They Stumble that Run Fast: Why I like teaching Shakespeare

            In 1995, I taught in a school district where I wasn’t allowed to teach Joy Luck Club to 17 year olds in an Honors American Lit class because a swear word appears on page 209, and I wasn’t allowed to teach Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Malcolm X or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, because they were too violent; and I couldn’t say out loud that Oscar Wilde was gay, which I know because our principal called me into his office and told me a parent said I was “recruiting.” At a certain point, I was annoying the Instructional Materials Committee with title requests so much they said I had to get all my dozen department colleagues as well as the principal to read any proposed book and each sign off on it before the IMC would even consider anything else.

            And that was how I fell in love with teaching Shakespeare—gender-flipping, triple-entendre, binary-busting, blood-and-blaspheming, pratfalls and poetry Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare I was automatically in the clear. Phone calls to the superintendent slowed to a trickle. But I wasn’t going to avoid nuanced or challenging themes or the complacencies that privilege brings to bear; I wasn’t going to infantilize students; I wasn’t going to trade what’s gorgeous and radical in literature—that it allows us to observe and take part in the messiness of social relations and human feeling, to steep ourselves in the experiences and points of view of people not ourselves—for testable content and skills.

           Teaching Shakespeare allowed me to close the door to my classroom and say fuck you, censorship—or rather, fuck you, canker blossom!

            Here’s an example—a Shakespeare text that gains meaning and power from directly mucking around in its grime.

            Many of my ninth grade students have already read Romeo and Juliet by the time they get to high school, and they groan to hear they’re reading it yet again. That means I’ve got them exactly where I want them.

            The play begins. Here come a couple servants from the house of Capulet, talking trash in the street.

SAMPSON: When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.

GREGORY: The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maiden-heads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.

Take it in what sense thou wilt. A little translation and students come to attention. Sampson is joking about rape.

GREGORY: They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMPSON: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and ‘tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Know what Sampson’s talking about there? I ask, whether or not they’ve started buzzing with the language. They hesitate, and I say, He’s talking about his pretty piece of flesh.

            They read these lines in middle school, but their teachers surely didn’t linger. I do. And I do it because there’s rowdiness in Shakespeare’s plays and I want them to experience the energy of that, but also because it feeds themes of the story so deeply—the swagger and energy and teasing and bluster of youth (and then the shattering disbelief when someone dies from their rough play); a sexism so pervasive and natural and potentially violent, Juliet thinks to die or feign death before even for a second imagining running off on an abusive father.

            Soon after, we meet Romeo, one of the great incarnations of love in all the world, and he’s gone nocturnal, running off to the woods each night to weep, and then collapsing in his room each morning for some fitful, despondent sleep. All this is because he’s in love. In love? “Out of her favor where I am in love.” What we find out is that he knows Rosaline doesn’t love him because she “hath Dian’s wit, / And in strong proof of chastity well armed.” After asking students about the goddess Diana (of the hunt) and the detail of most interest to Shakespeare (virgin, never to marry), I ask about chastity. Then students start to say, Wait a minute.

BENVOLIO: Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

ROMEO: She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste.

            This is such important character development for Romeo. When we first meet him, he is so certain he knows what love is; and he’s so certain that he loves Rosaline; and he feels all over his itchy body that Rosaline has no feelings for him, which he knows because she won’t “ope her lap to saint seducing gold.” Here’s this guy who’s supposed to be the greatest lover of all time, and he’s a just a kid: he’s passionate, articulate, pained, but young and dumb. How can we understand either that Romeo’s love for Juliet is different than this and therefore tragic in its explosive brevity, or even more tragically, that his love is not so different at all, but enthusiastic and bright, trusting and good?

            Take these things together, the boyish bluster of Romeo and Juliet’s wild, young love, and I just want to protect these kids. Because this is what the story for me is about: teenagers at play and in love who get caught in the spokes of adult foolishness. If you take out the rowdiness and horniness and the sexism, how do you understand the tragedy of this childhood forced so needlessly to its end?

            Infantilizing students by stripping literature of its vulgarities and of the disorders the art then reflects smothers students from grappling with issues as adults; and it does something else, too: it doesn’t let them take delight as children.

