Free How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig

Orsino stops the musicians from allowing him to indulge in all this richness and says:
Enough; no more .
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before .
    Have your children rehearse each phrase as often as possible until the passage is memorized. This passage is no longer than the first passage they learned from A Midsummer Night’s Dream , but it is considerably more complex. Say it together one final time before taking a well-deserved break.

CHAPTER 14
    Passage 7
The Nature of Shakespearean Comedy
    VIOLA
What country, friends, is this?
    CAPTAIN
This is Illyria, lady .
    VIOLA
And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium .
Perchance he is not drowned.—What think you, sailors?
    CAPTAIN
It is perchance that you yourself were saved.…
    VIOLA
I prithee—and I’ll pay thee bounteously—
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke .
( Twelfth Night , Act I, Scene 2, lines 1ff.)
    W e are now on a beach on the coast of Illyria right after a shipwreck. (It’s the second scene of the play.) A ship was split on a rock, lives were lost, a man tied himself to a mast to save himself, and a few survivors have struggled out of the water onto the beach. It is here that we meet Viola and hear her distinctive, invigorating, yearning voice for the first time.
    After hearing Orsino spouting all those hothouse metaphors about love and hunger in the first scene, this simple narrative exchange comes as a breath of fresh air. You play the Captain, and let your child play Viola: VIOLA
What country, friends, is this?
    CAPTAIN
This is Illyria, lady .
    VIOLA
And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium .
Perchance he is not drowned.—What think you, sailors?
    CAPTAIN
It is perchance that you yourself were saved .
    This scene is characteristic of Shakespeare in the sense that most of his plays open quickly. In general, a play begins when a world in equilibrium is broken into by a significant change. In Shakespeare, the opening disruption usually occurs early in the action. In Hamlet we hear about the ghost by line 20 ( What, has this thing appear’d again tonight? ). In King Lear we’re only up to line 37 when the monarch unwisely divides his kingdom, thereby setting off the entire plot of the play. The Tempest opens with an exciting shipwreck that drives the rest of the play’s action. And Romeo and Juliet opens with a street brawl between warring families that will lead directly to the final tragedy. Similarly, here in Twelfth Night , the shipwreck off the coast of Illyria occurs after an opening scene of a mere seven speeches.
    Tell your child to imagine a rocky coastline. Waves batter the sand,and we see a lone ship in the distance, buffeted by a terrible wind. Then suddenly, we’re on that ship and people are crying out, fearful for their very lives. Crack! The ship hits a rock, and now your daughter tumbles from her bed and across the floor. She’s on a beach, and for a moment she’s unconscious. Then she wakes up slowly, stunned and aching. A few of her fellow passengers, including the Captain, are sitting nearby, equally stunned from the wreck. She catches her breath and says:
What country, friends, is this?
    It sounds so simple, this sentence, yet I find it to be one of the greatest first lines of any character ever written. It reminds me of the opening line of Hamlet when, at night, a nervous guard at Elsinore Castle cries Who’s there?! In both cases, the questioner seems to be asking “Who’s out there?” “Why am I here?” “What will become of me?”
What country, friends, is this?
    And the Captain replies:
This is Illyria, lady .
    Illyria will prove to be a magical place. Not magical like the Wood near Athens—there are no fairies here, no supernatural goings-on. But the world of Illyria will turn out to contain daffy servants and lovelorn travelers, loyal comrades and identical twins, a melancholy jester and a