Completions and communions

I read myself in Shakespeare. I read Shakespeare in me.

Not long after I finished the complete works, I popped into a bookstore. I knew exactly where to find him. He has his own section. He always has his own section.

I strutted straight over. Shakespeare.

Top to bottom, shelf by shelf, I eyed all the Macbeth’s and Much Ado About Nothing’s, all the Romeo and Juliet’s and Richard III’s. I puffed out my chest. I cocked back my chin.

Think your so tough? I said to myself. I read you. I pointed to Hamlet. I read you. I pointed to The Tempest. I read you and you and you. I even read you, singling out a copy of Cymbeline I was surprised, and impressed, to see stocked. Whatcha got on me?    

Wait. I stepped off.

What do you got on me, Shakespeare?

What did I learn? How am I different now? How has the experience changed me?

No, no, I know my writing will never inspire my own section in bookstores and change Western literature as we know it. I don’t mean that. I don’t want that. (But would I turn it down?) I mean: Why not read all of Shakespeare’s works in one year and see what I can learn from it? That’s what I wrote when I started out on Shakespeare Confidential. That was the whole point of this thing.

So? What did I learn? How am I different now? How has the experience changed me?

***

Before I tackle the big to be or not to be’s, though, some Shakespeare superlatives are in order. I think I’m qualified to pass a little judgment at this point. One’s likes and dislikes shift with time and experience, of course, so I’m basing these winners and losers specifically on how I feel at the other end of reading the complete works.

Most underrated play: The three parts of Henry VI. Action-packed. Ensemble cast. Huge set-pieces. Plus intrigue, given new evidence that Christopher Marlowe helped write the plays.

Most overrated play: It’s still a masterpiece, but Romeo and Juliet. Boy, girl, parents, hormones, yadda yadda yadda, double suicide.

Favorite character: This is a tough one. Portia’s intelligence and selflessness amaze me in The Merchant of Venice, as does Helena’s in All’s Well That Ends Well. I feel some sort of spiritual affinity with melancholy Jaques in As You Like It and would love to drink some sack with Falstaff. Not that I want to be friends with them, but there’s so much to Iago, Macbeth, and Lear’s tortured and torturing psyches. But I think Hamlet wins this crown. He’s a remarkable literary creation, for one, and his lines always yield, no matter how many times I revisit them, profound and difficult Truths About The Human Condition. 

That I’m still shaken by the passage over 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it – that’s powerful.

Best comedy: This goes to an underdog, The Comedy of Errors. The twins/mistaken identity plot is at once hilarious and disturbing. 

Best tragedy: King Lear. Once I found my personal connection to the play, I’ve been haunted by the idea of Lear witnessing himself lose his own mind ever since. 

Best history: Henry IV Part I. It’s a time machine back to Merrie England and Shakespeare at his bawdy best, but not without darker undertones.

Best romance: Another underdog, Cymbeline. I know The Tempest is the more canonical choice, but Cymbeline, in all of its odd plots twists, I found more transportive.

Favorite line/passage: An impossible question, but here goes. I certainly linger longest on Shakespeare’s expressions of the fleeting nature of our lives. Lord Hastings in 2 Henry IV: “We are time’s subjects” (1.3.110). Edmund in King Lear: “The wheel is come full circle! I am here” (5.3.173). Hamlet: “That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once” (5.1.70). Prospero in The Tempest: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156-58). But the top prize has to go to Macbeth: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.25-26). It’s dark, I know, but it’s very dramatic. Its language is vivid, its music forceful, its metaphor appropriately theatrical, and its sense, ultimately, ironic: In spite of its nihilism, the line’s poetry does have meaning. That I’m still shaken by it over 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it – that’s powerful.

Most difficult play to read: Troilus and Cressida. I had a very hard time with the long monologues in this play. Also, the pacing was lagging. Runners-up: The Rape of Lucrece and his first 18 sonnets. *Shudder.*

Most accessible play: Julius Caesar. We know the story. We know its famous lines. It reads quick. It drives its themes home. Bonus: prophesies, dreams, and ghosts. Just after I started Shakespeare Confidential, my father-in-law, who is the first to admit he’s no Shakespeare scholar, asked me to recommend a play when I finished. It’s this one, Tim.

Desert island play: Nobody wants to be stuck inside Hamlet’s head for the rest of their lives. I’m going with Henry IV, as long as I get to bring both parts. There’s so much humanity in this play.

Least favorite play: As much as Love’s Labour’s Lost irks me, Measure for Measure was meh. It just didn’t do all that much for me.

And now for the big one. Drum roll, please.

Favorite play:

Let’s try this again. Drum roll.

Favorite play:

Gah! “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” I’m just not ready.

***

When I think back on all I’ve read, a funny, and frustrating, thing happens: It’s like I can’t remember anything at all. All of Shakespeare becomes one giant blur. I re-thumb through the hundreds of the pages I read. I scroll through every title. And yet I struggle to call up character names, plots, lines. As You Like It bleeds into All’s Well That Ends Well. The histories rewrite themselves. “These violent delights have violent ends” issues from King Lear, not Romeo and Juliet. I forget Pericles even exists until I review the spreadsheet I used to track my progress. Concerned by my amnesia, I even tested myself with a few online quizzes – you know, one of those Think You’re the Ultimate Bardolater? Match the Quote with the Play. 7/8 on one. Not horrible. 20/30 on another. Zwounds. 

Now, I didn’t take on this project to become a Shakespeare encyclopedia, dazzling people with an apt allusion at a dinner party or dispensing a comforting quote upon some trying occasion. Nor did I take it on to become an expert, parsing arcane discrepancies between Quarto and Folio editions or waxing historical on Elizabethan sumptuary codes and the role of the costumed self in Shakespeare’s early comedies. Plus, reading so many plays back to back – the blur is understandable. Still, being able to drop a few verses would be nice.

Are these even Shakespeare’s details? Or are they mine? Maybe they’re ours now. Maybe they belong to both of us.

But what does emerge from the fog are these little trivial details. The dogeared page of a book. Sadness over the death of a deer. Love notes left on trees. A grocery list. Underskinkers and ostlers. A wrestling match. The strawberry pattern of a handkerchief. A king who wished he didn’t have to bring work home. A joke about Welshmen loving cheese. The word butt-shaft. The word welkin. A singular reference to America. The names of taverns and the drinks served there. That executioners got to keep their victims’ clothes. That vision was believed possible because the eyes emitted light. That sighing was thought to draw blood away from the heart and shortened one’s life. 

At first, I can’t place any of these bits and pieces. I can’t remember which play they come from. Am I just imagining them? Did I read them somewhere else? Were they residue from some dream I had? Did I dislodge them from some deep memory?

Are these even Shakespeare’s details? Or are they mine? Maybe they’re ours now. Maybe they belong to both of us. And maybe these little details aren’t so trivial after all.

***

I have learned some lessons. Or rather, one big one, if I’m so brazen to boil Shakespeare’s 38 plays and immeasurable cultural legacy down to a single takeaway:

Our egos cause a lot of problems, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. Because we want sex, power, and fame. Because we to be right and to be loved. Because we want to matter, because we know we’re going to die. And it takes a hell of a lot of love and humility to override our egos. But we usually fail. People suffer and die, often ourselves. We repent. We reconcile. We go on, cleaning up our messes and telling stories and singing songs about where we’ve been. We promise we won’t repeat our mistakes but the Fools know we can’t really help ourselves.

Scenes end, but the play never does. “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women mere players,” Jaques famously says in As You Like It. “They have their exits and entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts” (2.7.138-41).

I don’t think my Big Conclusion is terribly profound or original. Nor do I think any of it’s exclusive to the Bard. It’s Story. It’s Humanity. It’s World.

Am I smarter for this? Am I wiser? Did The Taming of the Shrew make me a better husband? Did All’s Well That Ends Well make me a better brother? Did King Lear make me a better son? Did Othello or Henry VIII put past hurts to rest? Did Hamlet ease present anxieties? I don’t know.

After reflecting on my past year play by play, Shakespeare has become a habit, a reflex, a coping mechanism, a meditation practice, a frame of reference.

But I do feel heavier, fuller. My 2016 was a busy one, from moving into a new profession to moving to another country to moving into new places in my relationships, every change filtered through, processed through, Shakespeare. Rocky moments in my marriage are synonymous with The Taming of the Shrew. Feelings of fading friendships are Henry IV Part II. Hamlet is Christmas and New Year’s 2016. King Lear is my grandfather, nearing 100 somewhere in Cleveland on a nursing home bed, trapped in the dark expanse of his own mind.

I carry so much Shakespeare around with me now.

And yet at the same time I feel so much lighter and freer. Arguments and anxieties, inadequacies and insecurities, fears and failures that I lug around, like those cumbersome Norton Shakespeare volumes, no matter where I move to – these I’ve unloaded onto Shakespeare. Twelfth Night and Pericles have to help shoulder my imposter syndrome. Richard III has to deal with my body image issues, Henry VIII my parents’ divorce, Othello that dark D.C. night. Shakespeare shares the burden of my neuroses.

