It had taken me a long time to get to Shakespeare’s graveside. The road had started in Ancient Rome with “Julius Caesar” in tenth grade. All I could remember from the experience was my friend Foop asking, exasperatedly, “Eh tu, Brute?” He didn’t know what it meant—what any of it meant. The language. The play. Shakespeare. I don’t know that any of us did, and Foop gave voice to our befuddlement.
Somewhere I read “Romeo and Juliet.”In in-class reading, I read the part of Friar Laurence aloud, the first Shakespearean role I ever performed—if halting, “I don’t know what this means” spoken-word fumbling counts as performance. Laurie Cote, the girl I had a painful crush on and who knew it and who was kind about it, sat in front of me. Years later, recalling these memories to the teacher, the teacher said she never taught R&J, and so perhaps, I realized, these memories were false or romanticized, although my feelings of angstful teenage yearning were not.
The road to Shakespeare’s grave ran through Scotland and Glamis and Cawdor and Dunsidane Wood (a moving target!). It ran tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and crept not at a petty pace from day to day but, instead, somehow surged on.
By my freshman year in college, the road took me to my own Shakespearean Rosetta Stone. There, cast as Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I finally understood the secret of Shakespeare, which seems so elementary in retrospect but which no one had successfully unlocked for me prior: Shakespeare is meant to be performed. Read aloud as awkward spoken-word tedium doesn’t capture the magic, and in fact probably does much to kill it. But to perform it! Oh, the language comes alive, and all the complexities and wonder of the human experience awaits inside. That is why Shakespeare remains so relevant and essential to us today. This was the magic Oberon performed for me, and that spell continues to enrich my life.
The road to Shakespeare’s grave ran again through “Romeo & Juliet” as Mercutio. It ran through “As You Like It” as Touchstone. It ran through “Twelfth Night” as Orsino. It took me, as an audience member, to wonderful and awful productions. It took me to BBC productions and a dazzling array of movie adaptations. It took me to Shakespeare biographies and Shakespeare’s poems.
The road took me, as a director, into the “Tempest,” where a young me looked at an old Propsero and wondered if I saw myself in the mage. Would the fervor of my own intellectual curiosity ever be my fatal flaw? Would I ever need to learn to find grace after a spell in the wilderness? Life would later say “yes.”
Shakespeare put a little of himself in that play. We don’t know how much because we know so little about him. He is unknowable to us even as his writing seems so ubiquitous, so central to English literature—indeed, so central to Western thought and language.
I read and listened and watched and performed all along the road that led me, eventually, to Shakespeare’s grave. Those physical places of his life—his birthplace, his schoolroom, his wife’s former cottage, the site of his own home, the church where he worshipped and is buried—are among the most real ways we have of knowing anything him and his life. The power of place, always so tangible, so intimate, so resonate, connect us through time and our imaginations to lives before us. We can walk in the footsteps of those who came before us and step into the stories they once lived. That makes that history come alive.
By the time the road led me to Shakespeare’s grave, my walking was over. Sure, the road would go on, but for a moment, it was time to stand. It was time to be still.
I cried as I stood by Shakespeare’s graveside. I cried for all the beauty he had given me in my life, for all the inspiration he had sparked in me, for the all the people—real and imaginary—he had brought into my life over so many years. These were all gifts I could never repay, that I could only be grateful for, that I held in my heart with awe and respect and reverence.
Photos Darren Rawlings.
The rest of my life will travel along the road from Shakespeare’s grave, not to it. Fortunately, Shakespeare remains very much alive, very much with me, very much with all of us, as the journey continues.
Great article