Twelfth Night

‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here’

-William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene III

‘Be not afraid of greatness:  some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them’

                              -William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene V.

Two of William Shakespeare’s most popular comedies are Twelfth Night and The Tempest.  They have seen a resurgence in the last decade.  Whether you realize it or not, there a number of movies and shows that are based, some closer and some more loosely, on these plays.  If any of you have seen a movie titled She’s the Man, it is actually a retelling of Twelfth Night.  While the dialog and setting has been updated, the characters are the same, and some of the more famous quotes have been retained.  Anyway, that kind of thing fascinates me and also shows how the Bard’s works and themes about people and humanity transcend time.  Both of these plays also remind me of what often happens to fathers when they find out that they have a child that has special needs.

Both of these plays, even though they are comedies, start out with disasters.  In both plays, a shipwreck creates havoc and casts away a person on an unknown shore, where they have to try and figure out how to adapt and survive.  In many ways, this is what happens to dads. Dads must weather the storm and try and survive the shipwreck.  At times, in our initial despair, we do believe that, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here’ with us.  We are tormented by what was expected, what has happened, what is going on now, and fears of what may be.  We are not sure if we can find our way from the ship to shore without drowning, or if we will find any other survivors from our family on that shore. 

Once we have reached the shore, even though we have survived the disaster, we now feel as if our survival depends on our ability to disguise ourselves.  We hide who we are and how we feel until we can get from the safe yet uncertain shore to a place where we truly begin to understand the new world, and understand if we are truly safe.  Only when we believe we are truly safe are we able to begin to reveal our true selves to those around us.

Sounds familiar if you are one of these dads, doesn’t it?  I cannot think of a single father, myself included, who has not done this to some degree. 

In both of these plays, the characters are a spider web of people, people in disguise and people interlinked with other people.  I once saw a character diagram of both of these plays, and, even knowing them, I had a hard time following all the crosslinks between characters.   Our lives are like this as well.  When that child with special needs drops into our lives, suddenly the character lists in our worlds explode.  In my case, we didn’t just add a child and a pediatrician, but a 4 person early intervention team, a neurosurgeon, an orthopedist, an audiologist, (and all their staffs), two different hospitals (because of where the doctors practiced), and a whole host of other folks.  We almost needed a program to figure out who was who and a large calendar to figure out who had to be where when.  Sounds much like the chaos that rules throughout these two plays and creates the comedic effect.

But, of course, the difference is that for us dads, this is real world, and not theater.  In the plays, everything comes out with happy endings.  The right people unite, the bad folks get punished (but usually not too badly) and everyone lives happily ever after.  We fathers aren’t really sure what the ending will look like in our real world.  Also, we don’t get the solutions in two to three hours.  Our answers come in years.  Sometimes many years, and sometimes the answers never arrive.  We also are not sure if our situations are a comedy or a tragedy.  I do think that the story can be whatever we make of it.  How we choose to see all the events that happen and what perspective we place on it.  In the end, it becomes our choice and we have to use our intellect to determine whether things are tragedy or comedy.

Truth be told, Shakespeare gets it.