Rough storm

Listen and watch…

The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Hell is empty, And all the devils are here.

I am listening/watching this on an app on my iPad. I posted about it a few days ago.

As mentioned there, my main motivation really was to watch Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi read this at me. And the hope of understanding it better. The biggest help for the understanding of the text were the annotations and explanation in the app. 

Very, very good! I recommend this app and if they bring out some other play, I will gladly pay for it and watch/listen, whatever play it might be!

Link to app

For tracking purposes I downloaded a kindle unlimited version as well and re-read some parts there as well.

How familiar am I with Shakespeare? Not very. I watched some movies and I read Hamlet about 30 years ago. The Tempest is a first for me, in any kind of medium, I think. I tracked down a movie version with Helen Mirren, that I will probably watch in the next few days.

I am not going to review the actual play, I am sure everything has been said, that could be written about it. And much more knowledgeably.

McKellen is fantastic as Prospero in the app. 

The instalove is a bit odd. They meet, they like what they see and on the spot decide to get hitched. Ok…

At times I felt the need for a translation into plain, current-day English. Some of the speeches went right over my head.

The motivations of the various characters were not always clear to me. Why did Prospero ‚abjure‘, for example, and forgive everybody?

„How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t.“

Is this where Aldous Huxley got the title for his book?

I am sure I will come back to this, re-read and discovery many new things I missed the first time around.