that you can go to a performance of The Tempest and actually feel like you're going to understand what the heck is going on, and maybe even enjoy it."

Engaged coworker tells me that maybe her soon-to-be-husband should read it.  Other coworker tells me that it's an idea that "sounds awesome."

I should have asked for their credit card numbers. :)  Always Be Closing!

Ancient History

It's a little weird running a blog like this one for as long as I have. You eventually get to a point where you realize that you've been documenting your own life, and you come back to your own notes as reference points.  

What many new readers may not realize is that this blog existed in a different form, long since offline, before even June 2005 when Shakespeare Geek was born.

Yesterday I was looking for the story about the very first time I told The Tempest to my daughter as a bedtime story.  I remember how it went, how they knew Shakespeare as "the name of the song that Daddy's phone plays" because I had David Gilmour's Sonnet 18 as my ringtone.  She asked me who Shakespeare was, and I told her that he wrote the greatest stories anybody has ever written.

I found this post in my offline archives, from June 20, 2005:

I want my kids to learn Shakespeare, just like I want them to learn about computers.  But at 3years old, I have to pick and choose what Katherine is exposed to.  So if I'm going to pick the first play for her to learn, which should it be? 

The tragedies are all right out because she doesn't get the concept of people dying yet. 

I think The Tempest is perfect.  One of the main characters after all is Miranda, a naive little girl.  Sure, maybe she's a teenager in most interpretations of the play (and, I believe, according to Prospero's math), but I don't think that matters in fairy tale rules.  All the princesses always end up getting married to a prince and living happily ever after in those.  And that basically happens here, too.

So, it must have been after that :).  But check it out, from January 8, 2006! A story about finding some Shakespeare books at a dollar store.

"Before leaving I came up with Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear (!), and The Tempest. I'm particularly pleased by those last two, because I am not nearly as familiar with the plot points of King Lear as I would like (who is?), and I have in the past attempted to tell The Tempest to my daughter as a bedtime story, and having a mini freeform script of the play in a pocket reference like this will possibly help me succeed in that attempt." 

In June I was thinking about it, and by January I'd done it.  My plan was in full swing, apparently, by August 2006 when we went to see Taming of the Shrew with some friends in Boston. The poor woman made the mistake of telling me that Shrew was better than Hamlet, because people like comedies, not dark depressing stuff.  No, wait - it gets worse:

"Know what else I hate?" this woman continues, perhaps not realizing or caring how much she has fallen in my eyes. "The Tempest." 

"I've read The Tempest to my 3yr old as a bedtime fairy tale," I tell her. 

"And did she understand it?" 

"She asked me for it. Repeatedly."

I don't know if they ever found her body. :)