While I read and researched this summer, I also journaled about my experience. A lot of that material made it into the essay. Some of it didn't. I've transcribed my entries here:
May 24
I find out that I received a microgrant on a rainy Sunday morning, the day before Memorial Day. It's also the Sunday that the NY Times prints tiny, heartbreaking obituaries for 1,000 people on its front page - continues page 12. 1% of 100,000 Americans dead - a number that doesn't feel real, that so many people claim isn't real. Cruelty and ignorance as an alternate to numbness or the raw gaping wound?
Anyway, last night I told Taylor I wanted to the drive to the store and buy a copy of the Times. "This is the kind of thing that will be in history books," I say. "the kind of thing we'll want to show our kids." As is usually the case, though, these days, we got a late start, and didn't make it to the grocery store until after five. On our way there we looked at the rain falling, flooding the streets. "This is one of the few days I haven't minded being at home," I said, as I have every time it's rained or snowed since March 13.
When we got to the store the newspaper stand was empty, so we just bought coffee, and I impulsively selected a package of Walker's shortbread, nostalgic for Christmas at home.
Back home, I made coffee and carefully laid out a mis-en-scène on the kitchen table. Collected Shakespeare, Station Eleven, notebook, coffee, shortbread. I rearranged them a few times, snapping pictures, painfully aware of the performance of artistry. This weird need to curate an idealized space for creation. I lit a candle, put on a record, opened the window so I cold hear birdsong and the rain. Was this self-consciously artificial, or a way of creating the ideal environment for me to start the project? Am I the person I dreamed I'd be as a teenager, or a parody of her?
I have the same questions about weddings, really. Are we performing our love? Or just creating a wonderful, concentrated stage for something real? (Don't be too heavy handed on the whole performance thing).
I haven't written in a notebook in years - it's slower, and I'm not sure whether I like that you can see all the spots that I've crossed out.
Ironic notebook description, but it was empty (finally, a project worthy of a notebook).
May 25
Beautiful, sunny Monday with cartoon clouds.
I started my first play. I’m moving chronologically, which starts us sunny. I’ve seen MS live three? Times – twice as a freshman at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and once a while later at Shakespeare in the Park with my family.
May 26
Finished Midsummer. Still laughed out loud at some of the snark, but was made painfully aware ofh ow much the comedies need to be PERFORMED. Look for photos of production I saw – also try to watched filmed version.
The play ends with the blessing of fertility and the hope for ‘unblemished’ children – maternity in quarantine.
June 18
Finished Romeo and Juliet on Monday. I haven’t read it since the tenth grade. It is such a horny play, which my conservative Baptist homeschool curriculum somehow managed to ignore. What did we even talk about?
R+J gets a bad rap for being soppy and romantic, and it’s true that it gets a lot of misaimed fandom. I feel like it got taught in high school as a cautionary tale – “these violent delights have violent ends.”
This time, however (and I know this isn’t an original reading) I was struck by the play’s older characters, their foolishness, and the effects of generational violence. All of the young people in this play die (except, I think, Benvolio), and all of the adults (except Lady Montague) live. Old people start wars, and kids die in them. People suffer for senseless causes they don’t understand. Even the Prince is complicit – and loses Paris and Mercutio as a result. In essence, the refusal to collaborate and understand the other costs the future.
Though I didn’t mean to, I read R+J alongside This Is How You Lose the Time War – a novel that is, among other things, a reference to R+J. (Spoilers ahead!) In one of the time streams, Blue remarks that she likes to watch R+J in each version of history and find out whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. Of course, she and Red are star-crossed lovers caught in a senseless war, one of them “dies” of drinking poison – but thanks to time travel shenanigans it’s a fake death, and they do not die together. It’s almost incidental that Red and Blue are queer – they have bigger problems – but it was nice to see two women in love with a happy ending – star crossed not for their sexuality but because they’re on opposite sides of the time war.
