I went to see The Tempest over Christmas – it’s one of Shakespeare’s late romances: not a tragedy in which everyone significant is dead by the end of the play, nor a comedy with cross-dressing, mistaken identity and a bit with a dog, but a story that is complex and hopeful. The most famous line from The Tempest is “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” which comes as part of the magician Prospero’s explanation of a play within the play – Shakespeare loves a play within a play. The language is a little strange – “dreams are made on” is not a normal turn of phrase – and it got me thinking about dreams, what you can make on dreams, what we should make of dreams and so we have an assembly filled with dreams and what others have said about them.
We’ve already had a Shakespeare quote – it’s far from the only time he mentions dreams, in fact he wrote a whole play that he invites any critical members of the audience to put down to a dream – but let’s move on to something a little more modern: a 1993 song from London born soul/pop singer Gabrielle, whose debut single said “Dreams can come true: look at me, babe, I’m with you – you know you got to have hope, you know you got to to be strong.” Gabrielle joins Shakespeare in being hopeful – you have dreams for your future and hope that they will come true. Now Gabrielle’s dreams are about a cuddle from somebody she’s fond of, and due to popular demand I don’t give romantic advice in assemblies, instead we’ll be thinking about career dreams.
What are your career dreams? Do you have a clear vision for what you’ll be doing on a Wednesday afternoon ten years from now? Some of you, I’m sure, will have, but for most of you I guess it’s pretty vague: something worthwhile maybe? Something well paid? Something you enjoy – and you’ll all have different views of what you might find enjoyable that someone else would value highly enough to pay you to do it. That, of course, is the central challenge of careers - you can’t do just what you like, because the person who is paying you will only do that if you do what they like. Sometimes the two will align – but whatever job you get there will be times when you need to do what your boss wants rather than what you want. The closest to the ideal is if you make a living as a freelance artist but even then, particularly at the beginning, you’ll need to take gigs to pay bills rather than because you love the job – either that or spend a lot of time hungry. I say particularly at the beginning because the more experience you have, the more you can charge, and the more you can charge the less often you have to say yes. Particularly at the beginning, but not just then – Taylor Swift is moderately successful in the pop world and has just done a world tour for which she didn’t have difficulty in selling tickets, but during the tour she wrote a song, “I can do it with a broken heart”, that explains that for some of those concerts she didn’t feel as glad to be there as she pretended.
A few years before Gabrielle, the American rock band Van Halen released their take on Dreams in which they said “Straight up we’ll climb, higher and higher leave it all behind. So baby dry your eyes, save all the tears you’ve cried, cos that’s what dreams are made of.” I’m not entirely sure what these guys are dreaming of – a better world of some kind though, one with fewer tears – and that’s what we’re thinking about too, isn’t it: a future that is better than the past – and again I don’t exactly know what you’re hoping for, your own place to live, maybe a family, maybe a particular lifestyle. Maybe your dreams shift with your mood and fortune and you empathise with the Cranberries whose song, again called Dreams, says “My life is changing every day in every possible way, and oh my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems”. Maybe you recognise that your reality is never quite going to match your dreams.
I’m on LinkedIn – it’s like social media for the boring professional side of your life: instead of filling your profile with cat pictures and your favourite Van Halen quotes, you put your education, qualifications and experience. One of the things I see a lot of there are people who advertise themselves as motivational speakers. I am really taken with that as an idea for a career – except that it’s nonsense isn’t it? Whether my speaking is motivational or not depends on how it’s taken – I’m hoping that some of you will be motivated by what I say today, but I’m not foolish enough to kid myself that there aren’t some of you dreaming of something else as you sit there. Stop that – listen up, this is motivational guys! I know the lines as well – you’ve got to have dreams, big dreams; you just have to believe in yourself, believe you deserve success; visualise that success, be true to yourself, don’t pretend to be what you’re not, fake it ‘til you make it, never settle for less and reach out to grasp that future you’ve dreamed.
It’s not entirely wrong, that. I do think you have as much right to success and happiness as anyone; I do think that you have skills and talents that make each one of you quite remarkable; I do think that integrity is important, that believing in something can help you live a worthwhile and satisfying life. However, I invite you to listen to the words of Terry Pratchett in his 2003 comic fantasy The Wee Free Men in which a witch, Miss Tick, is giving priceless advice: “If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star… then you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
I can’t see Miss Tick getting work as a motivational speaker because people want to hear a secret trick to beat the matrix, not that the answer is hard work and time spent learning things. That, though, is a problem with motivational speakers, not with Miss Tick – Gabrielle tells us that as well as having hope you have to be strong, Van Halen tell us that to get to your dreams you climb straight up and invite us to imagine the lactic acid burning in our limbs as we toil. Before even Van Halen, however, back in 1982, there was a TV show that dominated the lives of eight year olds in playgrounds across the country. It was set in the New York School for the Performing Arts and it was about a group of kids who had big dreams, who wanted fame and the opening scene of the first episode set the tone for the six seasons that followed.
***VIDEO***
Whatever your dreams are, however you intend to earn money as an adult, whatever you see yourself doing in ten years time, or indeed during the intervening decade – if you want to avoid feeling disappointed in yourself then you need to work hard. Success is paid for, as Lydia says, in sweat. It’s that simple – if you do your best then you can feel legitimate pride in what you achieve – if you slack off then whatever you make could, by definition, be better. And when it comes to this summer’s exams, doing your best doesn’t mean showing up on the day and seeing what questions you can answer – it means starting here, it means putting in the hours on past papers, problems sets and practice essays, and the better you are, the more you have to do. I should emphasize that I don’t mean staring at your books until it’s 2am and your eyes are fuzzy, I don’t mean cutting out sleep or food or friendship – I mean starting earlier rather than having a nap, or a quick scroll through Instagram, I mean working hard at questions rather than watching videos of someone else working hard, I mean doing 45 hour weeks from now rather than trying to do 100 in the days before your exams.
Let’s go back to that quote from Shakespeare – “We are such things as dreams are made on” – made on, not of. Dreams are airy things, they sit on the solid foundation of real life, of commitment and study, they’re not what you can make your future out of and if you try you’ll be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things. You should have your dreams, you should believe that you can achieve them but you shouldn’t rely on dreaming to get you there – your future is going to be built on the solid, unromantic foundation of following your teachers’ advice, getting their feedback on your best work and responding energetically to what you hear. That’s what the 3Cs tell us, that’s what we do here, that’s the Harris Clapham Sixth Form way and we are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Footnotes
1. I've not quoted The Tempest before, but Pericles (also a Late Romance) comes up in Pericles and the Violin and Henry VIII (arguably with Late Romantic elements although normally classed as a history) is in Small and Scorching
2. The video shown is here: Fame
3. Van Halen are referenced via their song Jump in Spinning Pebbles: The Cranberries and Gabrielle are new to assemblies
4. Terry Pratchett's books The Last Hero and Pyramids are referenced in The Song Remains and A Fine Thing respectively, whilst his difficulties in concluding books are mused on in Endings