After reflecting on my past year play by play, Shakespeare has become a habit, a reflex, a coping mechanism, a meditation practice, a frame of reference. If I have a rough stretch freelancing and question my purpose, my adequacy: I call up Hamlet. If I have a bad fight with my wife and need some perspective: marital counseling in the Comedies. It’s grounding, it’s comforting that he’s there.

I read myself Shakespeare. I read Shakespeare in me. I wrote myself into Shakespeare. I wrote Shakespeare into me.

***

From his impact on our literature to his infiltration in our everyday language, Shakespeare, of course, has permeated our collective consciousness – and not just what it means to be well-educated, well-read, or well-cultured. Over the past 400 years, his work, both on its own terms and because we so privilege it, has steeped what we think art is, what drama is for, what language can do, what it means to be human.

I feel closer to Shakespeare. Not the playwright, not the entrepreneur, not Shakespeare the cultural institution and larger-than-life-idea we’ve created today. But Shakespeare the person, getting along the best way he knew how: scratching out one little word at a time.

Over this past year, his work also saturated my individual consciousness. My Big Conclusion, in all of its banality, was an education in Story, in World, Humanity. But now I’ve read everything Shakespeare had to say about it. I’ve met all his characters. I’ve visited all his settings. I’ve come along on all his plots. I’ve listened to all his voices, his comments, his puns, his jokes, his expressions of love and suffering. I’ve experienced all of his particular take on Story, World, Humanity – and all of his details swirl and slosh and jostle and jump around in my head, leaving their impressions as they bump into and bounce off my memories, my feelings, my sense of self, my thought patterns, my particular take on Story, Humanity, World.

And so I also feel closer. I don’t think I ‘get’ Shakespeare better. I don’t think I understand his work, his craft, his legacy, his truths more profoundly than anyone else. I’ve just spent so much time with him, really. If I had to call up a single image of this whole experience, it’d be me sitting at my black IKEA desk in the spare room of our house in Dublin, the soft glow of my desktop lamp illuminating the long and Bible-thin pages of a Norton volume, using its weight to keep open my notebook as I jotted down some interesting word, feeling, when it was very quiet and still and late, that I wasn’t alone, as if that word was a direct portal to the same letters Shakespeare inked down on a piece of parchment, lit from the fire in the kitchen of his house in Stratford-Upon-Avon so many years ago.

“May way is to conjure you,” says Rosalind in the epilogue in As You Like It (l. 9).

This communion makes me feel closer to Shakespeare. Not the playwright, not the entrepreneur, not Shakespeare the cultural institution and larger-than-life-idea we’ve created today. But Shakespeare the person, getting along the best way he knew how: scratching out one little word at a time.

Thirty-eight plays, some odd poems, and 365 days later (well, 361), I’ve read the complete works of William Shakespeare, but I don’t yet feel complete. I think I might reread As You Like It sometime soon.  That one’s my favorite play. At least this time through.

Mothers of self-invention

I had a pulled a Shakespeare: Where was my mother?

I issued the usual complaint to my wife: “I don’t know what to write about.”

Henry VIII was in the books but no inspiration was coming to me. I had come down with a bad case of PPMD: Post-play Moping Disorder. Symptoms include: writer’s block, acute unoriginality, sore purpose, intellectual nausea, and mild gas.

“Your mother,” she said.

“Huh? My mother?”

“You haven’t written about your mother.”

She was right. I had written about my stepmother. I had written about my brothers. About my father and grandfather. About old friends and new friends. I had written on many occasions about my wife (and our many arguments). I had called up grade-school teachers and past girlfriends. I had even dedicated a whole post to my dog.

But my mother? She was nowhere to be found.

I had pulled a Shakespeare.

***

What happened to Queen Lear? In The Tempest, why don’t we hear about Miranda’s mother? Desdemona’s father plays a major part in Othello, but what about her mom? So too with The Taming of the Shrew. We hear about Portia’s father in The Merchant of Venice but not his counterpart. Titus Andronicus has a whole brood of children (25 at one point) but no mention of their mum. Nada, zilch, squat on Prince Hal’s mother from what I recall in Henry IV – maybe that’s why he was acting out. As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline. The list goes on.

In so many of Shakespeare’s plays, mothers are conspicuously absent.

And some of the mothers he does feature aren’t exactly getting a call on Mother’s Day. The un-bereaved Gertrude in Hamlet? The vengeful Tamora in Titus Andronicus? Distant Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet? Even Lady Macbeth. When she’s laying into her husband for lacking cojones to kill King Duncan, she suggests she once had a child:

…I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (1.7.54-59).

When there are strong mothers, they’re often vilified: King Leontes tyrannizes Queen Hermione in A Winter’s Tale and Queen Margaret, whose hard-nosed leadership is viewed as too masculine, is deemed unnatural in Henry VI. Volumnia in Coriolanus, meanwhile, strikes many critics as over-mothering to the point of warmongering.

What gives, Shakespeare? What do you have against moms? People like to joke Shakespeare’s absent wives and queens divorced their husbands long before Act I. Take Prospero, who spent all his time reading magic books, and you can imagine King Lear was pretty controlling. Would you stick around for these two? (I think I should hide these two plays from my own wife.)

But jokes aside, was Shakespeare short on talent? Young boys played female characters on the Elizabethan stage; perhaps they weren’t seen as believable in the role of adult women. Or was Shakespeare just heavy on patriarchy? Wives, sadly, were largely relegated to the private sphere in Shakespeare’s day, thereby removing them from the public action that drives the plots of his plays.

One of his most women-centric plays, case in point, is a domestic comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Mistress Margaret Page has a daughter and a son). But the wives, you may recall, hilariously outwit the lusty Falstaff and have some good clean fun at their husbands’ expense. Perhaps Shakespeare was actually pushing the Renaissance husband-wife/father-mother envelope, even if just a skosh?

***

And what’s my excuse, you ask? I’m putting the question right back on you: Do you think the likes of Lady Macbeth in any way makes me think of my dear mother?! Well, a few glasses of chardonnay in, my mother does like to joke of my birth: “They pulled you from my womb. They pulled you from my body.” That’s kind of Lady Macbeth-level graphic, isn’t it? I can hear one of my brothers bellowing: “Mom, c’mon! That’s gross!”

Maybe Shakespeare didn’t write mothers into his plays because he got along with his mother.

The truth is, I chased Shakespeare’s emotional ambulances. Conflict is my way into his plays. Conflict is essential to any good story, my writing here included. And conflict is something, other than me being occasionally too judgmental of her when we talk on the phone, that my mother and I, fortunately, haven’t experienced much of.

Maybe Shakespeare didn’t write mothers into his plays because he also got along with his mother.

***

Mary Shakespeare, née Arden, came from some money and status. Shakespeare’s father, John, was a farmer’s son. Mary married down. Did she marry for love, for fulfillment? Did she exercise more choice and will than your typical Elizabethan woman?

I also can’t help but wonder how Mary and John reacted when young Bill said he was going into theater. I’m sure you can hear it today, too, when one tells their parents, oh, I don’t know, you’re quitting your job to read the complete works of Shakespeare.

But maybe Mary was supportive. Maybe Shakespeare modeled one of his best mothers, the caring but fair Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well, after his own. The advice she gives to her (ungrateful) son Bertram as he’s going abroad is something every son should heed today:

Be thou blessed, Bertram, and succeed thy father
In manners as in shape. Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright. Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none. Be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key. Be checked for silence
But never taxed for speech…(1.1.54-61)

I’ve revisited this passage several times since finishing the play. In part because I find her advice so pure, wise, simple, and true. In part because I find it remarkable Shakespeare left us such lucid moral instruction. And in part because I hear the guidance my own mother has always provided me at crossroads in my life: “Follow your heart.”

***

I’ve often struggled with her words. A lot of times, I didn’t know how to listen to my heart. I didn’t know what it was trying to tell me. Other times, I just wanted someone else to make the big decision for me. And, to be honest, I’ve struggled with them because she’s said them so damned often – you I know I love you, Mom – that they just lost all their meaning. They’re like a truism, a verbal tic.

Following one’s heart: That requires self-invention. And there’s nothing more Shakespearean than that.

But something I never considered until I thought about Shakespeare’s mothers was: Why those words? Why that expression? Why that particular advice? Why did my mother always tell me to follow my heart?

There were times in her life, I think, when she wasn’t allowed to follow her heart, perhaps restricted like a Renaissance mother. Then there came a point when she could. This shift, this freedom, though born of painful circumstance, let her reinvent herself, who she is, what she could be, what could she do.

Following one’s heart: That requires self-invention. And there’s nothing more Shakespearean than that.

My mother pulled a Shakespeare – a proper Shakespeare.

The Enchanted Pen: The Reign of King Edward III

Magic, love, poetry…and being freakin’ done.

I stood up, fist-pumped a triumphant “Yes,” and collapsed onto the floor into giddy carpet-angels.

At 2:59pm on January 5, 2017, I did it. I read the word “queen” and was finished with the complete works of William Shakespeare, 146,344 days after he died.

