>At 6:30 PM -0600 1/28/03, seiferle wrote:
>In part because the island is threatened and contaminated from the
>beginning, threatened as the play begins with the shipwreck that
>brings the arrival of Alonso, King of Naples, and his company, and
>contaminated because Prospero's depiction of his own presence is so
>couched in terms of revenge for his exile and a perilous escape by
>sea. When he says, "These our actors/...were all spiritis, and/ Are
>melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of
>this vision," it seems to me that he is talking about much more than
>the idea of a fantasy island.
It's more of the teatro mundi, "all the world's a stage".
Be cheerful sir:
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-capped tow'rs, 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. Sir, I am vexed...
(Couldn't resist typing that out. What a speech!) It's one of the
great monologues: the masque is over, and now Prospero bitterly
foresees even the dissolution of "the great globe itself" (both The
Globe theatre and the world) - that all pomp and splendour, all human
mundanities, even the natural world in all its teeming hugeness, are
as "baseless" and "insubstantial" as theatre itself; a mere dream.
It's one of the moments where stage and real world unite: just as the
play-within-a-play ends, so will this one; and it is but a shadow of
our own mortality. The Shakespearean theatre was roofed with a map
of the stars, the 12 signs of the Zodiac: all the company would have
been literally aware of that metaphor.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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