Stratford's Antoni Cimolino on finding hope for humanity in The Tempest

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]How does your relationship with that work or with Shakespeare change over time? What do you see that you didn't see before? When you're young, you look at a play like Lear and you just see the young characters and then you come back to it 10 or 20 years later and suddenly you're beginning to sympathize with the middle-aged characters and after a while you are that old person on the heath screaming at the world that is moving on without you. There's something about each part of our life where we just the the truths embedded in the text suddenly hit us. But I think it's a testament to the dimensionality, how many dimensions are in this text.

[00:00:34]>> What's your favorite Shakespearean line?

[00:00:36]Oh.

[00:00:38]Come on.

[00:00:40]Okay, then because it's in the Tempest, the rarer action is in virtue, not in vengeance. Tell us what you hear when you read What's What's he saying? Well, he's at the point where he's got all of his enemies in his grasp, right? He can just destroy them and it's in that moment that he realizes he doesn't want to.

[00:01:00]And I think in the world we live in today, like I It's one of the reasons I wanted to do the Tempest, Thomas, that we have so much anger in the world. We got so many people who want revenge on the other side, whoever that other side is.

[00:01:14]And stopping and realizing that there may be differences, but you've got to somehow get over them and find common ground, otherwise we'll all be dead.

[00:01:24]Um and he doesn't say the better action is in virtue, not in vengeance. He says the rarer action, which is interesting, right? We all have been told what to do.

[00:01:36]Turn the other cheek, you know, preach peace, do the right thing, but it's rare.

[00:01:43]And uh it needs to be done if there's any hope for humanity.