“Teach?” his father echoed. He looked as if the word were a bug that had inadvertently landed on his meat. He had never gone to college himself, and although he’d promised his dying wife he would help their youngest son get his education, he’d always expected that education would help John get somewhere, too.
“Teach,” John agreed. Fitting the bite into his mouth, he leaned across the table toward his dad. “At a university,” he added, trying to buttress his expression with a confidence he did not own. He had no idea what teaching at a university would entail, but in his freshman English class that spring he’d seen glimmers of a challenge and a solace and a way of thinking that made designing dams and building bridges seem trivial in comparison.
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage Keeping one ear alert to approaching cars, John finishes the prologue and begins the first scene. Except for the bit of The Merchant of Venice he’d inadvertently read back in eighth grade, his experience with William Shakespeare has consisted solely of the play they studied each spring in his high school English classes. His high school teachers’ attitudes toward the Bard of Avon have been both precious and pedantic, while the other adults in Kernville seem to consider Shakespeare to be somehow akin to canned spinach or cod liver oil—wholesome and improving, if not always very tasty. As a consequence, John has sensed more than seen the powers those plays possess, their magic having been well-camouflaged by pop quizzes, forced searches for hidden meanings, and class readings whose only redeeming quality were the moments of accidental hilarity they offered, as when, at the end of Othello, the kid who’d been laboring over Lodovico’s lines, droned, “O bloody period,” and the whole class snickered. Or when Eddy Mitchell began Marc Antony’s funeral oration by carefully enunciating, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your rears.”
But his English prof at Davis had talked of William Shakespeare as if he were Clark Gable, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, and Jesus all combined. Myriad-minded Shakespeare, he’d called him, and everything they read, from “On Dover Beach” to The Grapes of Wrath seemed to lead back to Shakespeare in one way or another.
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Romeo and Juliet was the play they read when he was a tenth grader, and John had found it pretty stiff going. He recalls liking raucous Mercutio more than bland Romeo, and he’d been intrigued by Juliet’s apparent zeal to lose her maidenhood, since—locker room bluster aside—in his observation, girls seemed more interested in obtaining letter jackets and consuming chocolate sodas than having sex.
Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? Peeling back the wrapper from his brick of candy, John takes another bite. Strands of caramel sag between his mouth and the chocolate bar, and he gives the candy a deft twist to catch the dangling strings. Then, biting, chewing, swallowing, he reads his way down the page, flipping often to the end of the book to consult the glosses, struggling to keep track of which characters are Capulets and which are Montagues, while Hudsons and Austins and Packards lumber by on the street and, from the golden window of the east, the worshipped sun grows warm on his bare forearms.
He is surprised by how alive the first scene seems—much more modern and immediate than he remembers it being in high school. The Capulet servants baiting the Montagues until a brawl ensues reminds him of the fights that sometimes erupt behind the bleachers after the football games. And old Capulet blustering and calling for his sword makes John think of his own father, provoking a smile that is part smirk, part grimace, and part rueful tenderness.
Cast by their grave beseeming ornaments To wield old partisans Though he got an A in sophomore English, he’d actually understood very little of Romeo and Juliet. Even now he sometimes gets so tangled in the archaic language and odd syntax that he loses track of who is speaking or what is going on. But it’s summer. There are no essays to sweat, no tests to cram for. A feeling of ease floats in the air, a wide warm generosity that seems to hover over Kernville’s broad streets and low buildings, spreading out until it includes the river and the endless green orchards that stretch from the city limits toward the vague blue mountains east of town.
He doesn’t have to hunt for symbols or hidden meanings, and he soon realizes he doesn’t even have to interrupt his reading to look up every unfamiliar word. If he just keeps going, the sense of a line will usually come to him without his having to think about it, in exactly the same way he understands Mrs. Short when she drives up in her ’46 Buick and asks him to fill it up and check the oil without his having to stop and define each word she speaks.
A last wisp of breeze teases his pompadour as, waving good-bye to Mrs. Short, he returns to his step and his book. It cost him thirty-five cents, that copy of the play—six cents more than a gallon of gas. He makes seventy-five cents an hour. His fees at UC Davis are eighty-four dollars a year. If he doesn’t waste his summer’s wages, he won’t have to ask his father for much money next fall, a fact he hopes will help to justify his choice of studies.
It did help and it didn’t, John muses now while a pair of butterflies spirals around each other like a dancing double helix, for despite his ability to pay his own way through college, despite his scholarships and summa cum laudes, despite all his publications and awards, his father could never quite believe that John hadn’t been meant for some other, more comprehensible—or at least more lucrative—career.
But before he can mourn that strand of past too deeply, the butterflies float away, and the sharp, sweet smell of gasoline drifts back across the decades to mix with the algal tang that rises from the river bottom, and John is wafted back to his perch on the station step, lost once more—lost still—in a Verona that is both immediate and mythical, among characters it suddenly seems he knows better than anyone in his hometown.
