Questing

I have an assigment that's due in a few days. It's to create a program note for Shakespeare's The Tempest. At first, I was a little annoyed; this year, we're also studying plays like A Dream Play, Master Harold and the Boys, Hedda Gabler, and a bunch of others, and I got stuck doing The Tempest. Don't get me wrong - I really do like Shakespeare, and honestly, I don't mind The Tempest, either. It's just that I really didn't have anything to say about it.

For class, I bought a specific edition of the play, The Oxford Shakespeare edition. And it wasn't the play itself that really made the impact on me, but a tiny piece of the introduction. One of the intro's sub-headings was "genre". It's something that I haven't really considered before as it relates to The Tempest, but as soon as I saw that word, I knew what my program note would be about. The genre of the play. Because it's considered a romance, which, when I think about it, strikes me as sort of strange. My first instinct when it comes to The Tempest is serious themes with a lighthearted coating. Kind of like those Advil with candy-coating: the purpose, what makes it work, is serious, but it's coated with comedy to help it go down.

I think trying to catagorize the play is a mistake. If I were ever in charge of (or had an influence on) a production of The Tempest, I would encourage everyone, including the audience, to leave any assumptions about the play at the door. And although that seems like it could be a weak and obvious thing to say, it really isn't. The proof is that I've been a theatre student for over four years, studied Shakespeare countless times (heck, I even studied The Tempest in particular!), and I still needed that tiny, two paragraph blurb on genre to remind me not to get stuck in conventions. I still needed to remember that the strongest pieces can't be flattened and stuck into labeled drawers. That's why they're theatre.