Our revels now are ended
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.
Commentary
It’s been some time since we visited the Bard…
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
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Vikram Doctor · 20 June 1999
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
John Provo · 4 May 2002
If think of this quote from The Tempest in the context of events on September 11, 2001, you can feel the reverberations?
John Provo
William W Armstrong · 15 June 2002
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
…..the dreams that stuff is made of.
William W. Armstrong (“Bill”)
3624 108 Street NW
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6J 1B4
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Richard Southern · 4 October 2002
The proper rendering of the line is
“Yea, all which it…..”
Not “Ye” which gives it a different meaning.
Sasha Fergusson · 5 January 2008
Yes, the piece is very good… And, The Tempest having always been my favourite play, I’ve had it memorized since the age of eight. One of the important things to remember about Shakespeare is that it should never be read like poetry. It should be read as speech. In this piece, I find, it is particularly difficult to avoid reading it as a poem. The piece is about death, and the ‘death’ of the play. It means our lives/the play are immediately over after we die, and we leave no traces behind us. Our revels now are ended… he’s talking about the play, and its happy ending. He actually says that the play was only made up of actors, and that the characters are all gone now that the play is over. Very neat… I wonder if Shakespeare actually thought this about death….
My favourite part: And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.