Amelia's Golden Birthday

Amelia's birthday wish was to go away with just her parents and no sisters. While we only had one night two weeks late because of the prison-house of activities at which I always marvel and despair, it was happily anticipated. Stephanie rented a room in Coupeville, the town on Whidbey Island we lived in the very romantic year before we were married. 

The town itself is the second oldest in the state and lovingly zoned, a couple of times standing in for Martha's Vineyard or thereabouts in movies like War of the Roses and Practical Magic.

But as a getaway for Amelia's birthday, it was also close and featured one of our favorite walks in the state.

In the end, Stephanie and I were able to revisit a place vividly and affectionately remembered from our days of courting -- places we walked, air we tasted, the quaint and quiet and slowness that had room just for us. And by the end, we cherished the beauty of the place, and remembered, too, why when surrounded with such natural and historical treasures we rented a movie almost every night. 

One of the very fun things about our visit was that we were only three store fronts away from the house we'd occupied, a beautiful craftsman celebrating its hundred year anniversary next year (sharing the date with our house in Seattle). The house is now a store-front called Lavender Wind, and its opening made the kind of local news I'm happy now to see. 

We talked with the owners inside, and they told us of many others who'd stopped through to tell of their years in the house. They promised to make a Facebook page where we could share our story, and they did it right away. The page includes a video of their remodel that will be of much more interest to Stephanie and me than anyone reading here -- but the video does include images of the house the way we remember it.

Hey! This was the entrance to a
coffee shop where I'd grade papers!

Amelia celebrated with us and seemed almost as interested as we.

I'm sure not everything was interesting, such as comments like, "Hey, that used to be a coffee shop where I'd grade papers!" But Amelia is always game, always curious, and always a gratifying traveling companion.

We could not have predicted, though, when we drove to Ebey's Landing, one of Stephanie's favorite walks in the state, that the January afternoon would surpass so many of our past walks in light and warmth. Amelia experienced Crockett's meadows in  painterly otherworldliness; after we hiked past beet fields and ascended the yellow cliffs along the meandering lines of the water, we returned along the beach as the sun softly began to set, turning the grasses a full gold; and by the time we neared the beginning again, Mt. Rainier reflected the pastels of the sky and its bready red hunks of cloud.

Happy thirteenth, Amelia!

Measure for Measure

The origin story of David and Stephanie has its biggest roots in a couple scenes we performed together in our college Shakespeare class. I had no acting experience, but I saw no shortage of inspiration and devilry from the role I was working on--Angelo from Measure for Measure; soon, the "strong and swelling evil / Of my conception," and the exhilaration of performing, was just like any other kind of flirting--energetic, presumptive, sly.

Angelo is given charge of Vienna by its duke, who wants to crack the whip on a city of sin but is himself too soft and friendly to do it. Perhaps the need to give Vienna a cold shower is a necessary one, given how Italian it had all been getting there (all those Austrians named Claudio, Angelo, Lucio and Vincentio?). Angelo, though, is described as having urine of "congealed ice," and has no such problem, immediately sentencing a man to death for extra-marital relations. The condemned man's sister comes to Angelo to plead for her brother's life, and though Isabella is nearing vows of the sisterhood and though Angelo has been unyielding in matters of sex and love, he discovers a little spark, and finds himself telling Isabella leniency can be earned.

It's stunning and wildly grotesque, because the story is over 400 years old and fictional and yet not nearly fantastical enough. At the time we performed the scenes, the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill story was just a couple years old. I was aware of the political charge of our play, but also of the scent of Stephanie's hair as I stepped behind her to whisper at her ear, "Plainly conceive, I love you."

Last Wednesday night, Stephanie I went to see Seattle Shakespeare Company put on a performance of Measure for Measure. We had last seen an interpretation in 1992 with the college class, an unfunny, sober performance with a screeching rape scene that had only reinforced my sense that the play deserved its lesser accolades. We had been looking forward all these years later to going back to those resonant lines and discordant intimacies that put us together.

And it was amazing--one of the best performances I've seen out of this production company. And it put my one-note, sanctimonious college-y interpretation to shame. I wrote a letter to this week's Angelo, and he wrote a deeply satisfying and thoughtful response back. I include the letters below.

