‘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.
