AND WHAT SHOULD I DO IN ILLYRIA?

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of mean relatives.

I'm borrowing from Shakespeare here. Only he said "the death of kings,” not "mean relatives." But close enough.

I’ve been reading so much Shakespeare that whatever I’m thinking about — like mean relatives — has a way of translating itself into ShakeSpeak. Like the other day at work my boss was asking where the city reporter was, and my first instinct was to turn to a co-worker and say, “You there, fetch yonder scribe.” Then, remembering my century, I said, “Could you go get Chad?”

I’m completely in love with Shakespeare. Seriously. I cannot even look at another writer. (I did, I admit, spend a good part of the weekend perusing my new coffee table book: “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” but that is mostly pictures. I actually came across this gem, however, when I sneaked out of work to buy a copy of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at Borders. Sneaking out of work to fondle books is my secret vice. I say I’m going for coffee, but I actually go browse and fondle; sometimes I buy and then drop the book in my car before returning to work. Then I spend the rest of the night at work fantasizing about what I'm going to do to the book when I get home. For some reason, this tome of Teutonic debauchery was sitting on an upper shelf of the drama section with all the over-sized Shakespeare collections. It caught my eye. “Erotic” and “Weimar” taken together are just too much for me to resist, so I picked it up, along with “The Tempest,” and thought, walking back to work, that Shakespeare, the inventor of Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch, would certainly be down with the Weimar notion that life is a Cabaret. In “The Tempest” itself, I read later that night, he wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Holy crap. Joel Grey could easily have closed a Kit Kat Club show with those exact words.)

But I digress.

If only Shakespeare had told tales of his mean relatives, or any relatives, versus dying kings, there'd be a whole lot less speculation on his personal life. Or it would be of another sort.

But no one — the stray diarist aside — talked about himself in those days. Not explicitly anyway. I wonder if that's a good thing, culturally speaking. Maybe there's something to Freud's theory of sublimation — that great artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci are great not because they express themselves directly but because they sublimate all their personal “baggage” — like their gayness — into their art. So instead of creating a blog post on his pent-up longing for a beautiful boy, Leonardo (didn’t he predict computers and blogging along with the helicopter?) gave us The Last Supper.

On second thought, Shakespeare’s work abounds with screwed-up relatives. Most of the dying kings in his histories had them. “Hamlet” is about nothing if not about screwed-up relatives. Not to mention “Romeo and Juliet.” Same thing with “King Lear” —the most beautiful thing I have ever read. He did write about screwed-up relatives, just not his own, not explicitly, and not in the dour way we are accustomed to as in “Death of a Salesman” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Shakespeare’s darkness is darker than our modern masters’ — honestly, what can rival the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes in “Lear”? — but it’s a darkness glittering with stars. Shakespeare didn’t journey into night; he journeyed always into Hamlet’s russet-clad morn. After all of his plays, even the tragedies, the actors danced on the stage. Horrific sadness. Then life. Merriment.

What Cormac McCarthy said of John Cole in “All the Pretty Horses” is how I think of Shakespeare: All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent-hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

I decided to read Shakespeare’s 38 plays. Rick and I discussed whether I should go in the order they were written (such as it’s guessed at by scholars) or by category. Rick thought there was something to be gained by going in order, to see the intellectual development. But I didn’t know if that was something I could quite grasp. In the end, I proceeded randomly. Still, I thought I should be forming some coherent ideas along the way— but, frankly, my thoughts are a collection of “Wow” and “Holy crap” and “Oh my God” and “How was this possible?” How can someone sit down with apparent ease and pen the opening monologue of “Richard III”? Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.

I read a couple of books about Shakespeare in preparation and as guides, "Will in the World" and "Shakespeare After All." It’s amazing to me that scholars are still thinking up new things to say about him; I mean, beyond “Wow” and “Holy crap” and “Oh my God.” It made me think of my college Shakespeare professor who came into lecture with notes written on the back of junk mail. She had been lecturing about Shakespeare for decades, but she still found new things to say, I imagine, as she watched TV the night before and jotted them down on an envelope.

Another thing is how wildly inventive he was, averaging at least two masterpieces a year. And some of those were lost. I just recently realized that that old saying he is “not for an age but for all time” was said by a contemporary. He was standing the test of time in his own time. It amazes me that he added the word “amazement” to our language, along with countless other words like, um, “countless.” And “majestic,” “lackluster,” “hot-blooded.” Hundreds of new words. Hundreds of new ways of putting them together. Why can’t all these swag-bellied yahoos (an insult I learned from Christy) who are making up new words today and verbizing nouns and such, as Shakespeare did all the time, make up some beautiful ones?

One thing I keep coming back to with every play is how people always say you have to see Shakespeare performed, that it is meant to be seen. But I have preferred reading it, because then you can dwell. A line’s beauty stops your heart. And you can go back and get it beating again with a re-reading.

“Lear’s” ending:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.

One more time.