Later
Started rereading Much Ado About Nothing last night. The prototypical rom com. I loved Mumford and Sons’s “Sigh No More” album before I read this play, and that always inflects my reading of it. Possibly Shakespearean comedy at its highest wit per capita – much slower than reading R+J.
July 14
Last week I read Julius Caesar and I quit Twitter. I was frustrated by hot takes, by the way Twitter rewards fury and punishes deliberation, encourages binary thinking over nuance. Maybe that’s one of the greatest benefits of this project – it’s slow. It’s hard. It’s heavy (literally in the case of my Shakespeare book). Two weeks ago when Hamilton came out, Twitter and Facebook were awash with hot takes – condemning the musical, then people defending it, and finally someone reminding everyone that no matter their hot take, it had already been done on Tumblr in 2015. There’s something both frustrating and reassuring about realizing our “hot takes” are nothing new – that people have already had these thoughts before and will again. Reassuring – this is not new information – we have not lived unexamined lives until this moment. Frustrating – we go in circles, arguing the same points, taking the same sides. (“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?” Too cliched).
If the Hamilton discourse is already worn out, then reading and writing about Shakespeare is a hundred times so. People have had opinions on this since the 1600s. What more could I possibly say? And yet I am reminded of why I love the Book of Common Prayer. You do not need to find new words for rejoicing and lament – they are already there. A shared archive – the knowledge humans have felt these things before, had similar experiences, and lived (or not).
I’ve been revisiting personal archives a lot – rewatching the appendices for the Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings, tearing through books I loved as a kid, posting baby pictures, going through all of my Instagram posts from 2018, which I decided was likely the best year of my life so far. I became fascinated as well by public archives, spending hours on the FEC database to find out professors’ political donations, taking deep dives into fashion history and eighteenth century garment construction.
I also obsess over hidden archives, or missing ones. The best book I’ve read all summer is Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, which attempts to create a genre-crossing archive of queer abuse where none exists. I’m similarly horrified by an essay about her short story “The Husband Stitch” – and the realization that there are entire worlds of memory, of knowledge, that are forgotten or lost or intentionally destroyed. Thematic resonances stack up:
· A romance novel (The Falling in Love Montage, by Ciara Smith) in which the protagonist’s mother has early-onset dementia and she wonders whether love matters if you eventually forget it.
· Rereading Red, White, and Royal Blue, and seeing them quote letters between queer historical figures.
· The George Floyd protests, and revealing the racism built into America’s DNA
· The archive of racism in the church – papered over and ignored
· Where are the women, black folks, queer people? The danger of a single story
· My dissertation – alternative archives of Christian womanhood
· David Toole (Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo) – memories are resistance against the homogeneity of the Panopticon
· Woolf – Shakespeare’s sister
· The very real lack of access to archives right now – research trip cancelled and school library closed
· Pride (2014 movie) – archive of coalition building and shared experiences
What do we remember and what do we forget?
Universal vs. specific – who decides that Shakespeare is “not for an age but for all time”? The universal – Covid-19 can kill you – and the specific – but as always, poverty affects things.
Take notes somewhere from plague chapter of The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.
But anyway, back to Julius Caesar. The most powerful and acclaimed section of JC is, rightly, the funeral, in which Brutus gives a speech explaining why he helped kill Caesar. The people applaud him, want to make him the new Caesar (which is kind of missing the whole point). Then Marc Antony gives his eulogy, turns everything on its head, and within pages people are weeping for Julius Caesar, calling for Brutus’s head. A terrifyingly cynical view of the power of crowds. (“Teachers are heroes! Send kids back to school in the middle of a pandemic!”)
Tragedy – death, tyrants, arrogance, corruption, plagues
Comedy – the absurd
How on earth did Shakespeare write comedies during the plague? Miscommunication: comedy or tragedy?
July 15
Read most of King Lear yesterday. Not my favorite. I enjoyed it when I saw it live years ago (eyeball squishing!) but I think the deeply complicated language and lack of sympathetic and agential female characters annoyed me. One line, though, was very helpful and will likely make it into the essay. Act IV.i – “’Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.”
