By the time
it became apparent that graduation from high school would actually happen to
me, I was convinced that English education would be my career. I loved to read
and write, and I liked the idea of interacting with students. I enjoyed
teaching people about things--usually video game, Spider-Man, or Mormonism
related--and so I felt it a good fit to plan on being an English major.
I had to
finish my senior year, however, and in order to do that, I had to pass my AP
English class. Miss Bodily, our venerated teacher, would lean on her
podium/desk, put one end of her glasses in her mouth, and ask us questions that
forced us to truly consider, for the first time (or so it seemed) what a poem
was actually saying.
I remember
going home with my back-breaking AP Lit text book, Perrine's Literature Sixth Edition and cracking it open on my
cluttered desk in my basement room. Highlighters in one hand and a blue fountain
pen in the other, I would double check my assignment, then read slowly the poem
in front of me.
It was like cryptography.
While I had
years before abandoned any idea of being a detective (I realized I wasn't cut
out for that career when I asked my brother why he'd named a file on the
computer "MOOD"; he laughed and said it was "DOOM"
backwards but he didn't want our mom to know he had such a violent game on the
computer), I felt like poetry was a way for me to actually begin putting pieces
together in a way that deepened my understanding of what was being said.
I quietly
began writing my own atrocious, high school-level poetry. I tended toward
acrostics (sometimes being clever by putting them as the last letter of each
line, instead of the first) and modifying rhyme schemes to make them more
complicated. I hadn't a clue about meter or scansion, and the idea of using
similes, metaphors, or anything more advanced than alliteration was far beyond
my capacity.
We'd been
asked by Miss Bodily to recite a piece of poetry, so I memorized Robert Frost's
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by putting it to music. I can
still remember the guitar riff I wrote to go along with that beautiful poem.
Shakespeare
appeared on the syllabus with Othello,
a play that I can still see on the tissue-like pages of Perrine's. My friend and I, interested in making a recreation of
one of the scenes, took advantage of our time in yearbook to record ourselves
reading the play "in character". We always found it funny (and I
still do, actually) that Shakespeare always used the phrase, "How
now?" to say "What's going on?" And, since we were ever on the
lookout for additional hilarity, we added our own Seussian rhyme to
Shakespeare's: "How now brown cow my lord?" was inserted wherever we
could.
I dressed up like
Batman; my friend cut out a photocopied image of a penny and taped it to his
cheek. We recorded ourselves on two cameras, one pointed at him and one at me,
then edited them for two separate TVs. When it came time to present, we put the
VHS tapes into two different players, then had the scene play simultaneously
while on separate screens.
It drew a lot
of laughs, which means that it was done well.
Othello impacted me more in these types
of memories than in the story, though I dimly recall feeling sad about how Iago
manipulates the Moor into doing his, Iago's, bidding. Since I was seriously
involved with my then-girlfriend (now-wife) at the time, I'm confident some of
Othello's jealousy warned me from worrying too much about what she was up to
and with whom she spent her time.
It was about
this time that I thought, If I'm going to
be an English major, I should have a Complete Works of Shakespeare in my collection. When my April
birthday (three days after William's...and 419 years, too) came around, my mom
asked me what I wanted. My list included a guitar book (I think; I always
wanted more guitar books), a rhyming dictionary, and The Complete Works.
Ever dutiful--if,
perhaps, curious--my mom complied and got me everything I asked for. Inscribed
in my $20 Borders' special is a quick note to commemorate my 18th birthday, and
I consider it one of my best gifts...
...Though I doubted
it after I got it.
Logically
enough, I decided to start at the beginning. This particular edition follows in
the First Folio's footsteps and puts the plays into three (loose) categories of
Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Since I'd always just started at the
beginning of any of my other books, I decided to do the same and started in on The Tempest (even though it's one of
Shakespeare's last plays, it was put first in the Folio).
I had vague
memories flicker through my head as I read, all of them coming from a PBS show
called Wishbone in which the
eponymous pup takes the place of Prospero in an episode called
"Shakespaw". I knew I knew the story, but I couldn't really figure out
what was happening in it.
I pushed
through, laughing aloud at the line "By this hand, I will supplant some of
thy teeth." But other than that, I couldn't get much out of it.
Just before
my birthday, I had asked my parents if I could get a guitar of my own.
"Once you get a job," my mother said. "We can go this
weekend," my father said.
We went that
weekend.
As we were
driving around Salt Lake, looking for the right instrument for me, I held the
black-covered Gramercy edition on my lap. We bounced about in my dad's golden
BMW while I tried to puzzle out the lines. Conservative talk radio kept interrupting
my reading, ranting about things Bill Clinton was guilty of, despite being out
of office by then, and other shibboleths that made about as much sense as the
words on the page in front of me.
Still, I
persevered.
Knee-deep in Merry Wives of Windsor, I caught myself
smiling. "Wait," I said, "this is supposed to be funny? Like,
even for nowadays?"
At some point
during either my junior or senior year, the Utah Valley State College arts
department came to perform an abridged version of Macbeth. I remember liking it, particularly the part when Macduff
decapitated Macbeth behind a piece of scenery and pulled up a fake, bloodied
head.
Shakespeare
accompanied me right out of high school and ghosted my early adult steps.
***
I had mixed
feelings about my mission call for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints; at least, at the beginning. Everyone who goes wants the place to either
be exotic or fundamentally thrilling. While I didn't really have a preference
on where, I didn't want to have to learn Spanish. After an abortive attempt in
junior high to pick up the essentials of the language, I wasn't interested in
working it in any more. But, to my surprise, I ended up being assigned to the
Florida--Fort Lauderdale Spanish Speaking mission, which I loved and still
keenly miss. I served from mid-2002 to mid-2004.
While in the
Missionary Training Center, I was asked to write what I would want people to
know if I were dying--what would me last words be? I can't remember much of
what I wrote--surely a testimony about the things that had mattered to me most
in life, all of which about the Church and my feelings for Christ--but I do
distinctly recall writing these words: "Shuffled off this mortal
coil."
Even though I
hadn't read Hamlet yet--it was in the
back of my Complete Works, so I
wouldn't have finished it by that point--I was quoting it.
My mission
had many remarkable experiences, but--like all things--it eventually came to an
end. Return to home brought a return to my academic coursework, and, after
marriage during my first semester home, I found myself bumping into Shakespeare
more and more.
I had an
assignment for one professor to read Romeo
and Juliet. I'm confident I'd read it before (I don't know when--maybe in
7th or 8th grade), but I took to it in my familiar, black-and-gold bound Complete Works and found, to my delight,
I understood and enjoyed much of what I saw. In fact, during Romeo's wooing
scene of Juliet, I thought to myself, Yeah,
this guy's a pimp-daddy. He can schmooze better than anyone!
One of my
critical theory classes inspired me to pen a short story in which the main
character was an English professor who gets run over by a Mack truck. Dead, she
goes on a tour of the literary afterlife where she meets sundry
"dead" characters: Boromir from The
Lord of the Rings, Septimus Smith from Mrs.
Dalloway, and Dumbledore from Harry
Potter. Included in the mix are two star-crossed lovers who speak in the
worst, most cringe-inducing faux-Shakespearean that's ever sat on paper.
I had no idea
what I was doing. I knew I had to include these most-famous of dead characters,
but I didn't use an ounce of poetic effort in creating their lines. Ultimately,
I just dropped the pretense entirely and had them speak in normal English,
including a line about how the professor could only understand Shakespeare when
it was written, never when it was spoken.
I've wondered
about that. The greatness of the Bard is in his language, but it's also the
greatest stumbling block. Maybe it's because I really access things via reading
more readily than almost any other way. Perhaps it comes from a feeling of ownership
that I get when the interpretation is entirely my own. Whatever the case, if I
were to look at that story again, I'd want that line stricken from the record.
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