He has pumped several hundred gallons of gas and his reading step is swathed in afternoon shade by the time the lovers are riddling their way to their first kiss.
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
That youngster knows so little, the John he has become marvels and mourns. That stalwart attendant in his Esso uniform is such a colt. John longs to sit down beside that stripling and explain a thing or two. About what he might hope for, and what eschew, how best to hew his path through the working-day world.
Or, if the kid refused to listen to John’s hard-won wisdom on those topics, at least he might teach him something more about tragedy. Not the simple drivel his teachers had already expounded about hubris and catharsis and how tragic heroes contain the seeds of their own downfall, but other, more interesting insights, like Bradley’s observation that it’s a sense of squandered potential that makes a sad tale a tragedy, or Frye’s idea that the essence of tragedy is the fact that human beings are trapped in time, or even John’s own modest discovery that Shakespeare’s tragedies ask a third again as many questions as his comedies do.
But the boy on the step does not care about observations, ideas, or questions. He only knows they shine, Romeo’s lines. He only knows they provoke in him some welcome hunger, an ache that somehow helps to tame the pain in his heart’s core. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much
Later, walking home along the cooling streets, he carries the feeling of those lines inside him. He has left his book at the station, and so can recall only a few scraps of what he read. But as he follows the sidewalks whose cracked and buckled concrete he’s known his whole life, he whispers those phrases to the pale sky—rough touch tender kiss sin from my lips—the words returning to him like remembered flavors or far-off scents, and he feels happy and sad, empty and oddly thrilled, grateful for some unnamed thing that seems even greater than that play.
Exactly as he feels now, remembering.
He begins act two during the midmorn
ing lull the following day, starting with the chorus, and then rejoining Romeo to scale the wall of Juliet’s father’s orchard and so escape the stale company of his gentle cousin Benvolio and the wild Mercutio.
This time, John finds he is much less enamored of Mercutio, whose exuberance now strikes him as both more cruel and more crude than when he’d read the play in high school. It is while Mercutio is attempting to conjure Romeo by Rosalind’s quivering thigh that it occurs to John that the play contains a great many more references to sex than he remembers from Miss Halverson’s English class. A few lines later, when Mercutio suggests, O that she were an open-arse, thou a pop’rin pear! the image that leaps into John’s mind discomforts him so much he nearly drops the book, appalled that he could imagine Miss Halverson’s precious Bard writing anything so rude.
Hurriedly, he flips to the back of the book to consult the glosses, but they fail to elucidate anything. Open-arse is listed cryptically as “another name for the medlar,” while the definition of pop’rin is simply “a Flemish pear.” In the end, John decides his own dirty mind must be to blame for misinterpreting Mercutio’s line so obscenely.
That summer the smallest thing can twist his thinking back to sex. He thinks of sex when he fits the pump nozzle into the gas tank of Kathy Beecher’s Studebaker Coupe. He thinks of sex when his teeth break through the chocolate crust of his Snickers bar or when the river-scented breeze licks his neck. And he begins the balcony scene convinced his mind is so uniquely perverted that he can find sex even in William Shakespeare’s plays.
He’d been so innocent that summer, John broods. It wasn’t until he studied the tragedies in his junior year that he discovered that Romeo and Juliet really did contain the erotic meanings he’d imagined—as well as many more that had not occurred to him. It wasn’t until he was in graduate school that he understood that what he’d read in high school was yet another permutation of Romeo and Juliet’s unobtainable original text, an edition that had been sanitized not by the infamous Mr. Bowdler, but by some other meddlesome do-gooder.
But the John he is that summer has no inkling that the true text of any of Shakespeare’s plays is as elusive as the Holy Grail, that every play is a critical and philosophical conundrum that can never be resolved. He has not yet learned about the decades-long controversies over modernizing the spelling and punctuation, nor can he imagine how many hours he will later spend studying articles filled with terms that read like some arcane algebra—F1, Q4, Compositor X, Sheets C and E. Hand D.
The boy at the gas station has never even seen any of the plays performed. He does not yet know that the only actors on the Elizabethan stage were male, so that Romeo and Juliet’s original audience would have seen two boys standing palm to palm, two boys taking the sin from each other’s lips. He hasn’t yet read Hazlitt’s claim that Romeo is Hamlet in love, or Coleridge’s observation that Romeo is in love only with his own idea of love. It will be decades in the future before anyone thinks to explore the homoeroticism in Mercutio’s and Romeo’s friendship or examine how the patriarchy of Verona adds its oppressive weight to the lovers’ tragedy. That summer he only knows that, standing alongside Romeo in Capulet’s walled orchard as he and Juliet exchange love’s faithful vow, John is at the heart of all that matters most.
For the next few days he lives in thrall, pumping gas, changing tires, and rejoining the lovers whenever he can, following them—through bedchamber, street, and monk’s cell—as circumstance and chance tighten around their necks like star-crossed ropes.
