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The Tempest

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By William Shakespeare. First published in Britain in 1623 by Edward Blount, William Jaggard, and Isaac Jaggard. Review copy from ‘The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series’, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Revised Edition.

First off, let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: no matter how much lovers of Shakespeare want it to be, and try to rewrite history to make it so, this is *not* the final play that Shakespeare wrote. Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, both co-written with John Fletcher, followed this, as well as the lost play Cardenio (also with Fletcher). There’s no denying that it would be awesome if we could read the play as an allegory of Shakespeare’s playwrighting and the final speech as his retirement form the stage. But that’s not what actually happened.

This is not to take anything away from The Tempest. There’s a reason people want it to be Shakespeare’s last play – it’s fantastic, easily his best ‘romance’ and among his top plays, with some superb dialogue, especially from the magician who many say was Shakespeare’s self-portrait, Prospero. It has a lovely palindromic structure, and some supporting roles that an actor can really sink their teeth into in the form of the island’s two natives, Ariel and Caliban. And, despite many saying that she’s just a passive girl who does whatever her father tells her to, there’s more teeth to Miranda than one might expect if played in the right way.

I must admit when I first read this in college I did not get any colonial subtext at all – most of my classes were not dedicated to finding the political or social themes in Shakespeare’s work, merely focusing on the plot and language. But apparently there’s been a lot of discussion about how much Shakespeare was influenced by colonial trips England was taking to the Bermudas, so much so that some used to describe this as Shakespeare’s American play. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but certainly the conflict between Prospero and Caliban has been what many directors enjoy focusing on as the centuries have passed.

As times and mores change, the way we view the three main characters also develops. Caliban was a hulking, ape-like villain at times, but has also been portrayed as something of a noble savage – though one has to be careful not to make him too noble, given how he willingly admits to attempting to sexually assault Miranda shortly before the play began. Likewise, while it is tempting to keep to the symmetries of Shakespeare’s play by portraying Ariel as the light to Caliban’s dark, this does not necessarily make him any less of a servant – and many excellent productions have focused on Ariel’s truculence when dealing with Prospero, and his joy once freed.

As for Prospero himself, his character seems to have experienced a similar trajectory to Shakespeare’s, as so many scholars and readers saw Prospero’s magic and arts as Shakespeare’s discussion of his own writing. And, as the ‘bardolatry’ of the earlier centuries has given way to a more balanced look at Shakespeare’s life and works, so Prospero is not viewed with the rose-colored glasses anymore. He can be surprisingly petulant and stubborn, even in his final speech, and it’s possible to read his decision to leave behind his magic and return to the real world as a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

I’ve talked before about how I would stage a production of the play I’ve just read, but unlike Shrew and Merchant, I have less to say here. Certainly there would be a few more special effects needed than I’m normally used to in my Shakespeare – I’ve mostly performed the comedies – but that shouldn’t pose too much of an issue. Other than that, though, just reminding the actors that they need not necessarily lock themselves into one interpretation on their first reading, an to let their own view of the character come about during rehearsals and multiple readings. I hope that this would allow the ambiguities I prize so much in Shakespeare to shine through.

I feel I haven’t said as much as I normally do about this play but, slight controversies about Prospero and Caliban aside, there’s not as much controversy here as in the prior plays I’ve reviewed. This is the last truly great play Shakespeare ever wrote – Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen are interesting yet flawed, I would say – and anyone who loves the theater or language should read it if they have not already. As for this Arden edition, it’s great to read if you want to hear about the backstory of the play and get into the nitty gritty of Shakespearean scholarship – I loved the discussion about whether a speech should be assigned to Miranda or Prospero – and reads smoothly. This edition also updates it to cover the last 10 years or so of Tempest discussion, including the recent Helen Mirren version.

The Best of Archie Comics

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When I first saw the solicit for this title, I admit I didn’t pay it quite as much attention as I could have. Between the chronological archives Dark Horse has started and the hardcover collections by artist, there has been a glut of old Archie re-releases, with more coming every month. This one was a chunky 400-page paperback from Archie’s own publisher, though, and about the size of its Double Digests. Despite its rather uninspiring cover art (which remains a weakness), I decided to give it a shot.

It’s not *quite* a Best Of – the publisher is trying to give a historical overview of the titles the company put out, and thus you’ll see stuff here of lower quality that nevertheless gives a broader look than just a bunch of Archie love triangle stories – but it’s actually a very decent effort. The stories all have as many credits as they were able to locate, and a short paragraph either saying why they felt this story deserved to be in the book, why this ‘sort’ of story typifies Archie and his friends, or the occasional celebrity blurb. Each decade gets about 50 pages, ending with the Life With Archie years that we’re getting right now.