Taking a break for Station Eleven, then on to Antony and Cleopatra.
July 26
Read Macbeth on Thursday after finishing Station Eleven on Wednesday. I took a break from this project last week (can you take a break from something you’re not reading/doing steadily?) to go on vacation with Taylor to Idaho Springs. It was alternatingly weird and wonderful – staying in a beautiful Air BnB, drinking coffee in front of the mountains, hiking Chief Mountain. But also – ordering takeout everywhere instead of eating in. Putting on masks whenever we passed people on the trail. Deciding not to get out and walk around Garden of the Gods despite driving over an hour to get there because almost no one was wearing a mask (because it’s a Republican dominated city?).
There were two moments that stood out to me. The first was on our first night when we walked across the street to the cemetery. I was hoping to find Spanish Flu graves. We didn’t find a single one, and only one of someone who even died in WWI. Famously, the cemetery had a Titanic grave, but we didn’t find it – we looked it up online after. There we learned about Shadrach Gale, who had worked as a miner in Idaho Springs for several years. He took a trip home with his brother Harry, to visit his parents in Cornwall, and they booked second-class tickets back on the Titanic. Their bodies were never recovered, obviously. There are two memorials to Shad: one, erected by his parents, honors both him and his brother and stands in the churchyard in Cornwall. The other, in Idaho Springs cemetery, is just for him. I speculate that it was put up by his fellow miners. Strange to think that hillside was full of miners’ bones – no doubt many of them died in tragic circumstances – but the manner of shad’s death made him locally famous.
I love cemeteries, for the odd assembles of stories they tell, for the names. So many remarriages, so many paupers’ graves, so many babies and children, all with the same lamb-topped headstone, all with lives so devastatingly short they are counted out down to the month and the day. All of those attempts to mythologize, from the twenty-something boy with the etched football player, to the rows of neatly kept veterans with identical American flags, to the incredibly intriguing “Woodsmen of the World,” with their relatively ostentatious tombs and Latin inscriptions – until a quick google revealed them to be a fraternity of insurance salesmen. Who among us doesn’t want to romanticize our lives (and deaths?): “This is how I want to be remembered.”
Of course, the thing about most cemeteries is that unless your descendants are still living and faithful (or you become famous) eventually it’ll all come to ruin. The Idaho Springs cemetery is crumbling, overgrown, parts of it difficult to access, strewn seemingly haphazardly across the hillside. A reminder that we don’t deem all lives equally worth remembering. (A fun fact: Alexander Hamilton’s grave has been visited more since 2015 than in all the preceding years combined).
I have seen Shakespeare’s grave, on one of those trips that would have been cancelled had it been planned for this year. We went to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see his birthplace and grave, neat parentheses in a place he wasn’t overly fond of. A curse, written by him? – on anyone who moved his bones. No mention – who can name them? – of his parents’ babies who died of Plague before him. So many buldings desperate for notoriety by association. “This building dates back to the sixteenth century,” one pub proclaimed, “So Shakespeare likely saw it every day on his way to school.” Anything for a legacy.
But Macbeth (no Station Eleven thoughts here for now, they are too big) – I deeply enjoyed it – I read the whole thing in one sitting, but despite all the thoughts on tyranny and violence it mostly made me feel nostalgic for grade 11 English class, for my best friend of 13 years, for communal experiences of theaters. Plays are meant to be experienced. Now, A+C?
July 28
Didn’t like Antony and Cleopatra. Didn’t find any of the characters sympathetic and thus the tragedy didn’t land. Talking to Taylor yesterday about how the tragedies are all about “great” people – nobles, generals, kings, princes. Commoners only exist for comic relief or to support tragedy (Cleopatra dies – and also all her servants! Antony’s soldiers are slaughtered – but his emasculation is the real loss). Most people who saw Shakespeare were commoners. Were they convinced that their stories weren’t worth telling – or was there satisfaction for the powerless in seeing great men die? (See – public executions).