Every last play. Every last line. Every last word. Every last iamb. Every last roguish, rascally, knavish, villainous fragment he may have in some way, shape, or form penned.

Whither hast thou been? There. What hast thou done? That.

I even read random little love poems that sound like something I once wrote about a schoolyard crush: “I did walk, I did talk / With my love, with my dove” (A Song, 4.34-35). No, the great Shakespeare was not above rhyming love and dove.

That’s thirty-nine plays, ya hear? Over 880,000 words. A whole lotta thee’s and anon’s, methinks. What? Didn’t copy? Thirty. Nine. Plays. In one year. No. In 361 days. I finished five days ahead of schedule, having launched Shakespeare Confidential on January 10, 2016.

I sprung up. There was work to be done. I had to tell Facebook. I had to tell Twitter.

I read the word “queen” and was finished with the complete works of William Shakespeare, 146,344 days after he died.

Likes and congrats starting pouring in my feed when it panged me like a slipped disc in my back. I technically said I would read the complete works of William Shakespeare in 2016, the year marking the four hundredth anniversary of his death, didn’t I?

This hadn’t dawned on me when I finished Hamlet in the wee hours of January 3rd. I took a seat. I took a few deep breaths. I called my wife for a second opinion.

We agreed: The letter of the law would be finishing the project before 11:59:59 on December 31, 2016, but its spirit was reading all of Shakespeare over one year’s time.

“And I did that. That’s what I did. Yeah, that’s right.” At this point I was just assuaging my own Hamletian doubts.

“Plus, the rough edges make for a more interesting story, right?”

***

I nearly bailed on my final play, The Reign of Edward III, which had been included in the Norton Shakespeare some years after I shelled out (well, my father’s credit card shelled out) over a hundred bucks for some used copies of the first edition in the Xavier University bookstore. That turned out to be a pretty good investment, come to think of it.

I couldn’t find a physical copy of the play anywhere back in the states, when I needed to finish over the Christmas holiday. I hunted for it in libraries and bookstores. A California Barnes and Noble said they could ship in a copy. For $99. That wasn’t going to happen. My brother’s local library had an edition of a Complete Works with Edward III (not bad, Bexley, OH, not bad at all). But I didn’t discover this until the day before my stay there ended.

I started making excuses. Actually, I started making a formal list of objections:

  1. Most anthologies don’t include it. There have long been questions about what parts Shakespeare may have written.
  2. Few people actually read the play. It’s not considered a particularly good play.
  3. I’d have to read it online:
    • Elizabethan English is terribly difficult to wade through on a screen.
    • The available text was short on glosses and footnotes. That means even more language and historical context I would miss reading a digital copy.
    • The online edition would be inconsistent with other texts I’ve read.
    • I couldn’t underline notable passages and circle interesting words.
  4. I really wanted to finish Shakespeare Confidential on Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most Shakespearean play.

Aroint ye, excuses! The counterarguments:

  1. More and more anthologies are including Edward III, as forensic and corpus linguistics have recently identified hallmark signs of Shakespeare’s idiolect. 
  2. Few people may do so, but people actually read it.
  3. Reading online is tough, but it was available with just a few simple keystrokes:
    • I’ve read 38 other plays at this point. I’ve got some practice working my way through the language.
    • Again, I’ve read 38 other plays at this point. I can handle raw text.
    • For Much Ado About Nothing, I did read the Folger edition, after all.
    • Even when I marked up compelling parts, I still coped their line numbers down in a notebook.
  4. I really wanted to read all of Shakespeare in one year.

I really wanted that last one, item #4. 

“I’ll be disappearing in the basement for awhile,” I informed my stepmother while loading up on fresh coffee and water upstairs.

“Happy reading,” she wished.

“We’ll see about that.”

I cued up the play on Shakespeare’s Words, from celebrated Shakespeareans David and Ben Crystal, and strapped myself in.

***

A funny thing happened. I ended up finishing the play in a just few short hours, my fastest all year. Maybe I really had learned a thing or two on may way to Shakespeare completism. Maybe I was less encumbered by shuttling back and forth between footnotes and text, between glosses and my notebooks. Or maybe I was just ready to be done already.

“For so such moving hath a Poet’s pen: Then, if thou be a Poet, move thou so.”

But another funny thing happened. I can barely remember a damned thing about it other than that the English and French are fighting and the English win. This is pretty much a safe assumption for any of Shakespeare’s history plays. And this, as Wikipedia has since kindly reminded me, is pretty much an accurate outline of the play.

I remembered that, and a passage where Edward III asks his secretary, Lodowick, to write some poetry for a new love interest:

Now, Lod’wick, invocate some golden Muse,
To bring thee hither an enchanted pen,
That may for sighs set down true sighs indeed,
Talking of grief, to make thee ready groan;
And when thou writ’st of tears, encouch the word
Before and after with such sweet laments,
That it may raise drops in a Tartar’s eye,
And make a flint-heart Scythian pitiful;
For so much moving hath a Poet’s pen:
Then, if thou be a Poet, move thou so,
And be enriched by thy sovereign’s love.
For, if the touch of sweet concordant strings
Could force attendance in the ears of hell,
How much more shall the strains of poets’ wit
Beguile and ravish soft and humane minds! (2.1.65-79)

This passage, perhaps, is as close as we get to a statement of poetics from Shakespeare. Of what he may have thought poetry is and can do. Of he thought art is for.

For Shakespeare, poetry’s like magic and love: It seduces and enchants us, as the renowned Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate argued at that lecture I attended in Oxford back in April 2016. Poetry conjures up powerful images in our mind – which were called fantasies in Shakespeare’s day. And these images have power over us. Like Theseus’ potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Prospero’s spells in The Tempest. They make us think differently. They make us act differently.

Like magic, like love, poetry changes us. Poetry transforms us. For so such moving hath a Poet’s pen: / Then, if thou be a Poet, move thou so. O, thou wert a poet, Shakespeare.

Hamlet be damned: I can think of no better way to close out my year of reading the complete works of Shakespeare…and there I was, trying to skip out on Edward III. Fie!

Flourish. [Exit]

Everything and nothing: Hamlet, Part 3

Maybe we expect too much. Or not enough.

January 4

Words, words, words. (2.2.192)

It was my father’s birthday. From the basement, where the guest suite is, I heard him come home from work. He sounded tired. It sounded like a long day. I heard him answer a FaceTime video with my oldest brother. With his grandson. His voice, his mood lifted.

I gave him a card where I wrote “Happy Birthday” and his age in Irish.

We went out to eat. The ingredients of my salad were separated into eight ramekins. “I guess the cook figured ‘Like father like son,’” the server laughed. I tapped the bottom of my tumbler, shooting the half-melted whiskey-soaked ice into my mouth.

I charged dinner to my card. At first he refused, in due fatherly form. He knew well what I knew about my funds these days. But I insisted, in due filial form.

After dinner, I spent some time at my stepsister’s flat. She had two Rhinegeist Truth in her fridge, goddamnit.

This turned into Scotch at my father’s. Which turned into talking to my stepmother until two in the morning.

Frustrations, faults: They build up like alcohol in the blood. Disappointments, expectations: The words come out like vomit.

Maybe I drink too much. Maybe I expect too much.

***

January 5

The rest is silence. (5.2.300)

“I didn’t hear you come in,” my father said when he walked into the kitchen. He had his glasses on. His hair, slightly disheveled. Sweatshirt, rumpled. He had fallen asleep waiting up for me.

I told him I’d be back an hour, hour-and-half earlier, for a final Scotch my last night in Cincinnati. But I ended up lingering over one last bourbon, or two or three, at a friend’s house. 

My father didn’t need to say it. A son can read his father’s brow like a sailor divines import in the subtle changes of the wind and waves.

“I hear from some back channels that you’re not too happy with my, uh, level of engagement.”

It knocked me back. Not what he said or felt, but that he said it – directly.

***

“By indirections find directions out,” the lord Polonius charges his servant (2.1.65). And this – apart from the actual assassination, of course – is ultimately what’s “rotten in the state of Denmark,” I think (1.4.67). Everyone is testing. Everyone is surveilling.

What does Hamlet really say in the end? Everything and nothing. To be or not to be. Always talking around the great why of it all. Waylaid by the great or of it all.

Polonius sends his lackey out to snoop around on his son, Laertes. Joined by Claudius, he secretly watches Hamlet’s interactions with Ophelia to see if it’s love making Hamlet behave so strangely. Polonius even eavesdrops behind an arras when Hamlet, who stabs him upon discovery, is privately talking with his mother.

Claudius summons Hamlet’s childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet and ferret out the true cause of his “madness.” When Claudius sends Hamlet away to England, the two accompany him, entrusted with a secret letter instructing the English king to kill Hamlet. When this plan fails, because Hamlet finds out the letter and rewrites it to have the pair slain instead, Claudius plots to kill Hamlet with a poisoned sword and cup of wine in a ruse of duel with Laertes.

No one is direct.

And Hamlet’s the worst.

Aside from his sly forgery, he puts on madness to put off the court. He stages a play, which enacts an on-the-nose adulterous regicide, to gauge how it will prick Claudius and Gertrude’s consciences. He overhears Claudius’ private confession. He confronts his mother with pictures of his father and Claudius to guilt her into repentance.

