You're listening to the Parsley Xamon Life. This is a special bonus episode in which we'll be discussing Shakespeare's The Tempest.

This is Wes All-One and joining me today is a friend of the Parsley Xamon Life Bill Humans.

You've been on a few of these now, right? Well, you've been on Crito.

Yep, I've been on Crito and also this is Strata, Lysus Strata.

And your Broadway actor?

At the moment, I actually am a Broadway actor. I'm in the current production of Carousel.

Yeah, I've been an actor for 45 years and actually one of the very first productions I've ever involved with was a production of The Tempest at the CSC Repertory Theatre in New York City back in 1974, I think.

And I was the follow spot operator, so I heard The Tempest at least 50 or 60 times watched it and saw it 50 or 60 times that year.

And I've been in a production of The Tempest at Actress Theatre of Louisville playing Trinculo.

I've worked in the theatre all these years and studied Shakespeare in college and at State University of New York, I've been on Crito for 45 years.

So yeah, I had asked you to do something. I wanted to do a bonus episode with you and we were thinking about fiction or a play.

I forgot how this came about exactly, but you mentioned Shakespeare and I also have a huge love of Shakespeare.

Ultimately, I think I mentioned The Tempest just because The Tempest is something I have thought a lot about and I taught it a little bit at a small, a little bit of the Larts College where as an adjunct for semester.

And I've written about it. I happen to love this play and I know, you know, you immediately when I mentioned it, we're enthusiastic.

Oh, sure. It's one of his greatest plays. It's generally thought of as his last or one of his last.

Now partially to satisfy my curiosity, but also as a potential plug, are your writings on The Tempest available online?

I actually am preparation for this podcast. I started looking at, it's kind of an academic paper that I had started writing and I haven't completed it.

And I thought, you know, reading it, I thought, wow, I should really complete this because it turned into sort of an idea for a book.

One of the reasons why I'm so interested in this play is I became interested in the relationship between revenge fantasy and creativity or being a poet.

And the reason this is, was you mentioned, it's one of his last plays and it's, at the very least, it's the last play he wrote alone, wrote it 1610 to 1611 and it was performed in 1611.

And again, I think through 1613 and it is regarded as one of his romances, which are part of the meaning of that is it's not really classifiable as a tragedy or comedy.

And what's interesting to me about it is it's kind of a tale of aborted revenge. So you see a lot of, it shakes for strategies, you see a lot of vengeance going on or at least a lot of violence, but say in Hamlet, that's a whole revenge theme.

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