Tragedy – Shakespeare Confidential

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.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”: Macbeth, mortality, and mantras

Full of sound and fury, signifying something…if you repeat it enough

With a jaunty jump, I burst into the bedroom, my arms theatrically outspread: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” My wife looked up from her iPad, startled. She was enjoying a lazy Sunday morning in bed. I had just finished Macbeth.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps at this petty pace – shit. That’s not it.” I leapt out of the room. My wife took a sip of coffee and resumed her scrolling.

I scanned Macbeth’s famous monologue again and rushed back into the bedroom. She looked up, bored, humoring. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable – no, recored syllable, no recorded time. Ah, damnit.”

Slurrrrp.

***

I figured I better have a least something memorized at the end of my year of reading Shakespeare. Because, on some level, that’s what you do.

I’ve mentioned my yearlong project at a few gatherings. Each time, the response is predictable. With an undertone of “You’re crazy,” they say: “Oh, wow. That’s a lot of plays.” Then, they branch off into one of two commentaries. Fork 1: “I remember reading Romeo & Juliet in high school” (It’s always Romeo & Juliet). Fork 2: “You know, I managed to get through school without every cracking open a play.” Regardless of path, my interlocutor next delivers an inevitable look of expectation. It’s a subtle expression, but I know what they want from me. They want me to recite some lines.

We all share Shakespeare’s legacy as a cultural product, and quoting his words signals a literacy, a status, even if we have no idea what those words mean.

I don’t really have a mind for quotes, so I usually dodge or duck – unless I’ve got a few drinks in me, when I might just intone some Shakespeare-sounding gibberish loosely relevant to the convivial occasion. “Yon glass, that spangles in that later light of our erstwhile springs…” No one’s been the wiser – probably because they’ve mentally checked out of our conversation at this point. Still, no matter our relationship to Shakespeare, we all share his legacy as a cultural product, and quoting his words signals a literacy, a status, even if we have no idea what those words mean.

But when it comes to Macbeth, which tells of tragic unraveling of the Scottish thane after he murders his way to power, it really is about the words. OK, with about 8 plays to go at this point, I can definitely say all of Shakespeare’s plays are about the language. But Macbeth is obsessed with language. It has ambiguous riddles and creepy spells from the witches. It has letters and scenes of characters reading them. It has conversations about having conversations. It has sleep-talking while sleep-walking. Talking-related words like report and tongue abound. Words like strange get repeated over and over. And Macbeth, our self-doubting power-seeker, delivers just some of the most excruciatingly exquisite lines.

If I was going to commit some verses to memory, it was going to be this from play.

***

“‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time,” I practiced during one of those random, mid-afternoon showers that punctuate the days of people who work from home. “And all our yesterdays have lighted the way – crap, crap, lighted fools the way to, to dusty death.” The windows and mirrors had fogged over. I squeezed lotion onto the baby-blue loofah and took the passage from the top.

“Out, out, brief candle,” I declaimed while bending over to clean up my dog’s poop on an afternoon walk. When I stood back up, I realized a couple was approaching. They gave me a curious glance as they passed. I tightly knotted the package. “Shakespeare!” I explained, giving the bag a little twirl at their backs. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player–” My phone pinged. I disappeared into Twitter.

The barber spun my chair to face the mirror. I avoided looking at my head, mid-cut, the smock tightly ringing my neck like I was some criminally unfashionable altar boy. I avoided the awkwardness of other people thinking I was looking at myself. So I distracted myself with silent rehearsal: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that frets and struts upon the stage – that struts and frets upon the stage…” My words tumbled like the little shards of hair falling on my shoulders. “That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.’”

***

My desultory, half-assed memorizations were, in a way, fitting for this famous monologue, which Macbeth delivers after he learns his wife has killed herself and as his foes are taking back the throne. The speech is about how nothing matters in the end, because we all are going to die. What’s the point, then, in committing it to memory? As Macbeth concludes: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.25-27).

Why is it that a nihilistic manifesto on the meaninglessness of our tiny, little lives is dressed in some of the most beautiful language?

But the irony wasn’t lost on me. Why is it that a nihilistic manifesto on the meaninglessness of our tiny, little lives is dressed in some of the most beautiful language? Why bother to write it in the first place? Why bother to re-read after all these many years, to memorize it? What is all this for?

This tension – dramatized, I think, in Macbeth’s own notorious equivocation – is the essential predicament of consciousness: We know we’re alive and so we know we’re going to die. All art, all human action, is in some way a response to this reality.

And yes, this is what that creeps into my mind when I’m taking a shower, cleaning up my dog’s shit, getting a haircut. These are all futile push-backs against entropy, against time, against death. Shakespeare knew this. And he also knew that there’s no harm in making it sound beautiful along the way.

***

My memorization of the Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow monologue soon fell off. Not that it was hard; the monologue is not even 10 full lines long. And not that I ever really put in much effort more than reading it a few times over and trying to pull it up from memory.

Until I was in a deep meditation. My wife has been taking a yearlong yoga instructor certification course and I have been her sometime pupil. At the end of session, she was guiding my meditation, encouraging me to feel my body sinking into the floor and to let my random thoughts flit through my mind as they came and went. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” surfaced from somewhere bodily yet somewhere ethereal. I felt a calming gravity, and was cloaked, just for an instant, with a death-like blackness. I was detached, like a body drifting in space, liberated from concerns of any destination. And then, for the first time, the full monologue poured forth from within me:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (5.5.18-27).

But in this moment, I heard Macbeth differently. Less nihilistically and more stoically. I heard that we aren’t just condemned to nothing, but freed by it. That we are fools for clinging to our self-important delusions.

***

Since then, the monologue has been constantly ringing in my head, and I find myself reciting it not for any cultural cachet but as a kind of mantra. As something to hold onto. Like in a recent shower, when I tried to wash off the splitting headache of a hangover.

Or around my kitchen table, when I held my wife’s hand. Our eyes were bleary with lack of sleep and tears. The result were in. Clinton had lost. Trump had won. “What are you thinking right now?” she asked.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”

Fighting stances: The Tragedy of Coriolanus

Stand up and be a man – or at least try not to trip.

The kid kicked at my shoes but I didn’t fall.

“That’s fine,” I answered without losing my brisk pace. But he – and three or four other friends, I didn’t really slow down to take count – kept up.

“That’s fine,” he parroted in a mock American accent. “Take a look at this Yank,” he aped my determined gait.