And he talks and talks and talks. What does he really say in the end? Everything and nothing. To be or not to be. Always talking around the great why of it all. Waylaid by the great or of it all. And all this on his mission – his notoriously fitful, plodding, roundabout mission – to avenge his father’s ghost.

What is he waiting for? What does he expect? What he does he want to hear? “I’m sorry”? “I fucked up”? “I failed”? “I let you down”?

What is he waiting for? What does he expect? What he does he want to hear? “I’m sorry”? “I fucked up”? “I failed”? “I let you down”?

Tell that to Ophelia. Revenge isn’t far from self-righteousness. Nihilism, from narcissism. 

Maybe we expect too much of others. Maybe we expect too much of ourselves. Maybe we expect too much of the truth.

Or maybe not enough.

***

These are the conversations a son longs to have with his father. And these are the conversations he is never prepared to have.

My father stood close to me. I could smell the floral notes of detergent on his sweatshirt. He looked in me the eye. I cast my eyes across the room, tapping my fingers inside my coat pocket as I rambled about time and distance and happiness, saying everything and nothing at all.

“You’ve got a little something on your cheek,” he said.

We hugged. He insisted I take a few twenties for gas money for the drive up to Chicago. We said goodnight.

I went for a beer in the fridge but then thought better of it.

Everything and nothing: Hamlet, Part 2

It’s a ghost story, after all.

December 31 – January 1

Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred my imagination is!…Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? (5.1.171-77).

“How would you normally get there?” my father asked when we left to drop me off at my rental car, which I left by the bar.

“Uhh,” I tapped the window as the directions, like old home-phone numbers and Catholic school prayers, came back to me. “71-South to the Lateral to 75-South. Get off at St. Bernard and take Clifton up.”

The highway curved around hillsides, revealing familiar steeples and factory chimneys under an ashen sky, and new buildings, too. A medical center where the movie theater used to be. A business complex on a long-empty lot. Like a new couch in your parents’ living room, the structures. Changing everything and nothing.

***

I got a coffee from United Dairy Farmers. Displays for local craft beers loudly capped the aisles. But the same smell of malt powder and cake cones hung in the air.

Then I crossed the street and picked up two coneys – “Mustard and onion, please” – and a small 3-way from the nearby Skyline Chili to bring back for my wife. We had wanted to partake of some old favorites, to visit some old stomping grounds, while we were in town, but she came down with a fever and was laid up for several days.

The restaurant had new paint. They were selling t-shirts now. The conies climbed to over two bucks a piece. But the shredded cheese was just as yellow and melty, the windows just as fogged up from the bun steamer.

I lingered past a former apartment I spent years in on my drive back. Past corners of the university campus I walked for work and class. The Vietnamese spot moved across the street.

If the building were speaking to me, I couldn’t hear them. What did I expect them to say? What I want them to say?

Places move on.

***

Later that night, I met up with an old friend – the same who wouldn’t touch Juliet’s boob – for New Year’s. For weeks I had been nagging him about plans when I was in town. There was a need for organization and preparation, I felt, when you’re only back once a year. I could never reach him on FaceTime or email so I resorted to Facebook. I’d detour on pictures of camping trips and group selfies. I’d try to imagine myself in the frame.

It’s so beautiful, and so strange, how we come in and out of each other’s lives, like ghosts.

We went over to his buddy’s house, who was hosting a small get-together. At one point, my friend and I were the only two people on the couch in the living room, both drinking some Cincinnati craft beer, the Dick Clark New Years Rockin’ Eve duly muted in the  background.

“Did my…FaceTime Audio ever go through to you? Sometimes they don’t go through.”

“Uh, maybe a few? I’m not really sure.”

“Ah, yeah. They probably showed up as ‘Unknown.’”

What did I expect him to say? What did I want him to say? People move on.

“You need a beer?” I asked. 

“Yeah. Mine are on the porch.”

I stopped to take in the cool air. The porch overlooked Wasson and Paxton: Railroad tracks I had often walked, a grocery store where I had often shopped. But I had never seen them from this angle before, flattened and seeming so small from this height.

I grabbed my friend a Truth.

Back inside, the host presented me with a tumbler. He wanted me to taste his Midsummer Night’s Dram, of all things. A rye finished in French oak port barrels. I rolled it around my tongue watching Ryan Seacrest and Jenny McCarthy move their lips. I’m John. I go way back with Matt, I replayed my introduction to the host. Oh, I know who you are, he said. I’ve heard a lot of stories about you.

***

Just ahead of the ball-drop, we all crammed Cincinnati craft beers into our pockets and walked down to a local square. A community Facebook page promised a neighborhood party, food trucks, beer stalls, fireworks. But the square was empty except for another group, who also were expecting the event. Someone with us lead the countdown on their phone. We finished a few seconds before the other group, who were following a different countdown, apparently. At the eruption of their Happy New Year!, one of the guys dropped to his knee and proposed to his girlfriend. She said yes. We took their photos. We said our congratulations. Fireworks went off. 

Walking back to the house, I commented to another partygoer how we witnessed this intense and intimate moment for the couple, this defining moment, and yet, in all odds, we’ll never see them again. Further small talk led us to discover we went to the same dentist as kids.

It’s so beautiful, and so strange, how we come in and out of each other’s lives, like ghosts.

***

Not long after midnight, my friend drove me home. He stopped drinking a while back. We were tried. Or bored. Or both. Or…Unspoken words are like ghosts.

I tried not to make too much noise when I ate the Skyline over the kitchen sink in the dark. I thought about the tiny fissure of time between our New Year countdowns. As if it set off two separate new years unfolding in two separate universes.

***

January 2-3, 2017

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (1.5.168-69)

Sometime around one in the morning, I softly, deliberately, closed Hamlet. I smoothed over the cover and squared the volume with my notebooks and laptop on the dining table. In the soft glow of the reading lamp, over my final sips of tea, I listened. I waited. I didn’t know what for. 

***

I had been finishing the play, Shakespeare’s longest, in snatches stolen here and there at my oldest brother’s house in Columbus, where I stayed for a few days to spend some extra time with my nephew.

“How’s Hammy?” my brother asked me at one such reading.

I laughed. “You know, I had forgotten that he was 30 in the play.”

“Least you could forget it. I’ve never read it. I’m running out to get some beers – no Rhinegeist, Hammy be damned. I’m good on Rhinegeist.”

***

In all his squeals and giggles, in all his tumbles and preverbal clamors, my nephew is raw life, unmediated, unburdened, by the mind knowing itself as a mind. He is decisively, blissfully, un-Hamletian.

It’s hard reading Hamlet with a toddler around, because it’s hard wanting to read Hamlet with a toddler around. Eating, crying, playing, shitting: These are welcome distractions. In all his squeals and giggles, in all his tumbles and preverbal clamors, my nephew is raw life, unmediated, unburdened, by the mind knowing itself as a mind. He is decisively, blissfully, un-Hamletian. And so, too, I find my brother. Feeding, soothing, entertaining and teaching, cleaning: The parent of the toddler is managing the relentless onslaught of life, unconcerned with, unavailable to, the self-indulgent dread of that deeper, darker self-knowledge. There are no expectations. No demands, no disappointments. Just the immediate business of living. 

***

I heard nothing but the house its night noises. Boards creaked. Pipes tapped. Upstairs, my nephew issued a solitary cry in his sleep. I wondered what he was dreaming.

Everything and nothing: Hamlet, Part 1

Tap, tap, tap.

December 28

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! (2.2.527)

“I think I’m going to switch back to beer,” I announced, not they cared. My wife, brother, and I were chatting after our Christmas dinner, observed.

In the fridge, there was six-pack after six-pack of Cincinnati craft beer, which had exploded in the year since I had been back home. I went for a Rhinegeist Truth.

“What do you have planned for the rest of the week? Have to go back to work or anything?” I asked my brother, giving the top of my beer a few quick taps.

He was in town from Minneapolis. Our time in Cincinnati this holiday overlapped by about 40 hours. We were 24 hours into it, I calculated.

“Nah, I took the rest of the week off. Gotta pick my dog up from the sitter, clean my place, hit the gym. Nothing planned, really.”

“Oh, that’s too bad you couldn’t have chilled down here for another night or so, seeing that we’re, you know, in from Ireland and–”

“He visited us for a week and half this summer, John,” my wife cut me off. “What else do you expect?”

She deftly switched the subject.

I cracked open the beer. It hissed and fizzed.

***

December 29

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world! (1.2.129-34)

“Do you hear that?” my stepmother asked.

We crossed paths by the stairs on my way out for a run. A few too many of those Truths made it into the recycling bin last night.

“No. What?”

“The tapping.”

I listened closely. Three taps. A long pause. Two taps. Pause. Taps.

“That damned cardinal is back.”

“Cardinal?”

“It’s gotten fixated on its reflection in the stairwell windows. And it’ll just tap and tap and tap all day. The landscaper’s tried everything to scare it way. We even lined the windows with black garbage bags. It went away for a while, but as soon as we took them down, it came right back. The sound will drive you nuts!”