Watching the play with Stephanie two dozen years after our show was more satisfying and rich than I thought it could be; discussing performance decisions afterwards was delicious. Shakespeare doesn't have much in the way of successful marriages (who's his most united couple, the Macbeths?)--he mostly likes the getting there; but my partnership with Stephanie, these many years later, has as much the energy, joy and desire as it ever had.


Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 10:26 AM
To: Grosskopf, David
Subject: Re: Your Angelo was outstanding

David,

I can’t express how much I appreciate this letter. Like you, I have had an attachment to this role and play since I was in training, and to hear that an audience member, especially one so familiar with the play and character, saw and appreciated my journey though thrills me. 

When I was twenty, I saw Angelo much the same as you did….as a grotesque mustache twirler, yet as I studied him over the years I saw that there was so much more there. My first thoughts that he wasn’t two dimensional came when I realized that the way he is portrayed relies more on the plays journey than his. 

The simple fact of the matter is that if he is played to be unredeemable, then Marina and Isabel just look foolish in the end. He must be forgivable (one of the hardest things for us humans to do for the play to work. Forgiveness is a knot I believe Shakespeare tried to understand for most of his later plays, Winters Tale becoming his greatest treatise on the matter…in my opinion. Ironic that in one of the last speeches Marina refers to a "marble monument”. The interdependence of the characters to tell the story is the key here. 

Once I understood this, Shakespeare’s road map burst from the page and I saw the intense struggles that Angelo faced. The opposites he uses from couplet to couplet , and the antithesis he uses even in the same lines. Like all of Shakespeare late characters he lives in a moment in time, struggling with thoughts he has difficulty understanding. He in in an emergency room, looking only at what is in front of him.  Experiencing emotions he has no skills to conquer. Washing over him like a tsunami. 

God it is fun to play.

So thanks again for this. If you run into me at some point please introduce yourself. I’d like to put a face to the letter.

All the best

Brad

Dear Mr,

                My wife and I went to last night’s show of Measure for Measure and were thrilled by the performance. D. Chiang’s direction was so insightful and creative, lighting up the undertones and overtones of a play I thought I understood before; and your interpretation, in particular, gave me the illusion that no other interpretation of Angelo was possible.

                I am a Shakespeare teacher at Roosevelt High School, and I usually refer to this play when I’m talking about opportunities stage-direction-less texts present: I give the plot of Measure for Measure (but how did I forget the bed trick?), and I lead up to the moment the duke asks for Isabella’s hand, explaining that she has no more words in the script: does she take his hand, slap him, look quizzically at her rosary beads (loved it!), what?

                But the play also has special meaning for me because, twenty years ago in college, I performed a couple scenes as Angelo and ended up going home with my Isabel—last night was the first time we’d seen the play since all those years ago.

                I had played Angelo as a straight up hypocritical sleazebag. My performance journal is attached (ignore it, or just read the first paragraph), and you can hear my Sophomoric confidence as well as my stupid interpretation—one that held up for me until last night.

                Your Angelo is consistently principled, or tries to be; and when you launch into the “Plainly conceive, I love you” scene, Angelo continues to wrestle with himself much longer than mine did; I did not pick up the hypothetical cues in the scene well, though so clear in your performance; and so your Angelo, as he presents Isabella with what-if’s, does not seem merely to be trying to manipulate Isabel’s moral reasoning: he’s still wrestling somehow—until he goes for it.

                The smallness of your Angelo, the space he takes up on the stage especially when the duke is there, and then the slight puffing—pretty desk, Mao jacket—made Angelo so familiar, and even sympathetic: a middle manager who believes in the company he works for.

                Your acting was nuanced and thoughtful, and gave complexity and tragedy to a character I’d just seen as exploitative and villainous. He is as surprised by his downfall as anyone.

                The play really came together for me in a way that it never had before with Mariana’s lines, which your Mariana so powerfully belted out: “They say, best men are moulded out of faults; / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad.” I just saw this play as melodrama before; but with these lines, everything Chiang had done, everything you had done, really began to sing for me, and the play became a real play, and one certainly worth doing: our dogma and our righteousness is stupid in the face of our faults, and we should be led by our humanity above all else.

                In any event, I thought you were brilliant, and I thank you.

David Grosskopf