Thinking yesterday about how the tragic protagonists have a hamartia, and how the plays insist on that final justice. Plenty of innocents die in the chaos but the protagonists must always die as a result of their mistakes. There is always order restored – a sense of tragedy being justified (and thus preventable). Shakespeare writes amidst the Plague – seemingly random and not the result of any desert (though people desperately want to believe it is). Of course, there are patterns to the death, just as there are today. The rich can get away. Refugees die in their camps. Women are caretakers. People look for scapegoats.
“You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”
Onward to my most anticipated play – The Tempest!
July 30
I read The Tempest all in one sitting on Tuesday. It’s weird to think I hadn’t read it before – I feel like it’s been one of the plays that I’ve been cognizant of the most. It’s iconic, often-quoted, full of lines (oft-misquoted), like “o brave new world” and “we are such things as dreams are made on.” Technically it’s supposed to be the last great play, but I decided to read it before Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale.
As my introduction notes, there are big parallels to A Midsummer Night’s Dream – nice bookends. The biggest difference is that – unlike Oberon and Puck – Ariel and (purportedly) Prospero actually care for the people they’re messing with. This is a play that would clearly benefit from being seen (more so than most of them). My parents saw a production with Christopher Plummer for their 30th anniversary (or was it 25th?).
I feel like on the page it loses some of its charms – I was annoyed by the non-entity of Miranda, confused and distressed by the treatment of Caliban (who takes his place alongside Shylock as comedic “villains” who – intentionally or not – have a point and make the heroes look awful. Mostly this play just made me want to reread Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed.
Halfway through Cymbeline now, and what a wacky thing it is.
August 3
Hopefully the last journal entry before I start writing. Cymbeline was – immeasurably wacky. Ridiculously convoluted. Despite Samantha’s urging and her description of it as a play about healing and reconciliation, it mostly felt silly – a greatest hits of misunderstanding and contrived coincidences. I’m guessing that part of my frustration came from the speed of reading, and the rest of my disconnect from reading this play alone, on the floor of Taylor’s office, without a performance or professor to ground me.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only part that really stood out to me is the funeral song – “Fear no more the heat of the sun” – which is just as beautiful and haunting in this context as it was when I first encountered it, in sophomore year in Twentieth Century Lit, reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time.
Now, The Winter’s Tale was more familiar – I read it in Dr. Pittman’s Shakespeare Seminar (also sophomore year), though I’ve never seen a performance. I didn’t remember much – a tonal shift, the statue ending, of course “Exit pursued by a bear.” How weird to be a Shakespeare play almost entirely remembered for a stage direction. In the marginalia, a variety of notes. Some just helpful – summarizing action, deciphering a difficult passage. Others were so married to who I was as a sophomore (EIGHT years ago??) that I had to think for a while to make sense of them – for example, identifying a scene as one performed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.
What was missing was the visceral and unexpected anger I felt while reading it this time, how I had no patience for anyone except Paulina – the lone voice of reading who calls out the king for his absurdity, who curses him, who refuses to forgive him and holds him to task sixteen years after his wife dies, insisting he not wash away the fact that he killed her through his insane jealousy. After play after play of female characters who were either madonnas or whores, sidelined or falsely accused, I was exhausted, had no patience for another crazed rich, powerful man’s irrational hatred of a woman who was clearly better than him. Oberon, Hero’s fiancé, Marc Antony, Lear, Posthumous – the list was exhausting. No wonder by this point I felt like screaming. No wonder as I watched wealthy white men in government flout democracy and blithely send teachers and children to their death that I wanted to scream. Paulin, of course, recalls Othello’s Emilia, and Hermione, Desdemona. The difference is that Paulina is allowed to survive as she speaks truth to power, and Hermione is allowed to live again because The Winter’s Tale is a romance, not a tragedy. But has anything fundamentally changed? Their son is dead. The king is still in power. While Firenze is unwavering in his enduring love, he is blessed in marrying Perdita because she was secretly a princess all along, and noble blood recognizes like. The status quo remains intact, and there is no guarantee that these events will not be repeated in the next generation.