I thought of Hamlet. “Well isn’t that just the perfect metaphor for life?”

She laughed.

Tap, tap, tap.

***

I ran up and down the neighborhoods. On winding, sidewalkless streets, long driveways lead up to big houses that squatted on wide lawns with tall, leafless trees. There was no one else around. The silence was ghostly. It was the middle of the afternoon on the Thursday after Christmas, though. What else did I expect?

***

December 30

To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep–
No more, and by a sleep we say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to – ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. (3.1.58-70)

“Everything and nothing,” I told my friend at the bar.

We were grabbing a drink at my old haunt. I hadn’t been here in years. There were a lot of new taps there, I noticed. Cincinnati craft beers. But the counter was still sticky. The place still smelled stale and skunky.  Many of the same faces were still smoking out on the patio. One, a tall, quiet guy with a lazy eye I used to smalltalk with over a cigarette every now and again – God, he looked so much older. “You used have long hair, didn’t you?” the bartender asked when I ordered.

My friend and I fell into a conversation about Hamlet. At this point, I was in the middle of my third time through this most famous of Shakespeare’s plays, which takes us inside the self-consciously self-conscious head of the Prince of Denmark as he slowly revenges the murder of his father. The king was poisoned by Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, who immediately marries Hamlet’s mother. Gertrude. I was planning on saving it for my very last play for Shakespeare Confidential, because, well, it’s Hamlet – until I remembered that I still had that pesky The Reign of Edward III.

Hamlet’s just stuck. Stuck between everything and nothing, between the everything and the nothing of it all.

I hadn’t seen this friend, a high school pal, in years. After teaching in Thailand, China, and the Republic of Georgia, he ended up in a Hawaii classroom. He’s brilliant. Definitely one of the two smartest persons I know. The kind of intellect who reads the Elizabethan playwrights other than Shakespeare just for his own self-edification. Who does that? He could so effortlessly quote the Bard in support of whatever incisive argument he was making. I envied this. How the hell do you do that, man? I’d say each time he’d rattle off a choice passage, and not just short, well-known ones, either. Obscure, long, difficult ones. I’m the one reading the complete works of Shakespeare here!

“It’s mortality. Not the fear of death, per se,” I tapped a coaster on the bar. “But trying to…to…reconcile our recognition that our lives are, ultimately, insignificant, on the one hand, with our stubborn and vain insistence on acting, doing, being, meaning in spite of it, on the other. Hamlet’s just stuck. Stuck between everything and nothing, between the everything and the nothing of it all.” Tap, tap. “I think this is the source of all our art, of all our anxiety. I get this. I feel this. ”

He agreed. Not just with my interpretation of Hamlet, which was validating, but with the sentiment. That he, too, felt it.

“And it freakin’ blows my mind how Shakespeare captured it all over 400 years ago. Another Truth, please,” I asked as the bartender.

We bumped into two of my brother’s friends from high school. The four of us played some pool. In between shots, we caught up (they both have several children now) and reminisced (studying aboard in Japan, former guitar-playing glories, etc.). We texted our wives or girlfriends that we were only having one more. I sent a selfie with my brother’s friends. Wish I was there, my brother replied.

Eventually, my friend ordered us an Uber back to my father’s, where he crashed. I intended for us to grab a drink and then get a bite to eat. I wonder what else he had expected.

On the ride back, I couldn’t stop raving that the driver had seat warmers in the back of his Ford sedan.

Balcony scenes: Romeo and Juliet

It’s the story, stupid.

1.1
Outside Capulet’s house

When I cupped her boob, laughter erupted.

“What’s so funny?” I asked my friend.

“You’re standing, like, five feet away from her,” he said.

His father thrust his hips back and shot an arm high into the air. “Get a good feel there, Johnny?”

Even my friend’s mother was snickering as she captured my clumsy groping for all time.

I cleared the way and watched the next tourist, who posed for the camera – at a reasonable, comfortable distance.

“Least I did it,” I elbowed my friend.

He was too shy to touch the boob. Juliet Capulet’s boob, that is.

In a medieval courtyard in Verona, the brick thick with ivy and lovers’ graffiti, stands a statue of Juliet Capulet, her bronze breast polished smooth and shiny by countless hands, underneath the very balcony, legend has it, Shakespeare immortalized in The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

Touching her breast, tradition has it, brings luck in love. Touched, indeed: In 2014, the city had to remove and repair the statue, for a crack had appeared in her talismanic breast as well as in her arm.

***

4.3
An airplane over the Atlantic

That was one of my earliest memories of this play, as I recalled my awkward statue molestation while reading Romeo and Juliet for the fourth time 30,000 feet in the air. The summer before I went into high school, my friend, his father, and I tagged along an educational European tour for high-schoolers where his mother taught.

My wife and I were heading home for Christmas, a direct flight from Dublin to Los Angeles. I had three plays left, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Edward III, some odd poems, and only two busy and booze-filled weeks to finish. This flight was essential. But the airborne Bard hadn’t treated me so well in the past. The Sonnets left me short on attention, you’ll remember, and on cabernet sauvignon.

I’ll scroll through the movies option, I allowed. Just in case I need a little break…or deserve a reward. I tapped my touchscreen. It wasn’t responding. I tapped it again. Then I peppered it with jabs. The system jerkily caught up with my commands and sent me to the family movie section. A thumbnail of Gnomeo & Juliet popped up. Of course. But did they really premise this entire film on wordplay?

“Something to drink, sir?” Drink service arrived to my row.

“Uh, yes. Red wine, please.” Clearly I hadn’t learned my lesson about Shakespeare, wine, and airplanes. I saw the flight attendant eye my Norton doorstopper.

“What do you have your head in there?” he asked.

“Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.”

“Ah, Romeo and Juliet,” he trilled. “Light reading for a flight.”

“You can say that again.”

“‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!’” he intoned above the din of jet engines. I had just finished that scene, incredibly. Then he – the most charming steward I’d ever met, and the most knowledgeable about Shakespeare, to be sure – burst into chuckles as he recalled some hilarious production of the play he’d seen.

Everyone has a story about Romeo and Juliet, I thought. If person has read only one Shakespeare play, it’s gotta be Romeo and Juliet. But I, for one, have never really understood the infatuation.

***

3.0
[Enter] CHORUS

Permit me a little soapboxing, er, shouting from the balcony:

First, Romeo starts out in love, albeit unrequited, with a young woman named Rosaline. It when he sneaks into a Montague masquerade, for the express purpose of checking out Rosaline, that he glimpses, and instantly falls in love with, Juliet.

Second, Juliet is 13. Forget all you’ve heard about Elizabethans, Shakespeare’s original audience, mind you, marrying young. During the Bard’s day, the mean age of marriage was 27.

True love? Or just being horny? What do you think Shakespeare is getting at with all of Mercutio’s sex jokes, and his puns on the firm steel of a drawn sword? And in the famous balcony scene, after Romeo’s famed “It is the east” opening, he launches right into the poetic equivalent of ‘Have sex with me.’ Don’t be the maid of Diana, goddess of chastity, he says: “Her vestal livery is but sick and green, / And none but fools do wear it; cast it off” (2.1.50-51). Then, when he proposes immediate marriage, just after his first disclosure of his love, even Juliet says, “It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden / Too like the lightning which doth cease to be / Ere one can say it lightens” (2.1.160-62).

I can’t help but think Shakespeare’s winking at us with his sensational finale. There’s an element of comedy in their over-the-top deaths.

Third is their ridiculous double suicide. Recall that Romeo is a Montague, long feuding with the Capulets, Juliet’s family. This precipitates 1) their secret, forbidden marriage and 2) a fight in which Romeo kills Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, prompting Romeo’s exile. Friar Laurence concocts a plan to reunite them, including Juliet taking a sleeping potion that causes Romeo to think she’s dead. So, he downs some lethal poison, leading Juliet to stab herself to death when she discovers his corpse after coming to.

Passion? Pshaw. This is just the heedless, reckless impulsivity of adolescence. I side with the cooling wisdom of Friar Laurence: “These violent delights have violent ends…Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (2.5.9-15). And I can’t help but think Shakespeare’s winking at us with his sensational finale. There’s an element of comedy in their over-the-top deaths.

Finally, everyone constantly misquotes some of the play’s most famous lines. “Star-crossed lovers” (P.6)? Star-crossed isn’t a good thing. It refers, in the astrology of the day, to the stars that appeared when they were born; here, the stars thwarted, or crossed, the lovers’ destinies.

And as for the play’s most famous line of all? “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (2.1.74-75)

***

2.5
A classroom in Cincinnati, Ohio

“What does ‘wherefore’ mean?” I asked the ninth-graders, who were about the same age I was when I touched the Juliet nearly 15 years before.

This was the only time I properly taught Shakespeare, my semester of student-teaching. (Technically, I aided instruction of an adapted text The Merchant of Venice to a small group of seniors with learning disabilities. They found Portia’s “pound of flesh” strategy brilliant.)

