Once again, the Bermuda Shakespeare Festival will present some of the great bard’s plays, executed by students from local schools. They include the hits “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet”, as well as the possibly instructional “The Taming of the Shrew”, followed by after hours “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Twelfth Night”, but of most historical relevance to Bermuda is ‘The Tempest’. Were the great writer alive, one wonders what he would make of Bermuda and its tempests (hurricanes, that is), as he used our classic shipwreck story as the template for the last of his plays, which appeared in 1611.Thus Bermuda has been associated with one of the greatest exemplars of the ‘King’s Speech’, or classic English, for 401 years. It is a tribute to the student thespians that they, in these days of iPads, Kindles and rap, are willing to explore and enunciate some of the finest works ever written in the English language, now becoming through the Internet the worldwide lingua franca.The association of the master of the English tongue with Bermuda began in the autumn of 1610. The story that came to his attention was one unheard of in the history of the early English exploration of the Americas, namely the salvation of the complement of a shipwrecked vessel. The saga was that of the Sea Venture which in 1609 was the flagship of the Third Supply fleet of nine vessels sailing from England with settlers and goodies for the recently established (1607) colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The convoy encountered a hurricane and eight eventually made landfall at the James River, with the Sea Venture not in the pack.The first extraordinary act in that real-life drama was that the Sea Venture was on its way to the bottom when the tempest cleared and miraculously right in front of the vessel stood Bermuda, the only landfall in the entire western North Atlantic, between the Azores and the eastern coast of central North America, a latitudinal distance of some 2,300 miles. The second act closes with the survival of nearly all the 150 people from the ship and their arrival in two boats, built at Bermuda, in Jamestown on May 21, 1610. The final act of the play was when, in late September, 1610, the news hit London of the salvation of the Sea Venture gang, which would have been the talk of the town for some time.The Rev William Crashaw could not contain his excitement at ‘the marvellous and indeed miraculous deliverance of our worthy Governors … with all their company, of some one hundred and fifty persons, upon the feared and abhorred Islands of the Bermudas. Never was it heard of, that any ship wrecked there, but with the death of all or most of the people, save only this of ours.”William Shakespeare, perhaps sipping a drink in a coffee house, would have heard of that “reality show” from the Atlantic and folded aspects of that ‘live play’ into “The Tempest”.The value of “The Tempest” in these modern times lies more, it may be contended, in its literary value than in its dramatic ones, though valuable those are as well, especially for teaching students “how to be themselves when they are someone else”, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut. It all comes back to the three Rs: Reading, Writing and Reckoning, the essential foundations of a rationale life, and of these writing is the most important. Another person saw it as ‘reading, reasoning and reciting’, and L.P. Bénézet wrote…’by reciting I did not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or of the textbook. I meant speaking the English language’.Acting skills aside, it is the inculcation of respect for language, in this case English, that must be of the greatest value to students taking part in the Bermuda Shakespeare Festival, for clear language is the petrol and oil of the engine of the brain. Clear writing equals a clear mind and that skill must be taught and learned and much of it ends up in books. As Vonnegut wrote: “So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”It is in that sense that the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs has produced a new book in the King’s Speech for this anniversary year of the settlement of Bermuda in 1612, the anthology “I Wish I Could Tell You”, edited by Lynn Joseph. It is a collection of stories, nearly all by Bermudians writers, and some items of free verse by students, interwoven with illustrations by local artists, combining in a sense, language and theatre. The volume is another literary contribution to the Bermuda I love, even if it is on Kindle, as well as the front desk at Queen Street.William Shakespeare would be pleased to see that after four centuries of the occupation of Bermuda by human forces that the love of the King’s Speech is alive and well, be in on the stage or in the bound blocks of paper in the National Library. Good language in all its forms is a major part of the heritage foundations of the Bermuda community and will always be so, as long as we remain a civilised society.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480