Guy Reams (00:00.398)
Today is day 209, our doubts are traitors. You know, when I was younger, quoting Shakespeare was considered cool. I mean, if you could quote Shakespeare, you were like somebody special, right? You demonstrated your intelligence and your literary awareness. Nowadays, I think if you quoted Shakespeare, people probably wouldn't even know what you were talking about.
I'm not sure exactly why. I think obviously as our society has become more specialized or as our society has learned to appreciate more, you know, more cultures or become more aware of, you know, existing or current entertainment that the old forms of entertainment have waned. So,
You might not be exposed to Shakespeare as much as you were when I was younger. You might be exposed to Shakespeare in a drama class or in an advanced English class. Because if you were to read Shakespeare today, you would find the use of English pretty, you'd have to be pretty skilled in understanding what some of the words mean. I mean, Shakespeare himself invented like over 1700 words for the English language.
There's just many words that we use today. They actually come from Shakespeare because he created words to describe what it was that he was talking about.
So I think that knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare's works has waned over time. So I decided that I would start reading some Shakespeare now and then. So I decided I'm going to crack open a couple of plays and read them and dive into some of the wording and language and make sure I really understood what was being said. So one of the first plays I started this experiment with was called Measure for Measure.
Guy Reams (01:59.918)
And I just remembered this play. I remembered liking this play when I was younger. So that's why I started with it. Shakespeare has many of these problem plays, I guess is what you would call them. They're kind of a comedy with some tragedy built into it and then a whole lot of moral ambiguity. Shakespeare just had this way of understanding humans. He understood how we're always kind of hypocrites and we're always, you know,
declaring one thing, but doing another. And so he had a lot of interesting ways of bringing that out around very big themes about justice and mercy and abuse of power. In today's day and age, when we're talking about all these things of people abusing power or people acting bad or all these things, these are themes that Shakespeare was exploring in every one of his plays. So these particular problem plays are like that.
They present this major problem that somebody is trying to solve for. So in Measure for Measure, there's a Duke of Vienna who decides he doesn't want to do this anymore. So he decides an experiment to temporarily leave and leave control of his kingdom in charge of a deputy whose name is Angelo. And so he leaves. But.
The Duke doesn't actually leave. He actually hides as a friar, and he comes to witness what people would do in his absence. And so he sees Angelo as this very strict, moralistic deputy who really tries to hold everybody to a very strict moral standard and is actually trying to put people to death for doing things like premarital sex or things like that. So that's what the Duke is witnessing. Well,
During this first parts of the play, there's this character named Claudio who ends up guilty of infidelity. And I won't get into it because you got to read the play yourself. But anyway, the Duke of Angelo basically sentences him to death. And so Claudio is going to be put to death. But Claudio is a best friend and his best friend, his name is Lucio.
Guy Reams (04:25.006)
And Lucio goes to visit Claudio's sister, whose name is Isabella, at a convent because Isabella is training to be a nun. And he's trying to convince her to do something about this. Hey, you got to go stop, you know, you got to go see if you can convince this deputy from putting Claudio to death. And so Isabella kind of has doubts about her ability.
to do anything because she's just a novice nun and what could she do, right? So what could she do? So Lucio, now Lucio throughout the play acts as this kind of comedic relief, almost this special character that kind of advances the plot along. So he's always the one that kind of comes into something and gets things happening. In fact, in one particular part of the play, he actually,
attacks this fake friar and causes the play to come to a head or come to an end. So, Lucio's like Shakespeare's instrument, comedic wit to make things move along. But the reason I bring this all up, because as I was reading the play in the very first act, Lucio says something that really hit me to the core. It's like, wow, this is really powerful.
So in the first act is he's trying to convince Isabella to go do something, to go talk to Angela. Isabella is saying, well, I don't know if I could do anything and I have lots of doubts. And that's when Lucio says, our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we off -fight win. Right? So he's saying that if you let your doubts take control, there's a lot of good you could have that you won't get because you'll let your doubts take control. Your doubts are traitorous.
Your doubts will fool you. And so, man, I thought, wow, this is pretty powerful, because I do that too. Sometimes I allow my doubts to percolate, and I allow the doubts to build and build and build. And that prevents me from actually doing anything good. And so, ultimately, Lucio convinces Isabella to go plead for Claudio's life. And that delays the execution, and then the play continues. So you'll have to go read the rest to find out what happens. But...
Guy Reams (06:47.886)
As in any major Shakespearean play, there is a conclusion, but it leaves you kind of hanging in moral ambiguity. So that's just the fun part of reading a Shakespeare play. So with that, the advice from Shakespeare is don't let your doubts get in your way. Don't let your doubts prevent you from doing something good.