D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April 2010
Growing Up Shakespeare
Ding-dong, Bard of Avon calling!
April is the month of my dad's birthday — April 13, which he proudly shared with Thomas Jefferson — and, more important (to him, at least), Shakespeare's birthday. Although we don't know exactly when William Shakespeare was born, he was baptized on April 26, 1564, and his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23, St. George's Day. In any case, April 23 is also the day Shakespeare died, in 1616, so it's a good day to remember the Bard of Avon.
Any mention of April to my dad would inevitably first bring up T.S. Eliot — "April is the cruelest month," my father would recite, his favorite seasonal reference after "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being" (Shelley, in case you're playing along). But it was Shakespeare, whose works he taught to generations of college students, who was dearest to his heart.
I'm reminded of all this not only by the arrival of April, but by the current Western Institute of Lifelong Learning production of "Who Invited Falstaff?," an original play by Frost McGahey. If you've picked up this issue promptly, you can catch it at the Silver City Women's Club on March 31 at 2 p.m., otherwise on April 4 at the same time and place. Never mind that my dad — a purist, as I'll explain — probably wouldn't have approved; in my book, any Shakespeare is good Shakespeare.
You see, as the son of a Shakespeare teacher (my mom, also a college English prof, had a more than passing knowledge of Shakespeare, too), I grew up with a rather unusual relationship with the creator of King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet. Other Baby Boomers might have grown up with their heads filled with Mickey Mantle or Elvis; my childhood was rich with characters like Othello and Prospero, Juliet and Titania.
My, shall we say, "special" upbringing manifested itself as early as the second grade. My teacher was Mrs. Tabor, who for some reason I can't think of without recalling that she was the mother-in-law of Broderick Crawford, at that time recently the star of TV's "Highway Patrol." Perhaps it was her son-in-law's acting career that inspired Mrs. Tabor to suggest her young charges put on their own production. "What play should we do?" she asked me and my fellow second-graders, no doubt expecting responses along the lines of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Little Red Hen.
In a moment that would linger long in our family lore, however, I instead piped up, "How about Macbeth?"
Murder, revenge, blood and witches — perfect fare for second-graders. I can just imagine little Vivian Harvey rubbing her hands together while moaning, "Will these hands ne'er be clean?" (Instead I remember her as the girl who told me JFK had been shot.)
But this wasn't just me parroting something I'd heard my parents say. I could recite the witches' scene from Macbeth and already knew exactly how Burnham Wood would come to Dunsinane. My parents' exhaustive library included a set of miniature works of Shakespeare, perfect for child-sized hands. Sometimes my stuffed-animal collection would be enlisted in a living-room production of Shakespeare — Bunny the rabbit as Hamlet, perhaps, with Fluffy the dog as bumbling Polonius, slain behind the balcony drapes. Floppy, a stuffed pooch of much darker temperament and the villain in all my fantasies, would of course play Claudius.
It's probably for the best that my parents allowed no actual pets, or I would have dressed them up in Venetian garb and had the dog demand a pound of flesh from the cat. By the time I had anything living to care for — two turtles, my parents little imagining the lurking salmonella dangers — my imagination had moved on from Shakespeare to comic-book superheroes, and the turtles, predictably, were dubbed Aquaman and Submariner. (One from DC comics, one from Marvel — I was a very fair child.)
Despite my early inculcation in the works of Shakespeare, I never became a true Shakespeare scholar of any sort. I read the usual works woven into the high-school curriculum — Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar — and took a Shakespeare course in college. The latter required some scheduling finesse, as I attended the college where both my parents taught (free tuition — I never had a choice) and didn't want to take any classes from them. I knew my parents — at least my dad — would be far tougher on me than other teachers would. So to fulfill the Shakespeare requirement of my English-journalism major, I had to wait until my dad took a semester off from the subject and another professor filled in.
I think my Shakespeare studies were a little like my attempts to learn to play golf. My dad was almost as good a golfer as he was a Shakespeare scholar, winning the annual faculty tournament several times (the only athletic trophies that would ever grace our house). But playing a good game of golf and teaching golf to your son are two very different things. Dad's reservoir of patience, moreover, was even lower than mine, so my ineptitude proved a gimme putt to frustration. Someone else might have been able to make me a pretty good golfer, but not my dad.
(Much later, I learned the secret — for me, at least — of golfing success. Rather than trying to remember to grip the club just so and stand like this or that, I just need a glass or two of wine. We got to try out a driving range after a reception at a country club, and once properly lubricated I was a virtual Arnold Palmer. The club pro, watching me, walked over and asked what my handicap was. To my credit, I did not reply, "Being taught by my dad.")
Something of the same inhibited my full appreciation of Shakespeare, I think. By the time I was old enough to stop playing with stuffed animals, I was also old enough to realize I'd never know as much about the works of Shakespeare as my father did. He grasped Shakespeare the way a skilled surgeon understands the human body. Shakespeare was as much a part of my father's life as golf and martinis. It would never be that important to me — but then I never liked martinis, either.
Sometimes, though, I think my father's deep knowledge of Shakespeare kept him from enjoying Shakespeare. If a production cut anything, even the most tedious bits, from a Shakespeare play to shorten the evening, my dad knew it — and would not forgive it. He couldn't entirely appreciate the performances on the stage because the lines unspoken nagged at him so. Films of Shakespeare plays, altered to conform to the constraints of Hollywood, were torture.
And heaven forbid if a theater company played fast and loose with costuming, staging or setting! I'll never forget the time our family drove up to Minneapolis, stayed overnight at the famed Curtis Hotel there, and attended a production of Julius Caesar at the prestigious Guthrie Theatre. Had we known the Guthrie was transplanting the play from ancient Rome to a modern Latin American dictatorship, we would have picked something less painful instead, like family root canals.
As it was, my father's reaction to Caesar done Juan Pern-style could best be expressed by reference to another work of literature, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "The horror! The horror!" Why we didn't leave at intermission is beyond me; perhaps it was that growing-up-in-the-Depression ethic of, "We paid for these tickets and we're going to get our money's worth, no matter how painful."
But the junta-style costumes and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" sets weren't the worst of it. At the play's conclusion, after Marc Antony says of the fallen Brutus, "This was the noblest Roman of them all," the actor kicked Brutus' body down the steps.
Now, my dad was quite right that this was a thoroughly misguided bit of staging, giving the lie to Antony's words. But this was not a mere tsk-tsk moment. We would hear about it all the way back to the Curtis Hotel — probably, though I would have tuned out by then, all the way back home to Sioux Falls. By my dad's reaction, you would have thought Shakespeare had been brought back to life only to be brutally slaughtered on the Guthrie's stage, bloody bits of the Bard strewn among the well-mannered Midwesterners in the audience.
Perhaps other kids' dads reacted with similar outrage over inopportune strikeouts or snagged fishing lines. For my dad, it was Shakespeare, and for me, Shakespeare was just a part of growing up.
It's probably a good thing my dad never caught me cutting any of my stuffed animals' lines when staging Macbeth.
David A. Fryxell gets double, double, toil and trouble as editor of Desert Exposure.