As for the stories I mentioned above, we see many of the other titles Archie put out over the years that weren’t Archie. Some are famous enough to stand on their own – it’s nice to see the first Sabrina comic here, as well as a couple of Josie and the Pussycats stories (though I’d like to have seen something from the early, pre-band Josie years). And then there’s things like Wilbur, Ginger, and That Wilkin Boy, all of which try unsuccessfully to duplicate Archie’s formula with writing and characters that simply aren’t as good. Still, it’s interesting to see them here (we even get a glimpse of the infamous Super Duck) as a sign that it wasn’t just recently that Archie would try lots of different ideas to see what stuck – they were *always* doing it.

As for the Archie stories themselves, they are solid and readable – this is more of the Best Of that the title led me to expect. In particular, every time you see Bob Bolling credited you are in for a real treat. He’s got 3 stories in here, two featuring his specialty – The ‘Little Archie’ Archie as a kid strips – and they’re all brilliant, with two of them dredging out memories in me from when I was a small boy reading digests myself. Seeing Little Archie drag Betty through Riverdale’s worst outgrowth in order to put off her obsession with him – only to have it backfire and end in one of the most heartwarming moments in the history of the series – is beautiful. Likewise, one of his stories with adult Archie shows Betty misunderstanding seeing Archie and Veronica after he was just on a date with her, and spiraling into a blue funk. Archie’s solution requires a major deus ex machina, but we don’t care, as it’s simply so sweet. There needs to be a Bolling collection asap.

We do get a few stories we’ve seen reprinted many times over the last two years – Archie’s debut, the first appearance of Veronica, that Reggie with the football game – but that’s simply as the archive has skewed heavily towards the 40s and debuts, and you can’t really leave them out. But there’s other fascinating stuff here – some Katy Keene and Archie pin-ups, a few Jughead Dipsy Doodles, and of course Archie in the early 1970s taking the time to explain his growing media empire to the reader. We also get a few reminders that it wasn’t just experiments with other characters or series that didn’t work out for Archie. Witness Jughead’s pin that makes him irresistible to women, or ‘The New Archies’ trying to split the difference between Archie and Little Archie, or even things like Alexandra from Josie having magical powers – which, naturally, she uses for evil.

The book ends with a few stories that are right up to date. We get a Life With Archie from the current series, the only comic in here longer than 6 pages (by design, the editors admit), as well as a very funny Reggie comic about an anthropomorphic personification of his ego – and you can imagine how big it is. Kevin Keller even gets mentioned as a new breakout character – although his sexuality is not mentioned, FYI. And lastly, we see they’re still trying new things – the very last strips are one-page gag comics featuring Jinx, a teenage version of the bratty L’il Jinx from decades earlier.

There’s things I wish we’d seen in here – I’d have liked a few of the more serious 70s-style political stories, and I’d have loved one of the old ‘Betty Cooper is insane’ stories that the web has highlighted. But really, you can’t do a best of for Archie in only 400 pages – there’s simply too much. What you can do is give a sampler and show that Archie has, for the past 70 years, been doing what it’s doing today – writing fun, likeable stories and then finding ways to market them in any way possible. And if that defines Archie as a business more than a character, that’s not to say that the character is weak. You’d never have lasted 70 years without people loving Archie and his friends, and this collection shows why everyone loves them. As a history, it’s fine, and I would not mind seeing a second volume in a similar vein.

You can leave out That Wilkin Boy next time, though.

MMF Guest Post: Fruits Basket – Hiro and Rin

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Sean here, readers. Another MMF brings us another guest post! Ysabet MacFarlane is not only a good friend but also a huge Fruits Basket fan, and I knew she would not want to be left out of this month’s discussion. She was even able to adapt the two Fruits Basket fanbooks for Tokyopop! Here she is, discussing the relationship between two of the more prickly members of the Zodiac.

Hi, Sean’s readers! Despite my good intentions in previous months, this is my first-ever MMF post. Sean has had several years to notice that Fruits Basket is quite possibly my favorite thing in the world to discuss, and he kindly invited me to come hang out in his space and chat about it.

Disclaimer: Let’s play it safe and assume that this post contains for spoilers for all 23 volumes of the manga.

As a reader, what I look for in a series is great characters, and Fruits Basket has them in spades. I’m generally happy to talk about any of them, including the few I dislike, but when I’m starting a conversation it almost always starts or ends with Rin, and usually has a lot to do with her relationship with one of the other characters.

Sean already blogged about Hiro this week, but I’m here today to talk specifically about Hiro’s relationship with Rin. Like a lot of people, I discovered Fruits Basket through the anime, and when I switched to the manga I found that my feelings about a few characters changed. The main (although not the only) reason for that the manga offers a lot more development for most of them, often even in the chapters that made it into the anime adaptation. Sometimes it still took me a while to adjust, but Hiro found a shortcut: I fell for Rin pretty much on sight; Hiro was intensely worried about her; and poof!, he entered my good graces. And from my new softened-up position, it was much easier to see the many ways in which he’s a great kid who’s well on the way to growing into a truly awesome adult.