I responded with something about how I had moved to Dublin months ago. I’m not quite sure what the intended effect of this was. Perhaps to ease some larger territoriality I perceived, to lend myself some street cred? I was a bit disoriented. This stretch of the busy road up from the stadium, which my brother and I had left a little early to beat the crowds before the football match let out, had taken a darker and quieter turn. I had noticed the teenaged boys, mostly track-suited and probably a bit drunk, swaggering their way ahead of me, but I was surprised when I had somehow walked right into their ruckusing.

I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t want her know I didn’t stand up for myself.

The kid continued his blustery taunts, which I was now ignoring, when my ear suddenly stung and rang. Swiftly and sharply, and with a cocky little jump completely superfluous to the delivery of his blow, he had boxed the side of my head just as the road bent back towards more traffic and light.

They took off down a side street. I looked back. My brother, who had been some steps behind when the boys swarmed around me, planted himself at the intersection and stared down their fleeing backs.

“This is what they want, man. It’s not worth it. Let’s go,” I waved him along. “They’ll get what’s coming to when they find out where this kind of shit takes them in life.”

We headed towards a pub just ahead. “And don’t tell my wife,” I added.

At the moment, I had meant that I didn’t want her worrying she’d be unsafe walking Dublin’s streets, as she does regularly by herself. But since reading Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus, in all of its complicated portrait of masculinity, I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t want her know I didn’t stand up for myself.

***

“You shames of Rome!” Caius Martius, later Coriolanus, curses his fellow soldiers as they retreat from their Volscian foes:

You herd of–boils and plagues
Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorred
Farther than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese
That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
From slaves that apes would beat! (1.5.2-7)

Coriolanus beats back the Volsci as they pour out of the gates of their town, but he, and he alone, gets shut in. Coriolanus, valiant Coriolanus, takes them on and forces his rival, Aufidius, into retreat once more.

“Rome must know the value of her own,” the general Cominius publicly celebrates Coriolanus when returns to Rome, all the more heroic for his fresh battle wounds (1.10.20-21).

For the ancient Romans, Coriolanus – the courageous warrior, steadfast in his defense of home and country – was a proper man. And this made him virtuous, a word which literally derives from the Latin for “man.” As Cominius again boasts of his great solider: “It is held / That valour is the chiefest virtue, and / Most dignifies the haver. If it be, / The man I speak of cannot in the world / Be singly counterpoised” (2.2.79-83).

***

I am no Coriolanus.

As much as I like to imagine we – as men, as a society – have outgrown the self-measure of muscles and might, that dialogue overpowers deltoids, some primal, primate urge to flex and fight, to prove and prevail, is still strong in our sinews.

Or at least some of our sinews.

As much as I like to imagine we value, as I do, the modern model of a refined , enlightened, and reasoning masculinity, I’m not so sure we still don’t admire, even cheer on, a good-ol’-had-it-comin’-to-ya ass-kicking.

I’m not so sure we still don’t admire, even cheer on, a good-ol’-had-it-comin’-to-ya ass-kicking.

And what stings, I think, isn’t any blow. It isn’t being singled out or picked on. And it’s not even the fact that I didn’t tell the kids off or take them on in some Coriolanian charge. This doesn’t bruise my manhood.

What stings, or maybe what confuses me as I think about the incident and Coriolanus, is that I didn’t even feel the urge to – to posture, to stand the corner, as did my brother, and watch the little hoodlums diminish in the distance.

Does this make me somehow weaker? Somehow less? Do I lack some fundamental, inner quality or character? Would I run in the face of some real assault? Would I not come to others’ protection – of my friends, of my family, of my wife?

The kid kicked my shoes and I didn’t fall. But, in causing me to question my sense of virtue or manliness – even just in those small moments when the image of my brother standing the corner under the jaundiced streetlights flashes in my mind or when I picture an undeterred Coriolanus locked in behind the enemy gates – it did trip up my ego.

Just a bit. Surely only just a bit.

***

Coriolanus doesn’t get tested on the battlefield, but does get tested in the forum.

For all his guts and glory, Coriolanus is also a patrician who utterly despises the plebeians, who think, as one puts it, Coriolanus has “grown too proud to be so valiant” (1.2.249-50). So proud, in fact, that after the Senate (themselves patricians) put him up for consul, Coriolanus refuses to ask, even in feigned humility, for the votes of the commoners. They had just earned political representation, in the form of tribunes, after rising up over concerns the nobility was cheating them out of grain.

“Better it is to die, better to starve, / Than crave the hire which first we do deserve,” Coriolanus digs in (2.3.103-4). He sheds his own blood for his country: Why should he have to deign for their votes?

Coriolanus is winning the support of the citizenry until the tribunes press him on his grain policy. Ever short-tempered, he loses his cool and lets them know how he really feels (though some see a kind of virtue in his unwillingness to play politics, to refuse to be untrue to himself, for all his pride):

For the mutable rank-scented meinie,
Let them regard me, as I do not flatter,
And therein behold themselves as I say again,
In soothing them we nourish ‘gainst the Senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
Which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed and scattered
By mingling them with us, the honoured number
Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
Which they have given to beggars. (3.1.70-78)

Fearing the end of their influence, the tribunes conspire to stop Coriolanus by charging tyranny. Coriolanus barely escapes execution for exile, and in it, allies himself with his nemesis, Aufidius. They start a siege of Rome until Coriolanus’ mother changes her son’s hard heart: “That man was noble, / But with his last attempt he wiped it out,” she imagines posterity will say of him in her forceful plea (5.3.146-47). But just as he leads a charge to protect Rome, Aufidius, already planning to cross him, stabs him dead.

***

I might have some Coriolanus in my chest – er, ego – after all.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I remember my brother had said over the pints. “They’ll go nowhere in life acting the way they do.”

Can I say that my justification for my virtue is actually noble?

This was validating. To me as a younger brother, as a man, as a person who prides himself as committed to the virtue of nonviolence. But when I really listened to my own words said back to me, I also wondered: Can I say, if I’m honest with myself, that my justification for my virtue is actually noble – or, should I say, isn’t entirely too noble?

Can I say I didn’t think, at least on some subconscious, self-defensive level, that the kids were probably lower class, poorly educated, lacked self-control and constructive outlets, impressed each other with displays of machismo prized in some more primitive value system, were angry at their prospects in life and took it out on others in small, petty, and random acts of violence, feeling as if this was the only power they could exert over their lives, their world?

These thoughts, too, are the posturing of a masculinity, a display of power.

And I can’t say I didn’t think it. Even if just a bit.

Unlike Coriolanus, I didn’t say it aloud. Unlike Coriolanus, I struggle even to fully admit it. There may yet be a cowardice in that, but it probably spared it me a good-ol’-had-it-comin’-to-ya ass-kicking.

Over and over and over: The Tragedy of Othello

It’s not the jealousy that pushes you over. It’s the obsession.

Today I can laugh about it. She ended up dumping him and came out as a lesbian, I learned through the grapevine years later. And when asked to explain that semester out of school, I usually just leave it as a “personal matter,” as if it was an illness. I suppose it was, in a way.

I don’t talk to either of them now, though from time to time, late-night whiskey steers me towards Facebook. He’s helping launch a craft brewery. She’s married and has a child with her partner. I’m happy for them. Really. And I actually can’t say it took me a long time to get there. Once I was over it, of course.

In our third session, my therapist recommended Prozac. She didn’t think I was depressed: She thought I was obsessive. I can’t disagree. But at the time, I didn’t like how high the dosage was. Apparently obsessive behaviors warrant more milligrams than depression. At the time, like so many individuals at their breaking points, I didn’t want to rely on any medication. I wanted to restore equilibrium from within, by my own wherewithal. Fortunately, that session, that recommendation, triggered in me for the first time anger, then indifference. Then I moved on.

Othello articulates a very particular psychological state. The state between ignorance and certainty, between the not-knowing and knowing: the not-not-knowing, where obsession oozes from the darker recesses of the mind and takes over the whole body, like food poisoning. Where obsession becomes possession.

Fortunately, I didn’t kill anybody. Unlike Othello. But I did pull out of college after thinking about jumping onto US 29 from K Street by the Washington Circle the very night I drove back from summer break to start my second year of college.

***

Jealousy, that “green-eyed monster,” is just the trigger (3.3.170). The rapid descent is thanks to obsession. To the over and over and over, thoughts always hissing in your ear like Iago, slithering, compulsive, ubiquitous, until the merest suggestion, “trifles light as air,” pushes the boulder of sanity over the precipice (3.3.326).

In The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, Iago, through Janus-faced cunning, racial and religious resentment, and envy-mongering, drives Othello, the Venetian general, to kill his wife, Desdemona, and ultimately himself, by convincing Othello his lieutenant, Cassio, is having an affair with her. Why? The text says devilishly little on the motive for Iago’s all-consuming hatred: He begrudges Othello for promoting Cassio, not him, to his lieutenancy and believes rumors that Othello slept with his wife, Emilia. Here’s Iago’s insidious craft at work:

IAGO Will you think so?
OTHELLO Think so, Iago?
IAGO What, to kiss in private?
OTHELLO An unauthorized kiss.
IAGO Or to be naked with her friend in bed
An hour or more, not meaning any harm?
OTHELLO Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm?
It is hypocrisy against the devil.
They that mean virtuously and yet do so,
The devil their virtue tempts, and they tempt heaven.
IAGO If they do nothing, ’tis a venial slip.
But if I give my wife a handkerchief – (4.1.1-10)

The handkerchief Iago refers to is the love token Othello gave to Desdemona, and which Iago manages to manipulate as ‘evidence’ of her infidelity: “Trifles light as air,” as Iago famously observes, “Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ” (3.3.326-28).

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve memorized pathetically few lines of Shakespeare. This is one of them.

Iago is an evil genius who anticipated and mastered so much of psychology du jour: the powers of suggestion and visualization. He sprinkles questions and sows doubt. He paints a torturously vivid mental picture of Desdemona lying naked in bed with his lieutenant. Othello does the rest himself. At first it niggles. Then it rankles. Finally, it metastasizes.

He works himself into a trance as he plays over – and over and over and over – the thought, the possibility, the fleshy image of Desdemona having sex with Cassio.

As for me? I worked myself into panic attacks.

***

At some point, she’d started talking to her ex-boyfriend again. They had had a long, complicated relationship. We used to talk about that relationship after shifts at a Ruby Tuesday, where we both worked a few years before we ran into each other at a Barnes & Noble when I was back home from college during winter break. We’d chain-smoke in her silver Pontiac Grand Am. She’d always put Ani DiFranco or Pearl Jam on very low as I talked her through the turbulence. She’d always manage to keep that car smelling nice in spite of the smoke, too.

After that chance encounter at the bookstore, we fell into a long-term relationship between Cincinnati and D.C. At first it was intense and passionate, but just a half-year in, she started pulling away.

But in his pacing, breathing, sweating, head-clutching, gripped by the over and over and over by the slightest and lightest whisper of his wife’s adultery, I felt once again that loop, that broken record, that inexorable thought-cycle, that over and over and over overtake me.

Maybe there was nothing going on between them. She said there was nothing going on between them. But the evidence pointed otherwise. I saw the log on her cordless phone. Calls to Florida, where the ex lived. I learned from a friend that they met up when he was back in their hometown in Kentucky while she was herself visiting. This led me to check her mobile when she was in the shower. There were lots of calls. Long calls. Perhaps they were processing us as she and I once processed them. She insisted otherwise. I persisted anyways.

The ex dropped out of the picture, but maybe I drove her to spend more time with my best friend. We were writing music over that summer break when was I back home from school, even playing a few gigs here and there. I was semi-moved in to her place, which happened to be just down the road from my mother’s house at the time.

He was always around. They started smoking a lot of pot together.

One night, they encouraged me to grab my guitar down from my mother’s house. It felt like a strange request. They were sitting close and he was making her laugh. Reluctantly, I raced down and fetched my guitar. The dusk light illuminated their goofy half-smiles when I returned. They were seated just a bit more awkwardly.

I’d ring her after work. She’d already be hanging out with him at a mutual friend’s. I’s fell off from I love you’s. We were over in all but name. All but my acceptance, perhaps. But for some reason, I’d still tag along with them. One night, the three of us went out salsa dancing. She was a dance instructor studying to become a message therapist. I was terrible on the floor. So was my friend. But his clumsy maneuvers made her laugh. Desperately I’d insert myself, beats behind the sultry pulse. I’d get in a step or two and another partner had the dance.

***

“I had been happy if the general camp, / Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, / So I had nothing known,” Othello remarks after he’s fallen for Iago’s plot. “O, now for ever / Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content, Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars / That makes ambition virtue!” (3.3.350-55). He continues, curiously, bidding farewell to his military career, as if emasculated or, in the politics of the tragedy, stripped of the identity that gives him place as a black Moor in a white, Christian Venice. Grabbing Iago by the throat, he demands, “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore” (3.3.364).

I think Othello begins to articulate to a very particular psychological state here. The state between ignorance and certainty, between the not-knowing and knowing: the not-not-knowing, where obsession oozes from the darker recesses of the mind and takes over the whole body, like food poisoning. Where obsession becomes possession.

***

One sleepless night, every 15 minutes or so I’d go outside and light a cigarette. Stepping into the middle of the empty street, into the jaundiced glow of the streetlights, I looked all the way down Ivanhoe Avenue. It was after two in the morning and her car still wasn’t parked in its usual spot. Eventually, I wore myself out. Or ran out of cigarettes. Whichever came first. First thing when I got up, the ritual punctuated by a few, thin hours of sleep, I went right outside. Still no sign of that goddamn Grand Am at the end of the street.

I wasn’t able to breath. Why were they there? Why was I there?

Another night, her car was there in the early evening and I obsessively checked to make sure it stayed there. During one round, I noticed his car, that old baby-blue Corolla hatchback, parked opposite. I learned my lesson: I bought a two-for-one Camel Lights special at the corner UDF. Then I drank the rest of my stepfather’s Heineken and my mother’s cheap chardonnay, listening to the Postal Service’s Give Up on repeat. My iPod’s white display pierced the humid and still late-summer dark. The buzz of the streetlights and cicadas droned. A police cruiser swept the blocks like an occasional, sticky breeze.

I had to walk down. I shouldn’t walk down. I needed to walk down. I knew it wasn’t going to make me feel any better if I walked down. But how could I not walk down? I won’t be able to stop thinking about until I walked down.

I walked down.

I stood under her window. Through the vinyl blinds the blue light of a TV flickered. They must have fallen asleep on her couch. She used to like to snuggle into my lap, her back nestling in between my legs, head on my chest, her two cocker spaniels at her feet. I imagined them sleeping there like that, as we had once.

His car was still there come morning.

On yet another, I chanced to look out the window when her car drove by around 11pm. We had spoken just a half-hour before. I was surprised she had answered. It was probably a tactical appeasement. It must be exhausting, I imagine, to silence call after call. It was exhausting, too, to hit redial on that old Nokia, hearing her Kentucky drawl in her voicemail each time: “Hi, you’ve reached…” She said she was staying in. As her car passed, her brake lights burned like taunting flares.

I had a hunch. I got into my car, chain-smoked my way over to another friend’s whose parents were away from the summer. They had a big house, a fancy house, with a hot tub. I pulled up, cautiously. Slicing through the dark, my headlights found the silver of her car parked behind the blue of his.

I lit a cigarette but I wasn’t able to breath. Why were they there? Why was I there?

***

“Where is this rash and most unfortunate man?” demands Lodovico, relative of Desdemona’s father, Brabanzio, after Othello has killed Desdemona.

“That’s he that was Othello. Here I am,” Othello, the Other now self-othered, answers, as if literally beside himself, as if possessed, physically taken over and kicked out by his jealous obsession (5.2.289-90).

Othello is a psychological play and a political play. The performance I saw – yes, I’ve managed to see a second play, folks – at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin played to these dimensions. The small stage and sparse production was close, intimate, as if squeezing us into Iago’s twisted mind, Othello’s tormented psyche. The theater also produced the play as part of the centenary commemoration of Ireland’s independence from Great Britain in 1916. While I found mapping Ireland’s revolution onto Othello problematic, this framing also focused the role race, religion, and national identity plays in Othello’s destruction – and helps explain his suggestibility, aware of his vulnerability as a cultural outsider.

But above all, the Abbey production powerfully emphasized the physicality of Othello, the physicality of jealousy and obsession. I was seated on the stage and could see Iago spit as he hissed, Desdemona’s face pale and wrinkle as her marriage inexplicably collapses, and Othello, drenched in sweat, convulse and twitch with obsession, eaten by his jealousy.

***

752px-n64-controller-gray — “That’s he that was Othello.” Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

There are some serious differences, of course. My friend was no Iago and girlfriend no Desdemona. I, no Othello. (I did reprogram their names as “Brutus the Backstabber” and “Medea the Murderer” in my phone, though.) But in his pacing, breathing, sweating, head-clutching, gripped by the over and over and over by the slightest and lightest whisper of his wife’s adultery, I felt once again that loop, that broken record, that inexorable thought-cycle, that over and over and over overtake me when I called a friend back home after I made it to DC.

“What are you up to, man?”

“Just chillin’ with a few people.”

“Nice. Is, uh, who are you hanging out with? What’s going on?” I tried casually. He said our mutual friend – the Backstabber – was over.

“Cool. Yeah. Alright, is uh–”

“–Yeah, she’s over here, man. He invited over. I know. It’s complicated. But we’re just playing some Mario Kart.”

I thought about them rolling some joints, cracking some beers. I could hear the next album the friend, the one I called, put on. I could see the solid red and green Nintendo 64 controllers being passed around. Brutus would tease her for losing every race. Medea would laugh. Those goofy smiles would hang on their faces. Trifles, really.

I suppose my ache wasn’t over any betrayal. It was over feeling replaced, substituted, pass around, pass over. I think that’s went sent Othello over. I think that’s what sent me over that night, too.

But thankfully not over that K Street railing.

The art of artifice (and the artifice of art): The Life of Timon of Athens

In which Shakespeare beats a Painter and Poet with a stick.

The Life of Timon of Athens isn’t a particularly celebrated play in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Many critics think its language and plot don’t quite stack up to the Bard’s usual standards. Some argue it was never finished. Others conclude the play was a collaboration. Whatever its status in the canon, the tragedy stands out for its focus on money – and still has some warnings worth heeding.

Athenians love Timon because he lavishes them with gifts and parties: “Methinks I could deal kingdoms to my friends,/ And ne’er be weary” (1.2.215-16). His friendships are bought, but Timon is blind to this: “You shall perceive how you/ Mistake my fortunes. I am wealthy in my friends,” he responds when his servant relays that his creditors are demanding payment (2.2.178-79). His generosity is borrowed. And none of his friends bail him out.