Preparing for the unit, I reread Romeo Juliet, which I can vaguely remember reading my own freshman year, in the very same Norton Shakespeare I used this time around. There is evidence of my lesson planning in the margins. Symbolism of nurse, I jotted and heavily underlined. Opposites: Poison in beautiful flowers. Oxymorons, I wrote next to Romeo’s  “O brawling love, O loving hate” (1.1.169). Love turns everything upside down. Reversing/turning meanings. Their love is pure, but irony that the pretense to meet is under shrift/confession. Who’s responsible for the deaths? Themselves? Friar? Capulet/Montague? Friar John?

“‘Where’?” a student offered.

“That’s what it definitely sounds like. Plus, Juliet thinks she’s all alone, pining for her absent lover. Good thinking, but not quite. Anyone else?”

“It means ‘why’,” another student supplied.

“Yes! She’s saying, ‘Why does your name have to be Romeo?’ A Montague. The enemy of her family. How did you know that?”

“It says it in the book. I ain’t no dummy, Mr. Kelly!”

“And you ain’t gotta be salty about it!” The class erupted in laughter. “I was giving you props.”

“Let me tell you something,” I continued. I switched from teacherspeak to ‘real talk’ as I circulated the room, high up on my imaginary pulpit. “There’s no secret to being smart. Smart is knowing how to use your resources. Like your book, which defines some of those old-sounding words that make Shakespeare seem hard. You think I know what all those words mean? No. I just know what tools are available to me and how to use them. Wherefore sounds like where. But language changes. Words change. Take Slang. Does anyone here say phat anymore? No. You’ll sound like a…” I paused for dramatic effect. “A biscuit head.” Laughter. It was probably most effective tactic as a teacher. Not irony or oxymoron or critical thinking questions. Self-deprecation.

***

3.5
An apartment in Irvine, California

Early on in Shakespeare Confidential, before we moved to Dublin, my wife suggested I read Romeo and Juliet so we could act out the balcony scene. Our apartment had a very tall loft overlooking the living room.

I had no mind to read Romeo and Juliet just yet, thinking it one of the more overhyped plays in his oeuvre. But I did agree to try the scene.

“Where’s your passion? Where’s your spontaneity? Where’s your sense of fun?”

I started with some spirit:

“‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It the east, and Juliet is the sun. / Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon…’” (2.1.44-46).

The crown of my wife’s head comically emerged up from the ledge when I got to [Enter JULIET aloft].

“‘O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!’” (2.1.66-67).

My enthusiasm was started to wane, but my wife had no problem dusting off her drama chops from high school.

“‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?…
What’s in a name? That we which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.’” (2.1.74-86).

She delivered it in artful diction.

“Ah, this is so corny,” I broke in, polishing off my bourbon.

“That’s not your line!” She drained the last of her gin and tonic.

“You don’t think Shakespeare actually wanted us to take seriously alls this flowery sweet talk from two teenagers, do you?”

“Where’s your passion? Where’s your spontaneity? Where’s your sense of fun?”

“But,  but…”

***

4.4
Terminal 2, Los Angeles International Airport

Over a grande black coffee outside the gate, where my wife and I waited for her sister and then-boyfriend to land, I finished the final act of Romeo and Juliet.

Closing the book with a sigh, I looked over at the Starbucks line. Everyone in line was Hispanic. Baristas called for “Double mocha frappuccino” as customers presented smartphones for payment. Families chatted, stared at cellphones, or paced restlessly with their coffee drinks. Loved ones would emerge. Hugs. Cheers. One man went in for a kiss to the women he was greeting. She playfully thwarted it and grabbed the frothy pink drink out of his hand. She made a joke in Spanish. He laughed. They embraced.

This is America, I thought. This is love.

“I finished Romeo and Juliet,” I told my wife, who was watching Netflix on LAX WiFi, her phone charging in one of the few remaining sockets.

“Nice!” She gave me a solid high-five.

Last year around this time, I caused a fight that almost pushed our marriage over the edge. The very fight that, in some ways, lead to me reading all this Shakespeare in the first place. 

“You remember that old couple we saw at Marks and Spencer’s?” We were at the department before we flew home because her father – part humorously, part tortuously, and mostly seriously – had asked for some silk boxers for Christmas.

“Oh, with the elderly man who asked his wife, ‘Honey, do I like boxers or briefs’? and then she had to show him how to shop for underwear?”

***

2.6
A classroom in Cincinnati, Ohio

In one short semester, I wasn’t going to get my students’ reading levels up to tackle the text of Romeo and Juliet on their own. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare. Far from it. Let’s not forget Shakespeare wasn’t meant to be read.

It was simple. They liked the story.

The students followed along a version of the text in those bulky, grade-level literature textbooks (remember those?) as we listened to an audio play. Then, dutifully, we watched Leonard DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s surprise 1996 hit Romeo + Juliet. Anymore, watching that film in the ninth-grade is as much a rite of passage as actually reading the play.

“He look so young!” one girl shrieked at DiCaprio. 

“Broadsword. That’s tight!” a boy noted of the Luhrmann’s substitution of guns for swords.

No pontificating here. The students watched the movie raptly. Attendance was higher on those days, I noted.

It was simple. They liked the story.

***

3.6
Outside Capulet’s house

ROMEO. Lady, by yonder blessed moon I vow,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops–

JULIET. O swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

ROMEO. What shall I swear by?

JULIET. Do not swear at all,
Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee.

ROMEO. If my heart’s dear love–

JULIET. Well, do not swear. (2.1.149-58)

***

3.0
CHORUS

Friar Laurence objects to Romeo and Juliet’s hasty matrimony, but, come to think of it, he still marries them.

***

1.2
Somewhere outside Verona

As luck would have it, I had my first kiss a few days after I touched Juliet’s breast. With a high-schooler. At the end of trip, we exchanged wistful goodbye notes. I’m almost certain that, somewhere in my sappy, pretentious, and callow valediction, I included Juliet’s famous farewell: “Parting is such sweet sorrow…” (2.1.229).

Good Lord. But it’s true. Everyone has a story about Romeo and Juliet. It’s simple: We like the story.

Past, present, and macaroni salad: Henry VIII 

Why do we make the choices we make?

“We’ve got…,” I said with a suspenseful pause as I pulled tupperware out of the reusable grocery bag, “Monte Cristo sandwiches and macaroni salad.”

“Holy shit. Thanks, man,” my friend said. 

“Thank my stepmom. We had leftovers.”

We sat in his KIA sedan parked at a Love’s off I-65. A water tower read White County. It was a clear day, seasonably cold. Everything around us was flat for miles and miles and miles. We were closing in on Chicago, where we were visiting a friend for the weekend before I finally flew back to Dublin after nearly a month in the States.

Something felt so adult about eating lunch with an old high school friend in a car off the side of the road, your hometown hundreds of miles behind you, in a few days, thousands more.

And yet something felt so childlike about forking macaroni salad out of GladWare. Packed lunches, certainly, have that effect, but this wasn’t just any macaroni salad. I must have been eating this same salad, this same exact recipe, for over 20 years.

My mind drifted out and over thousands of conversations I’ve had with my family. Out and over thousand of conversations we’ve never had. And it landed on Shakespeare.

The taste plunged me back to the honey-colored wood of the kitchen table and terra-cotta tiled floor. Back to glass bowls of grapes and strawberries, of blackberries and bananas, that made their way from plate to plate. Back to my stepmother slicing those bananas by pushing a paring knife up towards a callused thumb so a perfect little chunk would tumble right into the bowl. Back to a cutting board propping up that long Monte Cristo, my father bringing a longer-seeming serrated knife down through its many layers and divvying out neat, even wedges.

“How does your stepson, you know, handle everything?” I asked, breaking my own flashback. Stepson. The word thrust me right back into the present, to adulthood.

My friend spoke thoughtfully about shared custody, about the different roles divorced parents take on. He spoke about his own identity, negotiating new territories of parenthood and stepfatherhood. He spoke about how his six-year-old stepson grasps it all.

“How was it for you?” he asked. “Weren’t you pretty young when your parents divorced?”

I scooped up my last bite of salad. My mind drifted out and over the never-ending flatness of Indiana. Out and over countless suitcases, bedrooms, car rides. Out and over thousands of conversations I’ve had with my family. Out and over thousands of conversations we’ve never had.

And it landed on Shakespeare.

***

It had been some weeks since I finished All is True (Henry VIII). This history centers, mostly, on the fall of Cardinal Wolseley, King Henry VIII’s powerful and self-serving advisor, after he fails to secure an annulment for Henry VIII so he can marry Ann Boleyn.

I sat on this play for quite some time because I had trouble locating myself in the drama. There were obvious connections, like Henry VIII’s divorce of Queen Katherine. But this, the subject of divorce in and of itself, didn’t grab me.

For one, I have no mind to air any dirty laundry here. For another, I’m just no longer all that interested in the gritty details of my parents’ divorce. I think I processed them plenty in the reims of reflective essays I churned out for high school English and religion classes.

I’m not sure that the heart isn’t a dark and opaque organ at the end of the day, keeping itself alive with molecules and membranes we will never really understand.

