This will first be published on the day, thirty years ago, when I married Hope Lancy.
If all has gone as planned, we are on an island now, far away from troubles, and full of love. Whatever is the case, and wherever we are, there is a magical place where love endures that we reach “by providence divine.”
Marriage doesn’t always feel magical. Many of us reach the shores of love through storms and with great hurts. Others find marriage isolating as if a man has cut himself off from the bigger city.
Marriage was created, in part, for the proper care and raising of children. Only when a man and a woman make love can new human life be created in an act of love. Science and magic may be able to replicate the results, but it is not quite the same. Having children is magical too, but often feels even more isolating, confusing, and upsetting to all we know. Hope and I had five children, one gone to God and four living adult lives. They are our children
This much is true: marriage doesn’t favor the rich, powerful, or the well born. Everybody who falls in love and makes a family is torn between rude earth and highest heaven. We have experienced both in our marriage . . . sometimes in the same hour! We slowly learn the love language of each member of our family, but that very language that lets us love and create beauty can be used to curse.
In his last great play The Tempest: Shakespeare places us on our island of love and shows us for the last time by the magic of his words what a man with Shakespeare’s power over words might do with love. He could command both an Ariel and a Caliban in our island. Ariel is the heavenly power that comes to us in love, but Caliban is the sin-nature that drags us down. We are, all of us, capable of making great beauty with wisdom, but are also saddled with painful foolishness.
The wordsmith, the film maker, the song writer can rouse the spirits within us and around us. They can make us long for goodness or long for evil. Still, even the face of the greatest wizards of words, we have a choice. No moment is so powerful and romantic that we cannot spoil it . . .and unlike Groundhog Day, we don’t get to repeat the situation until we get it right! We must seize the moment (our star!) or be lost . . . and we are often lost.
Shakespeare himself is aware of the limits of even his art. He can create beauty, but even it is mixed with absurdity. Only Shakespeare would dare write a love song with “bow wow” and “cock-a-diddle-dow” in it! There is also danger in invoking love . . . Caliban is violent and not really tamed and even Shakespeare must be beware.
Perhaps he knows, at the end of a long career, that characters like Falstaff have done harm as well as good. Men are foolish enough to admire a rogue if painted in words or on film, but men like Falstaff or Han Solo are not good husbands, fathers, or role models outside of words.
Words can move men and inspire, but Henry V could not have won Agincourt on words alone. He needed the good English longbow men. Words charm, but the charm has limits. On our magical island of love, words, even as powerful as Shakespeare’s poems, will get us there, but reality cannot be ignored.
The storms cannot all be controlled. People, even lovers, have free will they will use and misuse. Nobody would wish to have the raw power of God to use words to create, in any case. We can be sub-creators with words, very powerful, but even Shakespeare cannot do it all. Reality is broken by sin.
If there is one thing that thirty years has taught me, it is that God is in reality molding even more than Prospero. All will be well, though not in the manner I might choose. All is well and if I stop worrying, all will end well without the worry!
Why must we go the long way to bliss? God does not make our wooing too easy lest we take it lightly.
At the end of a long life of words, Shakespeare had also learned. Words are magic that can shape reality, but there are limits. Words are also dangerous, invoking evil as well as good in the human soul. Love is the most powerful word of all . . . taking us to a magical isle. There we can be happy, if we will, or we can mess it all up with our foolishness.
God help me to make the next thirty better than the first thirty . . . and thanks to Hope, they were very good! I say it: “I love Hope,” but I must do more in the face of intractable reality. Do. Speak. Act. All of it is part of this magical isle.
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William Shakespeare went to God four hundred years ago. To recollect his death, I am writing a personal reflection on a few of his plays. I started on Twelfth Night. The Winter’s Tale came next, followed by As You Like It. Romeo and Juliet still matter, Lady Macbeth rebukes the lust for power, and Henry V is a hero. Richard II shows us not to presume on the grace of God or rebel against authority too easily. Coriolanus reminds us that our leaders need integrity and humility. Our life can be joyful if we realize that it is, at best, A Comedy of Errors. Hamlet needs to know himself better and talks to himself less. He is stuck with himself so he had better make his peace with God quickly and should stay far away from Ophelia. Shakespeare gets something wrong in Merchant of Venice . . . though not as badly as some in the English Labour Party or in my Twitter feed. Love if blind, but intellectualism is blind and impotent in Love’s Labours Lost. Brutus kills Caesar, but is overshadowed by him in Julius Caesar. We should learn not to make Much Ado about Nothing. We might all be Antony, but if we would avoid his fate then we must avoid flattery and the superficial love of Troilus and Cressida. We are fools, but our goal should be to accept it and not to degenerate into Biblical fools during our Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard III is a symptom of a bad leadership community, but be careful that use Measure for Measure to guide your reaction to the mess. The modern university is Iago in Othello playing on our sins to destroy the nation. You can’t accumulate your way to a great leader and personal piety in Henry VI (Part I) is not enough to make a great king. God will save the King, not our stupid partisan squabbles seen in Henry VI (Part 2) and not kingmakers as existed in Henry VI (Part 3). Fortunately, in God’s world All’s Well That Ends Well. Two Gentlemen remind me that being in love is grand. King John keeps winning and so loses. Slander always gives way to truth in Cymbeline. We need patrons, but God help us if we flatter them and lose them as Athens did with Timon of Athens. We need good leaders and not have to hope against reason that one turns out well like young Prince Hal in Henry IV Part One. Being powerful is all fun and games, until it isn’t as Henry learns in Henry IV Part Two. Virtue can be jolly and edgy, as The Merry Wives of Windsor show. We can all be shrews and need The Taming of the Shrew. Pericles did not live in a Zootopia, his world was more realistic. No revenge lest we end like Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare shows what the fusion of Christianity and classicism did for all of us in Venus and Adonis. It is hard to be delivered from evil, if we pursue it as did the evil man in The Rape of Lucrece. God save us from the leader like King Lear who rules by tricks and fear, though God will make things the best they can be, usually be sending us a Cordelia. Even she cannot win without a community, as Edward III demonstrates. God can use anyone to be a hero . . . even Henry VIII. We should never underestimate the power of friendship . . . a power as great as romance as Two Noble Kinsmen show. Love is the great magic, creating a place safe from The Tempest.
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