[126] Our revels now are ended

It's been some time since we visited the Bard...

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-capp'd towers, 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.

    -- William Shakespeare

from 'The Tempest', Act IV, Scene i.

Have I mentioned before that Shakespeare was a genius?

In previous mails I had talked (briefly) about his poetic skills ('Full
Fathom Five', Minstrels Poem #16) and his rhetorical construction
('Pardon me, thou... ', Minstrels Poem #48). Today I'd like to highlight
another of his many talents - an uncanny ability to venture into highly
metaphysical territory without seeming awkward or strained. He does so
often enough for it to be noticeable, yet never enough to seem jarring
or out of place; indeed, it is this very skill of Shakespeare's which
raises his dramatic verse above the level of mere stagecraft and into
the realms of poetry. (Not that his verse was ever 'mere' anything - his
plays, as plays, stand alone, while his poetry - the sheer beauty of his
language - is beyond compare).

Time (and its effect on human affairs) always held a fascination for old
Willy (witness any number of Sonnets, most of Lear and the second half
of Macbeth), and some of his finest flights of poetic fancy have been
inspired by it. Some critics have read in this preoccupation a sort of
morbid pessimism, but I cannot agree with this diagnosis. As far as I'm
concerned, the man was just exploring the human condition to an extent
far ahead of his time... the fact that great poetry was distilled out of
his quest for 'meaning' is just an added bonus.

thomas

From: Vikram Doctor <vikdoc@>


>Time (and its effect on human affairs) always held a fascination for old
>Willy (witness any number of Sonnets, most of Lear and the second half
>of Macbeth), and some of his finest flights of poetic fancy have been
>inspired by it.

I love a couple of lines which are thrown in one of the more obscure plays I 
think - Trolius & Cressida (and that's the other aspect of his genius, his 
sheer volume, so he could write semi-duds like this, along with so much much 
more) where he says, "For time is like a fashionable host/..." damn, I'm 
forgetting the line, it goes on to say because it always has two hands held 
out, one to welcome new guests, the other to say goodbye to departing ones.

Vikram

From: John Provo <provo@>

If think of this quote from The Tempest in the context of events on 
September 11, 2001, you can feel the reverberations?

John Provo

From: William W Armstrong <arms@>

Anyone who has studied quantum physics, knows how our everyday view of
the world gives little inkling of the wierd properties of the matter out
of which it is built. Shakespeare seems to anticipate future discoveries
showing the illusory nature of our perception of the world in his "Our
revels now are ended" speech.  One quantum theorist, David Moser,
referred to quantum particles as

=2E....the dreams that stuff is made of.

William W. Armstrong ("Bill")
3624 108 Street NW
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6J 1B4
Tel. +1 780 438 1103

From: Richard Southern <rsouther@>

The proper rendering of the line is 

"Yea, all which it....."

Not "Ye" which gives it a different meaning.