Even though Hiro and Rin’s personalities are very (very!) different, they’ve got some surface similarities: they’re both prickly as all hell, they’re each driven up the wall by some of the same things, and they’re both in the habit of calculated verbal attacks—albeit for entirely different reasons. Hiro’s smart-mouthed tendencies have to do with being young and smart and excruciatingly aware of his own limitations, while Rin’s have more to do with being constantly on both the offensive and defensive and having no energy or inclination to be pleasant about it. (Consider this: she’s a terrible liar, and she spends her first ten volumes living and breathing a lie. That alone would wear on a girl.)

What Takaya shows us with these two is almost an incomplete relationship. Time after time, we see Hiro worrying about Rin and actively checking up on her, and she in turn usually ignores him or tries to drive him off, as she does with pretty much everybody. But there are plenty of things we’re not shown. We don’t have any idea how close they might have been, if they were at all, before Hiro saw Akito attack Rin. (The closest thing we have to a clue is that we see Hiro’s mom wishing Rin were around so she could meet Hinata, which at least suggests that Hiro’s not the only member of his family who’s fond of her.) We also don’t know how seeing Rin attacked might have affected Hiro differently if he weren’t already tormented by knowing that Akito hurt Kisa because of him, and if he weren’t keeping that knowledge secret from Kisa.

Hiro is fundamentally a good kid, as I said, so I’m not at all suggesting that he wouldn’t have cared (or been traumatized) by seeing what happened to Rin, no matter what his circumstances were. But as it is, he already felt powerless and as if he wasn’t there for Kisa when she needed him, and dammit, he’s going to be there for Rin, even if that means she bites his head off just about every time he comes near her.

I think “be there” is really the critical thing here: Hiro knows he can’t actually help her, but only he can fill this particular role for her. Tohru is more than willing to befriend and support her, but Rin never actually confides in her about a lot of things (a trend that continues through the entire series, even after they’re obviously real friends), and Shigure knows what happened to her but can’t exactly be said to be on her side.

And then there’s Hiro, who doesn’t just know what he saw; he knows why she got hurt, and he knows what she’s trying to do—break the curse—and what she’s doing to herself in the process, which is literally sacrificing her life to try to save Haru while pretending she couldn’t care less about him. How much of this Hiro knows because of what Akito told him isn’t clear—he says in volume 18 that Akito and Rin both swore him to secrecy about Rin’s “accident”—but the only way he can know some of it is that somewhere along the line, Rin told him. He probably still doesn’t know everything (her red-herring conversation with Shigure in volumes 9 and 14 comes to mind as a likely omission even if she confided in him again later, but that incident would be a whole ‘nother post), but somewhere off-screen, she trusted him with the truth about what she’s trying to do and then trusted him to keep it secret. Given Rin’s rampant trust issues, that speaks highly of how she feels about him.

What this adds up to, IMO, is an unbalanced but important relationship. Hiro is a child and fully aware of how that limits him—as Tohru says, living with that awareness takes real courage—and he’s Rin’s witness. With the exception of his slip-up in volume 15, when he unthinkingly starts to criticize Haru for how his behavior may have made Rin feel (and oh, that’s such a great scene—poor Hiro! But his internal monologue is so revealing), he keeps her secrets as long as he can.

When Hiro finally does break and tell Haru the truth in volume 18, it seems to be due to a combination of factors. Haru opens the door by referring back to Hiro’s brief outburst in volume 15, and Hiro, who’s been guilt-ridden about Kisa (and he seems to be on the verge of talking to her about it before they bump into Haru and it all comes out), who’s seeing everything in a new light after the birth of his little sister, and who’s so very aware of his own inability to do anything to help Rin, betrays her trust and defies Akito because he believes Haru can help her.

I think it’s also very telling of Rin’s character and Hiro’s understanding of her that what he says isn’t “help her”. It’s “tell her she can stop now”.

“Tell her she can stop now.”

Because Hiro may not know where she is or how bad things have gotten, but he’s been watching her long enough to know that what she needs is to be stopped before she completely destroys herself. Of course, at this point she has stopped, but only because Akito has blackmailed her with a “choice” that leaves her entirely powerless, and the effects of that particular abuse and of losing her momentum stay with her for the rest of the series.

We never see Rin and Hiro together again after this point, so how much Hiro ever finds out about what actually happened to her remains a mystery. We don’t know for sure that Rin tells anyone about it herself; she’s not even in the room when Haru discusses the situation with Yuki and Kazuma, and Shigure knew about it before (probably long before) he comes to talk to her in chapter 107.

I don’t want to wrap this up by extrapolating, but as the series closes Rin is moving in the direction of very, very slowly being less guarded, and Hiro seems to be placing more value on his relationships all the time, with the weight of secrecy lifted and a baby sister in his life. If there’s one thing Fruits Basket is clear about at the end, it’s that everyone is moving forward at their own pace, and that there’s more holding this group of characters together than the supernatural bond that’s been broken.