[Enter] Agonizing Trouble.
agony. n. 1. extreme mental or physical suffering. 2. severe struggle.
trouble. n. 1. difficulty or distress; vexation; affliction
I have been bamboozled.
Hit by a Pittsburgh city bus (which, as a side note, is an honest probability).
Failed to "Mind the Gap."
It is going to sound 100% ludicrous. It began with an innocent email message chain between two girlfriends and myself. They believed I needed more BBC and British actors in my life, mistake one, and proceeded to lay waste with a singular suggestion. The Hollow Crown.
I am telling you now it is a trap.
Diving down the rabbit hole.
Fingers crossed that Sherlock poisoned your Earl Grey.
That the worst thing you find taped to your hat is a lemon.
Loki'd. By Steve.
It is an enigma of the most seductive kind.
Charismatic. Charming.
Romantic. Revealing. Raw.
Masculine. Feminine.
Redefines love-hate relationship.
The Hollow Crown proved one glaring fact about my education: Shakespeare should never be met in a classroom. And never reading it. Not a first.
That sounds contradictory, does it not? Here I am saying I was going to keep record of the books I plan to read and I got side-lined by a mini-series. Amazon Prime is a huge problem. I had wiggle room in my tight monthly two part-time job budget. I have free two-day shipping. I consumed nine hours of Shakespeare drama in two and a half days. With subtitles. Around working twenty of those sixty hours.
I discovered many things because of it:
- I found the complete and collected works of Shakespeare in a thrift store. for free. on my birthday.
- It has been open to some page, currently Gaunt's soliloquy from Richard II, for two months.
- As Americans, we are insurmountably lazy about our eloquence.
- We would sound exponentially more attractive to the world if we stopped talking faster than our brain.
- I decided my pattern of speech was eminently dull. Developing from iambic pentameter would improve my cadence. I have begun reading Romeo & Juliet to one of my cats. Thus far, she remains unimpressed. Not surprising. I am nonsense at acting.
- My desire to consume theatre skyrocketed. There is a direct correlation.
- I can barely stop speaking about it. I want to know what people have read themselves, what they recommend, what context they can provide.
- The first thing I did after watching the Hollow Crown was check out a book about the Shakespeare folios and then proceed to have a heart attack when I saw a most glorious little video clip of several people, reading from a First Folio--one of the most expensive books in the world--and turning the pages without gloves!
See, it is things like that, despite peoples' obvious reverence, that make me sound insane. But that book is several centuries old and you all are touching it with oil covered fingers. Ah!
That is the agonizing trouble part. I hear it everywhere now. I am starting to talk in metaphor more and more frequent. I just gifted the Hollow Crown to a friend and in her card had to reduce Sonnet CXVI to 200 characters. Jaguar's new British villains campaign released a new spot this last week. Famous actor aside, Richard II was playing on the radio and was quoted at the end, in conjunction with the roar of the engine. Those words were the only thing I could think about when I pulled along side one on Friday evening leaving my second shift. I have watched it a dozen times. It is helping me memorize portions of a monologue that I had only heard first by Sir Patrick Stewart. Now, I have to find Olivier.
And Shakespeare's birthday is coming up and I am ill-prepared. Watching the Hollow Crown with subtitles does not actually count as having read the plays in full, so my Shakespeare count stands at a measly, official, three: Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. I read a massive portion of King John for a dramaturgy, but did not complete it. I was a sophomore in high school, I barely liked Romeo and Juliet. I find myself, currently, in the throws of Cymbeline. It is one of which I had never heard, but whose character names I am eminently familiar.
This is, therefore, what I have decided to do instead. Shakespeare has become this consuming passion of mine. It makes me stupid, truly, because when I listen to all these actors I have admired for years talk about their characters or the story or the author, I realize how clever he was. He understood the human mind and the human condition and this thing I have called agonizing trouble, the chasing something just out your reach. His characters do it all the time. And so shall I.
I was not born and raised in England. I will never have the foundation of Shakespearean study that I now desperately wish I had. I will, most likely, never study Shakespeare at the Royal Academy or London Academy. I cannot tell you if I will ever see the Globe or Stratford-Upon-Avon. I would like to think that when 2015 rolls around, my friends and I will board a plane for an extended weekend in London to partake of Hamlet, but there are little guarantees.
But I want you to walk with me, if you like. Or running would be even better. Running through the park I frequent, reciting Shakespeare, sounds like a medium for impressive cardiovascular strength. It is alright if you look at me funny. I am already that girl you see in the Pittsburgh suburbs with her car windows down, volume all the way up, singing and dancing to every word of Sham Rock or the Foundations or Seal or Macklemore because I have to be able to rap to one thing and sound impressively ridiculous. I suffer little doubt there is footage of it somewhere in a stone that has yet to be over-turned.
Regardless of how silly is makes us look, I want you to come. I want you to become this crazy and openly passionate lyricist. Let us bring back this idea that eloquence does not have to sound, for lack of a better word, American, but more than simply being English, to disprove an encounter between a butler and a nanny.
Come with me.
Walk with me.
Run with me.
Dance and sing with me.
Be a child again.
If we cannot behold Shakespeare afresh with childlike wonder in his 450th year, we are lost.
Pull out the five year old inside yourself. Pull your Shakespeare off the shelf. Pin down your cat.
Shall we begin? Yes. Yes, I quite like this. What a glorious confrontation awaits.
[ENTER] Agonizing Trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment