Shakespeare Sites in Stratford

Barges on the Avon:

Fools, minstrels and jesters:

The Grammar School:

The Birthplace:

Shakespeare

Why is Shakespeare such a joy? We feel his huge and generous spirit, which is fearless but understanding fear, good but also encompassing meanness, ambition, ennui, panic, power, lust—he understands all. He delights in all, in the story, in holding us enthralled like Prospero in the palm of his hand, the way a wizard enspells us. But it isn’t just his narrative skills, it is his largeness. He takes the old, clichéd stories and makes them magic. He must have enjoyed life. I can’t tell if he was more out-going or quiet, the life of the party or an observer on the sideline. But he doesn’t lack confidence. He does make mistakes, in his extravagant, over-the-top bid to entertain. In my experience, writers tend to be quiet and actors more extroverted, but Shakespeare was both. Yet he doesn’t seem to be a “personality.” I don’t know that much information about his habits and mannerisms, which leads me to think he was more quiet than not. Usually I think it requires quiet and solitude to write, but maybe not for a shining genius. (2003)

Shakespeare—I forgive you all your dark ladies and small affairs—I forgive you the antifeminism and anti-Semitism of your age—you are beautiful, you restore my faith in human kind, in art, in words, in my own work. To love you is to love Oberon or Prospero, a demi-god who lives on honeydew and moonshine—you of all scribblers justify my art (small tag-along player that I am, constructing stories of cobwebs and blood and little black spiders).Hearth-god, domestic deity, it is good to worship for a clear reason one who demands nothing of us but pleasure and understanding. Maybe the actual God is like you. He made you, didn’t he? Maybe Shakespeare is still writing plays for the royal court above, and sonnets to dark ladies. (2005)

The Victorians (2003)

We’re sitting in the garden at Ann Hathaway’s cottage listening to Kelli talk about garden styles through the ages, especially comparing the Victorian passion for ornate carpets of bedding plants to their nostalgic literature extolling the simple, delicate, useful herb-and-flower cottage garden. We are so similar to the Victorians, particularly us Mormons.

Stratford Theatre

We took an overnight coach trip to Stratford--the trip Chris and I missed last time because he was sick. We saw Hall's Croft, where Shakespeare's daughter lived with her physician husband. We saw the grammar school where Will learned his Latin and Greek. Then we saw "Hamlet" and "Merry Wives of Windsor"--both excellent productions. Hamlet was done in modern dress, with the king as a Godfather-type businessman. Instead of flowers, Ophelia carried a bottle of (I assume) herbal pills, offering rosemary and rue instead of posies. Instead of holding a dagger, Hamlet put a handgun to his head during the "to be or not to be" speech, and shot Polonius instead of stabbed him. The duel at the end still worked because they were fencing in modern uniforms. I had an odd reaction, thinking--"this is the older adolescent from hell." My sons are difficult, but they are nothing like Hamlet. I have a great deal of sympathy for Gertrude. (1997)

Lear last night was wonderful. McKellen made us feel the pity and terror. Lear, shrunken in habit of authority at the beginning, grew to the true measure of his greatness as he moved through madness to his ultimate sanity. I believe in tragedy as much as anything in this universe. Life is tragic, and even more so for those who don't realize it until they've lost what's most important to them--and then it's most difficult and most likely to crack them apart. Realizing tragedy and somehow accepting it, and not accepting it, is the only way to be sane to the end of life (maybe I need to write another essay).

John said this morning that he wonders if tragedy is un-Christian--if it denies the eucatastrophe of the Resurrection. I don't think it does. I think that the Christian Resurrection exists outside or beyond our tragic world. I gave the example of Mary Ann losing Russell. Close the casket on the broken face and body, and he's gone. As Lear says, "forever, forever, forever, forever, forever." No more in this life do we see our dead. No matter the state of our faith, we cannot know in an earthly sense what lies beyond. Denying the reality of tragedy is itself a form of madness. Mary has been half-mad. "I'll never get over it," she says now. And one doesn't. Our loved dead are gone, gone, gone--we shall not see or touch or know them in this life. No faith or doctrine changes that. I think that when we gloss over it we harm both ourselves and the grieving, deny ourselves and the grieving the purging catharsis of pity and fear, and push those grieving (which will be all of us before the end) into madness. (2007)

The Swan: