If embracing our own errors is so difficult, you can only imagine how difficult it is for us to embrace the errors of others. The Tempest displays this difficulty quite effectively. In the early going of The Tempest, it’s rather easy to despise Prospero. He displaces and enslaves Caliban, enslaves Ariel, and treats everything except [...]

I have mentioned the “mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream throughout these blogs, and there’s good reason. Their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe is a great example of how the errors of others can and should be embraced, but they aren’t the only ones to err in this play. Like the Comedy of Errors, A [...]

Unlike Hamlet, King Lear is the perfect example of a decisive leader but much more tragic. Hamlet loses everyone around him but is disgusted they’re alive. Lear sincerely loves his daughters when faced with Death, so losing them is all too tragic. But Lear learns something, which is why King Lear is the quintessential story [...]

James Joyce’s Ulysses describes mistakes as “portals to discovery,” but very few of us, especially Americans, would describe mistakes in this way. Americans avoid error like the plague, and that again may be due to the commodification of our society. Alina Tugend’s Better By Mistake explains how this shared vision of error develops. “Our response [...]

William Shakespeare wanted us to make mistakes. He knew, both first-hand and through his writing, that error was the foundation for learning. But Shakespeare also recognized which errors were worth making and which errors could kill us. Shakespeare may have written to entertain, but he also wrote to educate. His audience consisted mostly of under-educated, [...]

In conducting my research of Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and sonnets, I made some interesting discoveries. I used OpenSourceShakespeare.org to peruse all of Shakespeare’s work for use of the word “err,” and found a surprising fact that’s irrelevant to my research, but interesting nonetheless. Shakespeare’s favorite word to use was “merry” or any of its derivatives [...]

Last week I was rather critical of Prospero, who I felt was invasive and unsympathetic to Caliban and Ariel. I still believe this to be true, but Prospero does possess the most important of all qualities. He is aware of man’s fallibility and willing to forgive. This quality doesn’t come easily to him, however, as [...]

Shakespeare is believed to have written The Tempest around 1610, and though we know there was a lot of colonization during this period, I wanted to find a specific example that could have motivated our author to write the play. On August 9, 1610, the English attacked the Paspahegh village, killed their native queen, her children, and [...]

We all get it in the end. It, of course, being death. We all get death in the end. There’s no denying that, especially in the case of Shakespeare’s King Lear. But there’s another it that’s a tad more optimistic and somewhat enlightening – life. We all get life in the end. I’m not talking about [...]