Accents
A date with Shakespeare
Ashland, Oregon, USA, Oct. 11—Joy, Gentle Friends! writ large in frame on the wall of the gift shop of Shakespearean souvenirs easily catches the attention of shoppers. In another frame, the quote must have provoked a chuckle from many a Shakespeare fan as it did in us: There’s Many a Man Hath More Hair Than Wit. Still another: If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On. While lines from Romeo and Juliet surface as easy as pie to this writer, as to which play, act, and scene these three quotations come from, I’d have to go to the Internet for help. Offhand I must say, the last bespeaks yearnings of a love-struck, awfully in love, melancholic lover, the likes of Romeo and Juliet.
Yesterday, my daughter Raileen had set the weekend as our date with William Shakespeare. It was a two-and-half hour drive from her residence at Redding, California, to Ashland, place of the acclaimed Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF, for short). OSF annually runs the cultural richness of classic plays as well as a kaleidoscope of diverse contemporary plays from the last gasps of Winter in February to the close of Autumn in November. In three Ashland theaters yet. We had OSF’s As You Like It in 2007. ‘Twas a comedy, and this time it’s gonna be a tragedy, and so, Macbeth it was, one of Shakespeare’s five great tragedies. We were lucky to get tickets for the weekend showing that Raileen had to quickly purchase online the day before. Considering the number of other customers waiting online, she was given 45 minutes to finalize the sale.
With an hour to spare before curtain time, we lingered at the gift shop to be greeted with the framed quote Joy, Gentle Friends! An array of Shakespeare paraphernalia are there for the monies from costumes of clowns and queens, to swords and masks, to mugs and magnets, and to a pencil eraser with lines from Macbeth: Out, damn’d spot (Macbeth, Act V), uttered by Lady Macbeth as she washes her bloodstained hands that cry murder. Last time we were there, Rudy bought a T-shirt with a quote that amused his fellow lawyers: The first thing we do, let us kill all the lawyers. (Henry the VI, Part II, Act IV, Scene 2). The magnet which I bought then for my granddaughter Danika still hangs on their refrigerator in South Carolina. Inscribed on it is Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3). Verily, a counsel for the young to carry out through all of life.
Watching Macbeth exhumed a potpourri of memories from the deep recesses of the mind. A term paper I wrote entitled Full of Sound and Fury—Signifying Something was a critique on William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, which title Faulkner took from Macbeth’s soliloquy. At this point, with a bit of pride, allow me to say that the hubby has committed this soliloquy to memory more than I ever could or would desire to do. Inside the theater, he whispered the entire stanza to me so much so that it bothered the fellow in front of us, who turned and gave Rudy the look. Here it is, a gourmet serving from the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon to thy delight, my beloved readers: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/To the last syllable of recorded time;/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5).
In a previous column, I said he “was destined to be my roommate of 40 odd years.” For full disclosure, Rudy was a former NLRC Executive Arbiter (National Labor Relations Commission, Region VI), who now renders obeisance as in-house counsel of mine. Perchance thy path crosses his lordship, ask about Macbeth’s soliloquy, and he’ll recite it verbatim for thine pleasure, if not frustration and discomfiture. Never mind that his performance would make Shakespearean actor Lawrence Olivier cry. Doing a Macbeth, he would — antics hauled o’er the primrose path across the years to the inevitable stage of balding pate, missing teeth, and arthritic legs.
If Rudy had English Literature (Shakespeare included) in his Pre-Law, I had one whole Shakespeare subject—ye, gods, to rise to the rank of major in English. From the deep recesses of the mind (there I go again with the cliché), about half a century ago when UPV was a dream away, we had to be content with two years of UP Iloilo College or UPIC, second year being the highest collegiate level the nascent UPIC could provide. Teaching us Shakespeare was the UPIC dean himself, Dr. Domingo F. Nolasco, methinks a Shakespeare freak like his students. How he would do a Hamlet in front of impressionable young minds. Like Lawrence Olivier, Richard Burton and Marlon Brando were not around to bemoan the dean’s performance. All our exams under Dean Nolasco were “open notes.” Gush, the more reason we really had to burrow into Shakespeare’s magnum opus after magnum opus.
Reminiscing things Shakespearean, my mind’s eye conjures the heartbroken Ophelia as played by Prof. Zenaida Bernabe-French in UPIC’s Little Theater. Zeni was, still is, one of the bfs (best friends) and one of the bws (best writers). Together we proceeded to Diliman for our third and fourth years. It was there, circa 1957, when students trooped to listen to visiting Nobel laureate William Faulkner (1897-1962) who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels, novellas, and short stories. National Artist NVM Gonzales, then our creative writing professor, had cited Faulkner for his stream-of-consciousness narration, very apparent, chapter by chapter, in The Sound and the Fury where the characters reveal their inner conflicts like a soliloquizing protagonist and antagonist of Shakespeare.
Macbeth presents a classic case of regicide, murder of a king which, I like to believe, is passé for our times and climes. Further, I like to believe that sort of thing ended with JFK. Yes, John F. Kennedy. I think United Nations and how it looks on tempests and is never shaken. To thee, august body, I repose high hopes. The lady doth hope too much, you say? Yes, to the last syllable of mine own recorded time.
We were part of the standing ovation that the thespians well deserved. The portrayal of Lady Macbeth was excellent. Macbeth? Almost but not quite. I don’t know for the director, but the soliloquy of Tomorrow, and tomorrow… should have been acted bigay-todo, i.e., in extremis in keeping with the horrifying sound-and-fury lines.
Now back to the start of this column. The three quotations are respectively from: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene 1); A Comedy of Errors (Act II, Scene 2); and Twelfth Night (Act I, Scene 1). The first two were courtesy of bullgatortail of eNotes’ Shakespeare Group. The third I easily got from Google.
All’s well that end’s well, the long drive notwithstanding. We look forward to more dates with Shakespeare — time and the purse permitting, especially the latter.
(Email: lagoc@hargray.com)