About twenty-six years later, the wounds have healed. But the body is never exactly the same as it was before its injury. It works. It functions. It’s repaired. But it’s a different body, even if just by the scars it bears. Often you forget they are even there. But they are always with you, the scars. And every so often, you’ll stop and run your hands over them. You’ll stare at their shape. You’ll marvel that the body can even do it at all, this miracle work of healing, weaving together all that new skin. It’s magic, when you really think about it.

But what did grab me, in that chew-ful moment of silence before my reply, was a speech by Cardinal Wolseley right after his decline. Before heading to court to answer charges of treason, an ailing Cardinal Wolseley, who, mind you, has been an absolute bastard his entire career, has a sudden change of heart:

Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man. Today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy, man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his rot,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of  glory,
But far beyond my depth; my high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me
Weary, and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye!
I feel my heart new opened. O, how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have,
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again. (3.2.352-73)

“Well, that was quick,” as I wrote in the margins. Wolseley goes from utter villainy to complete reformation. Of course, this is drama, so, chop chop, metanoia. Still, where does he get off? Who does he think he is? What did he, do, really, to earn this epiphany?

Yet in my friend’s car, I heard the monologue differently. His repentance pointed me to the mysteries of our own psychology and behavior. Why do we make the choices we make? How do we think about our own decisions? When are we truly honest with ourselves? Why do we feel what we feel? How well can we actually know ourselves?

I went on to tell my friend, yes, about shared custody, about the different roles divorced parents take on, about my own identity, straddling two households and two sets of parents. About how I grasped the situation as a younger man, questioning its reality and aching to know why it all happened as it did. Perhaps I even wanted my parents to feel particular things, to say particular things, and those feelings and those words would make it all make sense.

Maybe there is peace in the pastness of some things, as much as its true nature haunts us.

But I ask a very different questions of my parents’ divorce now. Its reality, its objectivity, opens it up to an emotional, even epistemological, empiricism. I examine it as a curious specimen, craving knowledge without judgment, as if to satisfy a deeper curiosity, as if a stranger or alien. To understand the heart as an organ. To understand my parents as organisms. To see them as adults, as people. To understand myself no longer as child, but as grown-up and husband, who’s made mistakes, who’s made changes. Why do we make the choices we make? How well can we actually know ourselves? What really makes us behave the way do? To love and not love? To move on and not move on? To forgive and–?

“I know myself now,” Wolseley goes on, “and I feel within me / A peace above all earthly dignities, / A still and quiet conscience” (3.2.378-81).

That sounds like a sublime peace indeed. I’m not so sure we are ultimately knowable to ourselves. I’m not sure that the heart isn’t a dark and opaque organ at the end of the day, keeping itself alive with molecules and membranes we will never really understand.

But maybe there is peace, too, in the pastness of some things, as much as its true nature haunts us. For the past, in its own stubborn inertia, and one’s life, in that invisible accretion of decisions and boredoms and job applications and sleeping and fucking and eating and failures and photographs and moving boxes, takes on an inevitability, as if it could have unfolded no other way. There can be a peace in this factness, this livedness, this fixedness, this thingness, this thereness.

Or at least in the acceptance of them.

***

“But it’s just sort of what you know,” I added. “I just don’t know things any other way. You know what I mean? I don’t know any other reality.” I started into my sandwich, and it tasted it exactly as it did so many years ago.

Goddamnit, Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece

He’s good even when he’s not.

“Do you ever get sick of Shakespeare?” my sister-in-law asked me.

It was late morning, an unusually rainy day. I was sitting in a reclining chair, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis open on my lap, and I was making absolutely no progress in the poem. If only I could read like I drank coffee: No cream, no sugar, all day long, with lots of trips to the bathroom.

People were putting together their breakfasts in the kitchen, planning out activities and to-dos for the day, mapping out who would use the cars when, dogs barking out the window at passers-by, chickens squawking in the coop out back, a FaceBook video blaring on an iPhone, a call for “Who wants another cup of coffee?” (“I do.”) We were all back home at Christmas headquarters, my in-laws in Southern California. It wasn’t an ideal environment for a focused reading of Shakespeare, to be sure, but it wasn’t like I was making a dent in the poem. And this morning, my efforts were particularly half-assed.

“I wouldn’t say I get sick of Shakespeare, but I would say I get mad at him.”

“Sick? I wouldn’t say I get sick of him.” I explained to her how starting a new play was like jumping into cold water. You hesitate, fearing the initial shock of the icy immersion, the work you have to do warm up, but you soon acclimate to the temperature and love splashing around.

Then I looked down to Venus and Adonis.

I had been trying to wrap up Shakespeare’s other, non-Sonnets poems – including this one, The Rape of Lucrece, and a handful of other random little ditties – for a few days now. These felt like a long hike in the dessert.

“But I would say I get mad at him.”

Goddamnit, Shakespeare, I moaned to myself, my eyes glazing over at the fourth stanza into some extended metaphor about Adonis’ sexbod. Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem, 1194 lines long, about Venus, Roman goddess of love, falling in love with Adonis, a beautiful young man. Venus wants to jump Adonis’ bones, but Adonis is only interested in hunting. He does, the next day, but is killed by a boar. Venus is devastated, which is why, in the logic of myth, love is now so complicated. As she concludes:

Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend,
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end.
Ne’er settled equally, but high or low,
That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe. (1135-40)

She goes in, in poignant lines about how love hurts: “It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud” (1141). But goddamnit, Shakespeare, why did you have to make us wait for over 1000  never-freaking-ending lines for this?

It’s funny. Venus and Adonis was the first work Shakespeare published, and, arguably, his most popular. (Plays, back then, were owned by the theater, so the publication process, as well as the concept of authorship, was a different animal.) But now, with only Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Edward III standing in the way of my completist goal, Venus and Adonis felt like homework. Like a chore. And I, a recalcitrant schoolboy, having a tantrum about it.

***

I was taking far too much time to read Shakespeare’s “Other Poems.” Sure, there was day-drinking, outings, visits with friends and families, holiday parties, and all sorts of welcome and ready distractions. But I had more than enough time in between to put back these verses. So I snuck out to a Starbucks one under-scheduled afternoon to take on The Rape of Lucrece. This (motherfuckin’ 1855 lined rhyme royal) recounts how the son of the last king of Rome, Tarquin, rapes Lucretia, wife of a fellow soldier. Shamed and dishonored, Lucretia kills herself, leading to Tarquin’s banishment – and the founding of the Roman republic.   

But then here I was, bored to tears about a poem treating the horrifying rape of a woman.

I kept nodding off in the oversized café chair. I’d rub my eyes, try to get my finicky phone on WiFi one more time, and groan, “This is so boring.”

At one point, a group of late-middle-aged and older women gathered around a table nearby my seat. They were sporting Christmas sweaters and passing around Christmas cookies. They chatted – polite, soft-spoken, attentive – about the holidays, their kids and grandkids, movies and TV, and then politics.

I pretended I was reading (not that this required much of a change) and eavesdropped. “I just don’t know what the Access Hollywood video had to do anything. I mean, it doesn’t concern policy or anything.” She was referring to the tapes showing Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault.

I was shocked. How could she – a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a Christian, from what my eavesdropping gathered – shrug off Trump’s “Grab ‘em by the pussy”?

But then here I was, bored to tears about a poem treating the horrifying rape of a woman.

In the Roman psyche, a woman’s rape brought shame to her husband and family. And in the Elizabethan mind, women were seen as weak. “Those proud lords, to blame, / Make weak-made women tenants to their shame” (1259-60). Rape of Lucrece is far from any feminist anthem, at least people got up in arms about Tarquin’s heinous act.

Goddamnit, Shakespeare. You did it again. 

Just get on with it already: Love’s Labour’s Lost

This overachiever, though, makes no promises.

Love’s Labour’s Lost was my final comedy. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through all Shakespeare’s comedies, to be honest. There are 13 of them, by Norton’s classification, the most of any genre. Some of these plays are among Shakespeare’s best and most memorable: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice. Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, teachers are still assigning them in high schools and colleges, and for good reason. Four hundred years after his death, people like me are trying to read all of them in an ungodly, unnaturally short period of time.

For me, the comedies are among some of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays.

The Merchant of Venice, though, I’ve never found much humor in. Its antisemitism is more disturbing, though more relevant, than ever, and I’ve always had trouble reconciling this dimension of the play with Portia’s inspiring selflessness. But as a historical genre, of course, the comedy isn’t necessarily about ha-ha funny. As my friend conducts his Renaissance comedy litmus test: “Does it end with a marriage?” Disunion resolves in union. Ignorance finds knowledge. There is much more to it, of course.

But for me, the comedies are among some of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. For one, humor is topical and doesn’t age well. I chuckle appreciatively at all their inversions (e.g., mistaken identities, disguises, gender-bending), and I nod knowingly at their keen commentary (i.e., social roles are performative and constructed), but they seldom elicit any guffaw from me. Well, Falstaff, in all of his Homer Simpsonian idiocy in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a notable exception. And I did laugh out loud when Armado, a swaggering Spaniard, says in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “Cupid’s butt-shaft is too hard for Hercules club” (1.2.156-56), but that’s because I gleefully, juvenilely, took Shakespeare out of context. Butt-shaft. It refers, just so you know, to an “unbarbed arrow.”

