A Shakespeare lesson from the erudite Professor Tony Esolen: What does it mean that "We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on"? "What Prospero means is that we are that kind of material that dreams are woven from." If you open a drawer and see pencils, paper clips, chewing gum, old credit cards, a couple of programs from a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees, newspaper clippings, and an ad for teflon cookware, you say, “What is all this stuff?” The pejorative sense comes across in the British dismissal: “Stuff and nonsense!” That wasn’t what it meant to Shakespeare, though. Prospero is putting on a magic masque for the benefit of Ferdinand and Miranda, who have just plighted their troth, when all at once he recalls that the monster Caliban is plotting to murder him. He claps his hands, and the masquers disappear with a hollow noise. Then he tells Ferdinand not to be amazed, for all earthly things will disappear in like manner: We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. We are, as the phrase has since gone, the stuff of dreams. What does that mean? Well, stuff has a specific sense, as it still does in German: Stoff. It meant fabric, or raw material for weaving and suchlike. It originally meant the soft quilted stuff that stuffed the space between a knight’s chain mail and his body, to soften the chafing and bumping. We preserve the sense in our stuffed animals, or when a bully says he’ll knock the stuffin’ outer ya. We then use the word analogously to describe other kinds of material that plugs up a gap: stuffed turkey. So what Prospero means is that we are that kind of material that dreams are woven from.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:33:36 +0000
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