The Senate threatens to execute Timon for defaulting on his debts. Fleeing the polis, a forsaken Timon himself forsakes the world. “I am sick of this false world!” (4.3.368) as he cries, cursing man and gold, “thou sweet king-killer,” alike (4.3.374).

Timon becomes his foil, Apemantus, a gadfly philosopher whose cynicism he well sums up in grace he says at one of Timon’s banquets early in the play:

Immortal gods, I crave no pelf.
I pray for no man but myself.
Grant I may never prove so fond
To trust man on his oath or bond,
Or a harlot for her weeping,
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping
Or a keeper with my freedom,
Or my friends if I should need ‘em.
Amen. So fall to’t.
Rich men sin, and I eat root. (1.2.61-70)

In his own root-eating misanthropy Timon fails to see his servant, Flavius, stays by his side. He fails to see to his comrade, Alcibiades, leads an uprising against the city to defend him. The Senate relents their too-cruel punishment, but too late, as Timon dies out in the wilderness.

***

Timon of Athens isn’t exactly the most artful social commentary, but it does develop a compelling theme of artifice. We see the artifice of men and money, yes. You can’t buy love. Who can you really trust? But we also see the artifice of law. “We are for laws; he dies” (3.6.85), as one senator summarily sentences Timon. It’s a stark reminder that even morality is man-made.

He is as self-absorbed in his exile as he is in buying his countrymen’s affections.

We also see the artifice of Timon’s own self-pity: “I never had/ Honest man about me; ay, all I kept were knaves,/ To serve in meat to villains” (4.3.469-71). No, faithful Flavius doesn’t count; he’s just his lowly servant, as if only the rich and powerful are capable of any depth, or at least any sentiment of value.

There is a touching scene when all of Timon’s servants gather together at Timon’s house to mourn their master’s fall. “Yet do our hearts wear Timon’s livery./ That I see by our faces. We are fellows still,/ Serving alike in sorrow” (4.2.17-19). The master-servant relationship itself is not a natural construction, but Timon’s servants transcend the artifice of social roles and achieve true fellow feeling. “There’s none/ Can truly say he gives if he receives,” Timon earlier comments on the cycle of debt that a gift ignites (1.2.9-10). Only his servants prove otherwise.

But Timon certainly learns no lessons about egocentrism in his hermitage. He is as self-absorbed in his exile as he is in buying his countrymen’s affections. Timon may reject gold, but he doesn’t have to reject man – or the golden mean.

***

We’re always looking for clues to Shakespeare’s creative process. What did he think? What was his process like? How did he come up with his ideas? Did he know he was great? Did ever imagine that, 400 years after he died, some American dude would be cooped up in a spare room qua office in Dublin, spending the Sunday of his bank holiday weekend trying to glean some deep wisdom from the words of one of his lesser plays? Well, Timon of Athens may gives us some small glimpse into the poet’s poetics, but it may not glitter like gold: Shakespeare exposes the artifice of, well, art itself.

Art, counterfeit and fiction, is a made thing, fashioned from human hands, not from some divine imagination we mortals are not permitted to.

Shakespeare (and his collaborator, presumably) stages a Painter and Poet. In the beginning, we see them flattering Timon with portraits and verses. For patronage, of course. For money. For all their highfalutin words of inspiration, not even the artists transcend base greed. We see the pair again at the end of the play. They feign loyalty to the indigent hermit, hearing report of gold Timon discovers in the forest. But Timon overhears their mercenary dissembling and calls them out on it. He cleverly undercuts the Painter: “Thou draw’st counterfeit/ Best in all Athens; thou’rt indeed the best;/ Thou counterfeit’s most lively” (5.1.77-79). And the poet he lambastes: “And for thy fiction,/ Why, thy verse swells with stuff so fine and smooth/ That thou art even natural in thine art” (5.1.80-82). Then he beats the two with his stick. And natural, we should also remember, could mean “foolish” in Elizabethan vernacular – which just takes a sledgehammer to the play’s natural-artificial axis. Thanks, Shakespeare: You knew the artifice of sign and signifier all too well, too.

For as much as we like to worship great art and artists, as if the creator and their works exist in some higher sphere unsullied by the affairs of lowly man, Shakespeare recognizes that art is manufactured. That art, too, is often motivated by practical needs, by self-interest, by profit. The Bard had to make a living, after all. It can be deflating, even cheapening, to peek behind the creative curtain, like a son recognizing his father’s fallibility for the first time. But it’s also comforting, too, especially for the aspiring artist: Art, counterfeit and fiction, is a made thing, fashioned from human hands, not from some divine imagination we mortals are not permitted to.

But not all counterfeits, shall we say, are equally convincing. Not all fictions are equally credible. Not all makers are equally skilled. Not all art is equally good. Timon of Athens is no Hamlet. Still, I could never write a Timon of Athens.

Disintegration loops: King Lear, Part 3

It’s not King Lear’s madness that is so terrifying. It’s that he knows he’s losing his mind.

On Facebook, my stepmother recently posted a picture of my grandfather, father, and my oldest brother with his son propped on his knee. “4 Generations of Kellys,” she titled it. It’s a lovely picture and I looked at for some time. I stared into each of their eyes, wondering what they were thinking.

In the picture, my father and brother are crouching down to join my grandfather at wheelchair-level. Proud, they squint into the sun and smile, knowing the significance of the snapshot. What were they thinking about being fathers, about being sons? About being men?

Meanwhile, my grandfather, 98, and nephew, just over one, are positioned to face the camera. They gaze, expressionless, eyes cast slightly down. What were they thinking? Were they watching the dappled shadows of the trees rippling across the ground from a slight, early summer breeze? I suspect neither of them will ever remember this photograph being taken. Neither of them, it struck me, will ever remember each other. This is when I finally understood the terror of King Lear.

***

The terror of King Lear is not in the wrath of the god-like patriarch, blinded by his own white-hot pride and indignation: “Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster!” (1.4.236-38).

It’s not in the delirious, naked, and rejected man, raging at the storm in the desolate heath at night: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!…You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, / Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, / Singe my white head!” (3.2.1-6).

Nor even in the old father, cradling his beloved Cordelia and trying to will some sign of life from her: “No, no, no life! / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!” (5.3.304-07)

No, it’s not Lear in the heights of his fury, the belly of his madness, or the depths of his despair. “Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all– / O, that way madness lies; let me shun that,” King Lear tells himself (3.4.21-22). This is the terror of King Lear. Shakespeare drags us into Lear’s descent. We have to watch him fall apart. We have see him see himself lose his mind.

***

“Grandpa looked good,” I’m sure my brother cheered when they were leaving the nursing home after the photo.

“He’s plugging away,” my father must have remarked, the very summary my grandfather issued when he could still hold a conversation.

During the visit, I bet my brother joked about the attention our grandfather gets from the ladies. My father, with loving sarcasm, certainly reminded his father that he already ate ice cream today. “You don’t remember eating it? Have a look at your shirt, Dad!” Perhaps my grandfather slowly lifted up his heavy brows, wreathed in white, and mumbled from some interior place beyond humor: “Oh.” The perpetual loop of the present would’ve rope him back until the merciful timelessness of sleep took over.

Did my brother glance at our father when he said his goodbyes? Did he catch a wrinkle of sadness on his forehead, a warble in his voice? Did my father look away when my brother lifted his son up to his great-grandfather, two bodies knowing nothing of each other beyond some deep, primordial recognition of fellow flesh, nearly 100 years apart.

I’m sure neither said that this may be the last time they see him, though certainly they thought it before turning their minds back to the soothing preoccupations of the mundane: how the traffic would be on the drive home, what chores waited for them, when they’d eat dinner.

***

For me, I’m not sure I’ll ever see my grandfather again. I’m not sure I’ll even talk to him again. In fact, I don’t even really remember the last time I did. I mean, really talked to him.

For the mind eventually collapses on itself and into the dementia of the infinite present.

At first, my father and stepmother referred to it as “sundowning syndrome.” I’d ask questions. “Well,” they’d begin. They’d talk of onset and progression. They’d parse degrees of cognitive impairment. But at some point, distinctions don’t matter, as much as medical terminology disinfects with its clinical detachment and sanitizes with its lemon-scented denial. For the mind eventually collapses on itself and into the dementia of the infinite present. Like an imploding star, swallowing all the light and heat of our children’s names, our addresses, how to tie our shoelaces, when our wives will finally come back from the store into the cold void of the perpetual, selfness now.

***

We usually spoke with him on Thanksgiving or Christmas at my father’s house. On the couch, my father would surface from a nest of bills, newspapers, legal pads, screens, wires, and joint braces: “You guys want to wish Grandad a happy holiday?” From our own forts of beer bottles, phones, dogs, and unfulfilled filial expectations, we’d answer: “Absolutely!” We’d rush to crack fresh beers. A cordless phone made the rounds. I’d pace around other rooms to avoid my middle brother’s judging glare for talking too loudly. Into his 90s, my grandfather’s voice was quiet. Into my fourth beer, my voice was loud.

“Hi, Grandpa, this is John…I’m good…No, I’m still in Cincinnati…Yeah, getting my teaching license…Ha, yeah, I’ll be sure to keep those kids in line…Well, I don’t play the bass fiddle much anymore but I’m still plucking that guitar!…I remember you telling me about your clarinet days…Eat a lot of turkey today?…No, sounds like you should be watching out for those nurses!…Yeah, well, plugging away. That’s right…I appreciate that, Grandpa. Love you, too. OK, handing the phone back to my dad now. OK, bye, Grandpa!”

“Hi, Grandpa this is John…I’m good…You sound great! No, I’m in Minneapolis now…No, he’s in Columbus….Well, I’m getting married next summer…Ah, I appreciate that, Grandpa…It was great talking to you…Thanks, Grandpa…Love you, here’s my dad.”

“Hi, Grandpa, this is John…I’m good…No, he’s in Columbus…I’m actually moving to–no, he’s in Columbus…Well, love you, Grandpa. Here’s my dad.”

“Hi, Grandpa…I just wanted to wish you a Happy Turkey Day! Love you, OK. Here’s my dad.”

Before his Alzheimer’s – or whatever it is – was too far advanced, he’d catch himself. “I’m sorry. I’m not so good at remembering stuff anymore.” His loops shortened overtime. I think he knew I was a grandchild. I’m not sure how long he was able to hold on to it.

“I told Grandpa everyone says hello,” my father eventually took over.

***

Not too long ago, my father phoned me in the afternoon when I still lived in California. Since I’ve moved from home, first across the states and now overseas, I’ve been diligent about calling my friends and family. So diligent, in fact, I usually I am the one initiating contact. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw “Dad” show up on my caller ID. I was even more surprised when he just wanted to talk. Conversations with my father are usually pretty short. I often feel like I’m the one asking most of the questions. This time, he was chatty, inquisitive, engaged. A son wants nothing more from his father.

I felt sad because because I could see him seeing that he was losing his father.

“Well,” he said in the middle of our conversation, which usually indicated some sort of leave-taking, but he went on. “I called Grandad today.”

“How’s he doing?”

“It was the first time he didn’t recognize me.” I heard a slight tremble in his voice. I could hear the TV playing in his living room.

“I’m so sorry, Dad.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I felt sad. But not for my grandfather. I’ve not had much of a relationship with him, especially since he lived in Floria as long as I could remember, moving back to Cleveland only after his mind started going.

I felt sad because my father was sad. Sad because I could see him seeing that he was losing his father.

“He has his good days and his bad days. I’m sure he’ll come around tomorrow.”

***

I never personally connected with King Lear, this tragedy of tragedies, because I always tried seeing me in him, trying to locate myself somewhere in the sublime profundity of his broken psyche. Perhaps when I’m older, perhaps when I’m a father myself will these dimensions of King Lear ring more keenly.

For now, after staring at the photo of four generations of men in my family, I can’t help but see my own father and grandfather in Lear. Not in his flaws and follies, his despair and dejection, his rage and rejection, in his madness and mourning. But in his interiority, in those glimpses of luminous self-knowledge that dapple his disintegration – like those moments my grandfather reckoned, if briefly, with the decay of his own mind, those moments my own fathered acknowledged it, if briefly. As though for a moment they glimpsed their own selves, small and naked, fearing in that cold and unfeeling storm of nothingness.

“No more of that,” Lear tries to persuade his own, creeping madness (3.4.23). That is the terror of Lear. That is the play’s excruciating, exquisite genius.

Glass houses and jelly meerkats: King Lear, Part 2

Dysfunctional Shakespearean families: They’re just like us!

I have a lot of questions about King Lear. Like what is wrong with these people?

“Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” a retiring King Lear asks his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, as he divides his kingdom up among them (1.1.49). Unlike her sisters, Lear’s favorite, Cordelia, doesn’t fawn over him with the false flattery he’s fishing for. And Lear loses it. He disowns her, sending her off to the King of France without dowry, “for we / Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see / That face of hers again” (1.1.263-65).

Why would you ask that question, Lear? Don’t you think you took things way out of proportion? Did you really listen to what Cordelia what was saying? What were you thinking? This has been my struggle with Lear: Everything escalates so quickly. From 0 to insanity in one act.

Later, Goneril, now heiress to half her father’s kingdom, can’t handle her father’s retinue, who “hourly carp and quarrel, breaking forth / In rank and not-to-be-endured riots” (1.4.175-78). They’re unruly house guests, to be sure, but Lear is none too pleased with her ingratitude: “Into her womb convey sterility! / Dry up in her the organs of increase” (1.4.255-56). “Infect her beauty,” he later curses, “You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun, / To fall and blast her pride!” (2.4.159-61)

He did give you half his kingdom, Goneril. Can’t your father enjoy his waning days? But Lear, again, do you have to ratchet things up so much? I mean, you gave up your crown. Do you think you get to act like a king still?

I thought my family was dysfunctional. But the Lears are just batshit cra–like us.

Regan adds insult to injury: “O, sir, you are old” (2.4.139). She won’t put up with Lear’s knights either. “I gave you all–” Lear points out; Regan, like an entitled millennial, answers that it was about time he did (2.4.245). Everyone sees that Lear is cracking, especially when, martyr-like, he threatens to stay out in a violent storm after his daughters refuse to house his full retinue. But his daughters think he “must needs taste his folly” (2.4.286). “Shut up your doors,” Regan orders, and they actually lock their old father out (2.4.299).

Who do you think you are, Regan? Your dad’s losing his mind. Now’s not the time to make him learn a lesson – and out in the storm of the century at that. What is wrong with these people? I thought my family was dysfunctional. But the Lears are just batshit cra–like us.

***

“Goddamnit,” I complain, vainly thrusting the broom handle under the fridge. “How the hell did it get all the way back there? Jesus.” I stormed into the sitting room. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

“Are you listening to yourself right now?” My wife gets up from the couch. “I was trying to but you didn’t want me pulling out the fridge.”

We argue our way back to the kitchen. “I’m pulling out the fridge.”

“But you said it was gonna scratch the floor!”

“Well, I don’t know how our landlady expects us to keep these fucking floors perfect.”

“Just leave it back there then.”

“Leave it back there? It’ll attract ants and mice. What do you mean, leave it back there?”

“Well, you’re the one so concerned about the floors.”

“You’re not concerned with the floors? See, this is why you’re a slob. This is why we don’t buy shit in checkout lines. It’s impulse. It’s crap.”

“This is why you’re a dick.” My wife stomped back to the sitting room and slammed the door.

I carefully pulled out the fridge, reached back, and picked it up. I was tempted to march into the sitting room and present it to her: “You still fucking want this?”

Sometimes it just takes a gummy candy in the unusual shape of a meerkat that, after my wife accidentally dropped it, somehow fell all the way under the back of the fridge.

Then I thought about Lear. I lightly rap on the door. “I’m sorry, honey.”

***

When we first meet him in the Royal & Derngate’s production of King Lear, Edgar is carrying a bottle and slurring his words. (In a parallel plot, Gloucester’s so Edgar has a half-brother , the bastard Edmund, who convinces their father that Edgar is scheming to kill him for their inheritance.) I didn’t really give much attention to Edgar’s drunkenness – a directorial decision – until I later came read a short review by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian. She observes:

This is a production that makes you wonder what has been going on in the Lear household to produce three such dysfunctional daughters, and the emphasis is very much on the younger generation. Interesting, but it has the effect of sidelining Michael Pennington’s king, who seldom seems more than a volatile domestic tyrant.

Perhaps it does sideline Lear, but to good effect, because why does everyone in King Lear just fall to pieces?

In his opening soliloquy, Edmund grumbles: “Why brand they us / With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?” (1.2.9-10). Historically, we might appreciate his bitterness: His father’s sexual indiscretions cut him off from inheritance. Over 400 years ago, Shakespeare’s audience, familiar with primogeniture, would have felt his plight more keenly – not that it justifies plotting against his family. But in 2016, his motivation is much less immediate, making Edmund seem purely evil. And it’s hard to relate to pure evil.

This is why I find the director’s choice (or the actor’s) to make Edgar drunk so brilliant. This is why the Royal & Derngate’s Lear helped bring the drama of this trumpeted tragedy to life. We get hits of motivation. Edgar initially comes across as a cocky, entitled rich kid, and Edmund, a quietly suffering loner. Again, not that this justifies Edmund ruining his family (and, in part, Lear’s), but that bottle, that drunken swagger, hints at so much emotional baggage, pent-up resentment, and complicated family history. Do Goneril and Regan hold it against their father for favoring Cordelia? Is Lear just looking for a little filial reassurance as he confronts his mortality? What past wounds are reopened when Lear feels so totally rejected by his daughter’s slights? Have the youth of this play somehow been held back the systems of inheritance? Do the youth of this play take for granted their inheritance?

***

We don’t see the tension build up in King Lear. We just see it boil over. We just see the jelly meerkat: Not all the previous arguments about cleanliness, control, respect, and tone it triggers, the ongoing friction of two strong-willed personalities learning interdependence, the monetary and career burdens my wife takes on for me to write, the enduring trauma of divorce and how it shapes my communication habits and values, insecurities about body image and anxieties about what it means to be alive and –

What has been going on in the Lear household? Perhaps in King Lear Shakespeare wants us to imagine our own. Mine, for one, is made of glass. And you know what they say about glass houses and jelly meerkats.

Drama drama: King Lear, Part 1

I really should be getting to the theater more.

It’s bad enough I don’t know a whole lot about Shakespeare’s life or world. But I can’t even say I’ve actually seen many of his plays performed. I mean, the texts were intended for the stage after all.