My mis-glossing of butt-shaft points to a second reason for the challenge of Shakespeare’s comedies for the modern reader: The language of the comedies is dense. The language of all the plays – 1) poeticized, 2) in an early form of English, and 3) from the quill of a writer with a super-human lexicon – is dense. But in the comedies, Shakespeare further heightens his language with 4) truly acrobatic wordplay.

Take this moment of banter in Love’s Labour’s Lost where Catherine, a lady attending on the French princess, says to Longueville, a lord attending on the King of Navarre: “‘Veal,’ quoth the Dutchman. Is not a veal a calf?” (5.2.247). This veal is, no joke, a quadruple pun. (Thank you, footnotes.) It riffs on veal as a Dutch pronunciation of well or the German word for much (viel). Historically, veal would have sounded more like veil. Then, veal plays on the second part of Longueville’s name while calling up the French word for “calf,” veau, and a calf was slang for a “dunce” in Renaissance English. I don’t know what any of this means, really, other than that Catherine is ripping on Longueville.

Veal: That’s one word. One word, people. One word among 884,647, according to one tally.

But Love’s Labour’s Lost is especially difficult – and I intentionally saved it for my final comedy. Or more accurately, I avoided it. I’ve read it before, in college, and I can’t stand it. Only part of that is due to the play itself, however.

***

Love’s Labour’s Lost kicks off with three lords who promise Ferdinand, King of Navarre, that they will study, fast, and forswear the company of women for the next three years. Ferdinand even decrees no woman is to come within one mile of his court.

This doesn’t last long, as The French Princess arrives, having some business to settle with Ferdinand before her sick father dies, along with her three ladies. (You can guess where this is going.) Thanks to Ferdinand’s decree, her royal retinue has to camp out in his field. (She rightfully calls him out for this, in case you were wondering.)

But the three lords and the king immediately fall in love with their counterparts and, against their oath, try to woo them. Here’s the hard part: Anytime they open their mouths – anytime any male character opens his mouth in this play – out comes a flowery stream of verbal diarrhea. In rhymed iambic pentameter. Sometimes even as whole sonnets. (I suppose shit can smell like roses.)

Listen to Biron, one of the three lords, wax amatory for Rosaline, one of the three ladies:

Lend me flourish of all gentle tongues–
Fie, painted rhetoric! O, she needs it not.
To things of sale a seller’s praise belongs.
She passes praise–then praise too short doth blot. (4.3.234-37).

Even in acknowledging any “painted rhetoric” will fall short of her beauty, he paints his rhetoric. Just get on with it, man! OK, this is one of the aims of the play, to lampoon verbosity, especially the self-involved excesses of the language of their courtship, but just get on with it already!

***

Just get on with it already! I’m pretty sure my college Shakespeare professor was thinking exactly that as she read my essay on Love’s Labour’s Lost.

For my English major, I had to take one course in Shakespeare. We read Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale, Richard II, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. The latter is an unusual assignment, given all the other plays to choose from, coupled with the comedy’s difficult reputation. And, if I remember correctly, it was yet we read this play first. Kinda ballsy, especially as the class only had a smattering of English majors. The class roster thinned out a bit after this.

We had two writing assignments for the play. The first, a short reading response, I remember vividly. We had to pick a keyword in the opening scene or so of the play, look up its meaning in Shakespeare’s English, and then, when we finished the play, argue why it represented the work as a whole.

I chose conqueror. It’s from the King’s opening monologue. He’s addressing the three lords, saying they will achieve fame at his court through their study and self-denial:

Therefore, brave conquerors–for so you are,
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world’s desires–
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force. (1.1.8-11)

The edict, here, refers to the oaths they swear.

I have no idea why I chose conqueror, but I can recall thinking it was an inspired choice. (Not so.) Here’s my mini-thesis for the “Reading Response”:

The self-referential nature, irony, and issues of love, gender, class, and language that the word conqueror conveys in the opening of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost render it the most significant word in the entire first scene and one of the most important words in the play overall.

At the time, I thought this was great. Self-referential? The way I packed in irony, love, gender, class, and language in my first clause alone? I was making moves. English-major moves. (Oy.)

The second assignment was a full essay. I can’t remember the prompt. I can’t really remember my argument either, other than it had something to with appearance vs. reality. (So original.) My professor’s lecture must have emphasized on artificial language vs. natural language. That distinction, clearly, I failed to internalize in my own writing.

I do remember, though, that this was the lowest grade I ever got on a paper in college. It was a ‘B.’ I know, I know: the horror, the horror! I’m a perfectionist and an overachiever. What can I say? Crucify me. I always liked getting good grades and submitting my best work, even when I didn’t give a damn about the subject or assignment.

Out oozed, like one of those big pimples deep under the skin that are hard to pop and really hurt when you try, an overwritten sludge of overwrought and over-intellectualized over-ness about…well, I can’t even remember.

But it wasn’t the ‘B’ that bothered me. OK, the ‘B’ did bother me. I can’t deny my inner Lisa Simpson. But I was more so challenged by the fact that this was hardest paper I can remember writing, harder than that 50-page doorstopper on the prophetic mysticism of jazz in Ginsburg’s Howl, harder even than my Master’s thesis on reforms in teacher assessment. Harder, because I found I had absolutely nothing to say about Love’s Labour’s Lost.

I can remember starting this essay the day before it was due. That was uncharacteristic, because 1) I’m a slow writer and 2) I’m an overachiever, remember? (The day before an essay is due is the day for final editing, duh.) I’m not sure what delayed me this time, but when I sat down in my cold, empty-fridge apartment at the vintage turquoise-colored card table my late grandmother gave to me with my notes, text, oversized Dell laptop, and essay prompt, no ideas came to me. None. Zip. Zilch.  Zero. Nada. This spiked my anxiety, which constipated my imagination, which blockage in turn made me fear I wouldn’t be able to demonstrate to my professor that I was a good writer.

Isn’t so much of school, at least for nerds like me, wanting the recognition and praise of your teachers? Isn’t so much of work, life, and relationships that way? Even the lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost essentially show off their art and intellect in trying to win over the ladies.

And so the anxiety fed on itself: What if I’m out of ideas? What if I’m not as smart or as good a writer as I’ve always thought, always been told, I was? I, like the lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost, always have something to say, to contribute. Don’t I?

At one point in the evening, well before I had to burn the midnight oil, I had drive over to my father’s house for some bit of business, chain-smoking and refilling a Venti coffee from Starbucks along the way. Panicky, caffeinated, not even trying to cover up how much I reeked of Camel Lights in front of my dad, I shared my frustration. “Do your best,” he offered. “But sometimes you just have to know when you’ve done your best, call it a day, and move on.”

And so out oozed, like one of those big pimples deep under the skin that are hard to pop and really hurt when you try, an overwritten sludge of overwrought and over-intellectualized over-ness about…well, I can’t  even remember. How apt. Apparently it wasn’t horrible, if I landed a ‘B.’ My professor was a tough grader, but gave exceptional and in-depth feedback on composition. But I know I hid behind a whole lot of words, which is oh-so fitting for Love’s Labour’s Lost. And I know that my professor saw right through it, and, with that generous ‘B,’ must have seen something in me.

***

I didn’t see the irony of any of this at the time. I was too focused on myself to realize that I was acting like Biron, Longueville, and Dumaine, the third lord.

I didn’t appreciate how it was the ladies, by their wit, who brought them to their senses.

After hypocritical accusations, the three lords and the king reveal they are in love – and agree to bail on their oaths.  They disguises themselves as Russians to court the ladies. Because Shakespeare. The fanciful Spaniard gets a countrywoman pregnant. Because Shakespeare. There’s a comically bad play within a play. Because Shakespeare. Then suddenly, the princess learns her father has died and has to return home. Because Shakespeare. But the ladies, in parting, bid the noblemen to wait a year in some sort of punitive, ascetic condition, prove their love, before pursuing them again. Because Shakespeare.

My first time through this play, I focused on how the lords screwed themselves over: “The conquerors are themselves conquered, and largely by their own undoing,” I wrote in that reading response. I didn’t appreciate how it was the ladies, by their wit, who brought them to their senses.

I mean, for God’s sake, the Princess even explicitly mocks the poetry overkill the King sends her:

…as much love in rhyme
As would be crammed up in a sheet of paper
Writ o’ both sides of the leaf, margin and all,
That he was fain to seal on Cupid’s name. (5.2.6-9)

That essay – no, my professor’s feedback, on that paper and throughout the entire course – made me a much better writer. I’d probably say she provided the best writing instruction in my entire academic career, even. And I’d probably say that, while I still don’t like Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I’d say hate would be far too harsh.

As for that assignment, to pick one word most central to the play? For one, I’ve thought about that exercise every play I’ve read during this year, even selecting a representative word for a few plays just for the sake of it. And if I had a chance to redo it? Well, “butt-shaft” is very tempting…