September 2009 Issue

My Ohio: Desperately Seeking Shakespeare

Like most kids, I had heard of Shakespeare long before I actually read him. And like many kids, I had developed a bias against him. I knew that he had written some “classics” — but weren’t the classics boring and snooty? Although I knew that Shakespeare would someday be part of my education, his high-class writings seemed to have little to do with me. I vaguely assumed that his plays were intended for rich people, British people or people who wanted to appear rich or British.

The dreaded encounter with the Bard finally came at Donnell Junior High in Findlay, in Mrs. Kay’s eighth-grade English class. When I first tried to read Julius Caesar and the Merchant of Venice in those little Signet paperbacks, I had trouble following the language. This scared me because I had always done well in school: Would Shakespeare put an end to that by exposing me as the dullard that I always suspected myself of being? It was only when Mrs. Kay read portions of the plays aloud that I learned to relax and simply take in the words — and as a result, those words slowly began to make sense. Gradually, Shakespeare’s language — its vitality, its rhythms, its tonal shadings — became an object of fascination, mostly because it was something entirely new. There wasn’t anybody in Findlay who talked like this.

Years later, I learned that this language was also new to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who lived at a time when the expressive possibilities of early modern English were being explored and stretched. Buoyed by Elizabethan prosperity and patriotism, Londoners felt that they deserved a thriving theater no less than the ancient Athenians and Romans. Most playwrights adhered fairly strictly to classical formulas, but Shakespeare took a different and more adventuresome path, gleefully mingling times, scenes and moods.

Though the classicists saw him as technically undisciplined, everyday theatergoers didn’t mind his gaffes: By all accounts, his plays were extremely popular. Seven years after his death, a couple of his theater friends collected his works and published them in the so-called First Folio. Shakespeare was already becoming a “classic” writer.

Something is always lost when this happens. Once a literary work is labeled a “classic,” it can seem less accessible, more remote. It becomes a text that children are told to read in school as a necessary — though not necessarily pleasant — step toward becoming “educated.” Until eighth grade I bought into this image of Shakespeare, completely and uncritically.

Mrs. Kay, however, set me straight on a few things. Shakespeare was no aristocrat, but came from what might be called the prosperous “middle class” of his day. While his plays were occasionally performed for royalty, they were popular entertainments with unusually broad appeal. When Mrs. Kay told us about the “groundlings,” who paid a penny to stand around the projecting stage, I could see myself standing among them, gazing up at the costumed players and munching on roasted chestnuts. I imagined it as a very good time, like watching the musical acts at the Hancock County Fair.

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There’s no telling which lessons will stick with you when you’re still in school. My most lasting lesson from Mrs. Kay’s class was a simple one that still informs my life as a reader and my work as an English professor: Our “classics” usually began as somebody else’s popular culture.

This is certainly true of Shakespeare, who would be astonished to see his transformation from a self-made scribbler and theatrical entrepreneur into The Bard — that revered figure whose bust graces public libraries. Of course, he’s not around to bask in his posthumous glory. Apart from some popular tourist sites in Stratford-on-Avon, the plays are pretty much all that’s left of him — a fact that hit me with full force as I stared at that bronze plaque in the middle of an industrial Nowhere over 30 years ago.

A reconstructed Globe Theater now stands where I once stood in the rain by that brick wall. Although I’d love to see this New Globe, I’m glad that I saw the spot before it was made over, when it still reflected the natural evolution of a living city — Shakespeare’s city. His Puritan-leaning contemporaries wanted the theaters out of town, which is why the Globe, the Rose and the Swan were all clustered across the river. Victorian Londoners wanted their breweries out of town — not because of sin, but because of the smell. Once again, things change. But don’t such changes always point up the things that truly last?

One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, poet and playwright Ben Jonson, wrote that anyone seeking Shakespeare should “looke / Not on his Picture, but his Booke.” In other words, turn to his pages, which is precisely what Mrs. Kay gave us the courage to do. Or better yet, watch those pages come to life in performance. With Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival (once known as the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival), Akron’s Ohio Shakespeare Festival, Columbus’ Rosebriar Shakespeare Company and the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, Ohio is an excellent place to do just that.

As Mrs. Kay taught me nearly a half-century ago, the Bard of Avon is also the Bard of Findlay, Dayton and Chillicothe: wherever his work is read or seen. We live in an era that worships fame and obsesses on personalities, as attested by the steady stream of tourists flocking to Stratford. But Ben Jonson knew better when he directed our gaze from Shakespeare’s face to his “booke.” As I stared at that brick wall in London, it struck me that I didn’t really have to leave Ohio to find Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, the Bard himself said it best: The plays really are the thing.