The last production I can recall seeing was at an amphitheater in a park by the Cincinnati Art Museum – and I caught a only a few scenes at that. I stumbled on a public performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in medias res. It was hot outside, I was a little drunk, and I had no idea what was going on in the play. I soon left to find a bathroom, I think. I’m not even sure why I was there in the first place, who I was with, or even when this was my life, exactly. It must have been some sort of midsummer art festival during college – and equally as enchanting, apparently. For as much as I can’t recall, I can call up glimpses of Titania’s leafy crown. I can hear a donkey-headed Bottom braying. I can taste the IPA I was sipping from a cheap plastic cup, already warm and flat in the heat.

Before that I saw Macbeth. On a TV carted into a high school classroom. My junior-year English teacher – the late Mr. Cahill with his tweed-patched blazers, his breath stale from cigarettes and cafeteria coffee, his chalkboard listing smutty words you couldn’t say in class (“boring”), the rapturous “Great God!” he’d yawp when reciting “The World Is Too Much With Us” – had my class watch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1979 release of Macbeth with Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench. With its bare, black staging, this was a powerful performance. I still conjure it up whenever I think of Macbeth. But I think I liked it all the more because in my coffee-drenched, cigarette-stenched, ego-hunched intellectual coming-of-age, I wanted to impress Mr. Cahill. I wanted him to like that I liked what he liked.

We watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet that year, too. A classmate – he’s a successful editor in New York now – guffawed in surprise, in glee, in contempt when Branagh javelins his rapier into Claudius’ back and sends a chandelier swinging down onto him in Act 5’s climactic bloodbath. I always felt like that classmate was always several beats ahead of my own sophistication.

***

Certainly I’ve seen other plays. There’s no way I haven’t seen other plays. And not just on film. I hope. I suppose I can’t count those adaptations we’d gathered for on the gymnasium floor whenever the children’s theater came to school, can I? I even rented Lawrence Olivier’s famed production of Henry V after I read the play this year. I renewed it three times. Three times, the upper limit. I eventually sent it down the return box, unwatched. Pathetic. Criminal. I just don’t know why I don’t get around to these things.

Over two decades’ worth of schooling – including graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English literature, mind you – never put me in the theater seat. But apparently 140 characters could.

So, while recently walking through Oxford to meet an acquaintance from Twitter, I passed the Oxford Playhouse and spotted a poster for a production of King Lear, which I learned of from another acquaintance on Twitter, it so happened. The next day, I promptly ordered two tickets online. Over two decades’ worth of schooling – including graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English literature, mind you – never put me in the theater seat. But apparently 140 characters could.

My wife and I had an argument over seat selection. I wanted to reserve two seats by the aisle, she, sensibly, by center stage. “I’m tired of everything we do revolving around you having to go to the bathroom,” she complained. “I just like the option. There’s comfort in proximity,” offering the best defense even George Constanza could surmise. Begrudgingly, I booked seats facing centerstage. Marriage requires compromise, see. And sacrifice, though not of my fluid consumption. I still downed two pints at a pub before heading to the theater.

***

One dresses up for the theater. A man wears a jacket in the least. And I hadn’t been to the theater in a long time. I wanted to look nice. I wanted a cultured evening out on the town with my wife. So, I decided to wear the suit I had tailored for my wedding. It’s a classic suit: navy blue, cut slim. Maybe a little too slim, as some post-nuptial weight stretched the waistband. But I sucked in my belly, shoved in my shirt, and adjusted my subsequently bunched-up underwear. I was looking good, feeling fresh – until I got caught in a sudden hailstorm on my way to pick up the tickets at will call. Oxford’s old cobblestone streets are charming until you try to run them in dress shoes and slacks that are riding up your ass. I felt like Lear out on the heath: older, less spry than in my youth, and confronting the elements, only to be humbled later by my discovery that I had far overdressed for this weeknight performance. Oxford is a college town after all. At least I would be disturbing no one if I had to empty my old-man bladder during the play; we occupied the only seats in the entire row. Naturally, I enjoyed a glass of wine at intermission.

***

I loved the production. It opens with Cordelia aiming a rifle right at the audience: bang. Provocative, but I still haven’t decided on what it means. She struck me as a sort of revolutionary fighter, in fact, when she reappears with the French invasion later in the play. Edmund the Bastard was quite the bastard. So were Regan, Goneril, and Cornwall. The Fool accompanied himself with a concertina, giving additional voice and volume to his humor. And Michael Pennington played the mad king brilliantly. The costuming evoked, for me at least, interwar England, an interesting juxtaposition for tragedy set in ancient Albion. This, too, has a meaning, though I’m still deliberating on it. The set design was sparse, a stark brick wall suggesting not royalty but hard times, actually. A wind machine mimicked the elements when Lear is roving the heath and raving out in the storm; the effect was a bit gimmicky. But I can’t pretend to be a theater critic. You’ve seen my record, for one thing. For another, I don’t any have other productions of King Lear to compare this one to.

If I connected with the language in the first half, I connected with its emotions in the second.

I did read King Lear in high school, though. For Mr. Cahill’s class, in fact. A few of my peers said it was their favorite play, that it was Shakespeare’s best. I hadn’t even read enough of the Bard to have an opinion. My classmate – the successful editor – often quoted a favorite line: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/ they kill us for their sport” (4.1.37-38). I wanted to be serious and literary like them, so I agreed. It, too, I said, was my favorite play, though I never personally connected to Lear’s madness, as sublime as Lear’s descent into it is. I certainly didn’t understand a damned word of the Fool at the time (a lot of dick jokes, I now know). Like a well-trained but unimaginative literary analyst, I circled all the references to eyes and sight in the text, scrawling in the margins “seeing vs. blindness” and thinking myself a brave explorer setting the first foot in some new world.

I also tried to re-read the play before this performance. I only made it halfway through, but this was to my benefit. In the first half of the performance, I was delighted I could follow along with the actual lines. Shakespeare is hard enough to understand when you’re studying him in private with time, footnotes, and the internet at your disposal. In the second half, a lot of the lines went right over my head, as stuffed with Shakespeare as it’s been this year. But the meaning didn’t. If I connected with the language in the first half, I connected with its emotions in the second. Because theater centers, well, the drama.

I’ll pick it up in Part 2.

1.1 Outside Capulet’s house

4.3 An airplane over the Atlantic

3.0 [Enter] CHORUS

2.5 A classroom in Cincinnati, Ohio

3.5 An apartment in Irvine, California

4.4 Terminal 2, Los Angeles International Airport

2.6 A classroom in Cincinnati, Ohio

3.6 Outside Capulet’s house

3.0 CHORUS

1.2 Somewhere outside Verona