Of course, he already knows how the play will end, and yet some part of him keeps hoping he’s recalled the ending wrong. He reasons that if he is capable of being so mistaken as to imagine Shakespeare’s poetry filled with smut, then it is altogether possible that he might have missed some hidden meaning in the play that will allow the lovers to rise together from their bloodied bier and walk hand in hand into the bright morning of their earthly love. As he nears the final scene, he reads more slowly, searching for the loophole that will let the lovers live, dreading the conclusion he fears he will find instead.
It is nearly closing time on Friday evening when he finishes the play. While he cowers in the Verona churchyard, watching in helpless horror as Romeo drinks the apothecary’s poison and Juliet sheaths Romeo’s happy dagger in her breast, autos filled with teenagers have already begun to prowl past the station, their headlights and radios blaring in the dusk.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
After he reads the final couplet, he raises his face towards a sky alive with peach and violet clouds. He feels both flayed and filled, moved to a realm beyond that dusty street, but somehow also connected more deeply to that street, his hometown, and all the world than he has ever been before.
A heron flaps toward the river. Gazing after it, John is struck by the odd thought that Juliet and Romeo are only make-believe. They have never truly lived, not as he is living at that very moment—not so they can feel the little quiver of their meaty hearts inside their aching chests. He knows the same strange comfort he sometimes feels when, gazing into the sky on a cloudless night, he finds himself relieved by his very smallness in proportion to the mystery spread out above him.
But now that he has finished reading it, he also feels oddly bereft. Go hence, commands the Prince in the play’s last speech, to have more talk of these sad things. But in all of Kernville there is no one John can imagine talking to like that.
A Chevy growls by, its windows rolled down and its radio turned up high, a few notes of “All My Love” spilling carelessly out into the evening. Even though John is infamous for his inability to carry a tune, his mind automatically supplies the words to that fragment of song—I give you all my love. Long after the car’s red taillights have disappeared down the road, the lyrics continue to sound in his head. The skies may fall, my love, But I will still be true. Gazing into the darkness where the car has been, it suddenly comes to him that the way he can make sure those star-crossed lovers never leave him is to memorize the play.
At first it seems colossal, impossible, so audacious as to be hardly imaginable. And yet, as he weighs the little paperback in one hand, he reasons that surely it could be done. If an actor can learn Romeo’s lines, and an actress Juliet’s, why couldn’t someone learn both parts—and all the other characters’ besides? And why couldn’t that someone be him? He has the whole summer, after all, and long hours at the gas station with nothing else to do.
Two households, both alike in dignity He starts in on the prologue as he walks to work on Monday morning. In fair Verona, where we lay our scene The air is silvery, sharp as a cramp in his lungs, the light clear and sweet, free of the haze that will thicken it by midday. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Stopping at every corner, he feeds himself another line. As he walks the next block, he practices the words under his breath, his steps unconsciously limping out the iambic feet. By the time he arrives at the gas station, he can declaim the opening sonnet with hardly a peek at the page. The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
He practices in his head as he pumps gas and wipes windows and counts change. Alone in the bathrooms, while he scrubs the porcelain toilets with Bon Ami, he speaks the words out loud. He likes the resonance the tiled walls lend his voice, and he lingers over his scrubbing to enjoy the sound.
He tackles the first scene during the morning lull. Drudging his way down the page, he repeats each new line until it has worn a path in his mind like the dirt trails he takes to reach the river, and then he tries to find the logic in that line that will help him connect it to the one that follows. When Romeo joins Benvolio onstage, John is grateful for the mnemonics of his couplets—loving hate and first create, breast and press’d, sighs and eyes—though the lines strike him as being sillier than he’d found them before, and he hopes he hasn’t made a mistake about the greatness of the play.<
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But he is already in too deep to quit. He finishes the first scene on his way home from work that evening, and day by day the body of words inside his head grows larger, and slowly the play ceases to be a string of lines laid out one after the next, and becomes instead like the spider’s web he discovered behind the cash register: brushing a careful finger across one strand sends a shiver through the entire structure, rouses the spider at its center. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much O that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days O happy dagger!
By the end of the summer, he has saved nearly four hundred dollars for college, and, like a child saying his ABCs, he can start at any point in the play and recite his way to the Prince’s glooming peace. If he began his project out of love, he has managed to stick with it partly in the same spirit that inspired the greasers in his high school to master the art of removing beer caps with their eye sockets or the frat boys at Davis to learn to set their farts afire. But the longer he works at it, the less his accomplishment seems like a party trick, or even the act of possession he’d first imagined it would be. Instead, it is as if it were he who is possessed, as if the play were growing to own him instead of him owning the play.
Over the years, he learned half a dozen plays by heart—fluently, he liked to claim—and another dozen conversationally. Back in the days before computers, it helped to make his research more efficient. And even after the dawn of searchable texts and electronic concordances, it still impressed his students—undergraduates and graduate students alike—for him to interrupt their laborious paging for a pertinent line by quoting the exact section they were seeking, letting the words roll off his tongue as if he were Romeo or Falstaff or Ophelia. As if he were Shakespeare himself.