The first time I was in Oregon was for a tour boat ride on the Rogue River. I was fifteen. We boarded—it was an open-topped jet-boat—found seats, and set out across the gray water. On the bank opposite the landing, a woman and a man leaned over and mooned us, the man’s buttocks bare, the woman’s garnished by a red thong. A lady behind my seat chirped (without any great surprise), “Welcome to Oregon.”
The second time I went to the Beaver State was when I was twenty, for the Ashland, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ashland is a small town, in the low hill country just over the Siskiyou Pass, east of the Rogue River. Here’s something for you history buffs: the inland area surrounding Ashland, including much of southeast Oregon and a large chunk of northeastern California, once tried to become a separate state. Its state-name was to be “Jefferson,” because Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clarke on the Oregon Trail. Other proposed monikers were “Siscurdelmo,” “Bonanza,” and “Discontent.” The proposal was backed by enough earnestness to get a turn before Congress—but the attack on Pearl Harbor drove energy and effort away from the secessionists. The movement, though still smoldering today in back-country kitchens and saloons, never truly regained its blaze.
(And by the way, can I just say how much I love the west coast? Where else would you find a serious proposal to form a state called Discontent, or have a band of politicos hold up traffic on a major highway and issue a proclamation claiming they were “in patriotic rebellion” against Oregon and California, and would “secede every Thursday until further notice”? It happened. November 21st, 1941. Look it up.)
Ashland, however, is not so famous for its political leanings, as much as for its literary ones. The Shakespeare Festival isn’t a one-day event: oh, no. It’s a year-round brouhaha, with a staff of highly trained actors and about eight plays showing per day. The heart of the town is a complete reproduction of an Elizabethan theater: a round, roofless gray structure with (unfortunately) very uncomfortable chairs. Since the non-noble spectators in Shakespeare’s time, however, would have been forced to stand, I’ll cut the plastic seats some slack.
There are several other theaters, and a gift shop where one can buy playbooks, guides to theatrical accents, costumes, and various other baubles of a thespian bent. There are hotels and motels and inns. Greg and I stayed in a campground, though, because we didn’t have much money—but we spent most of our days in town, mingling with the crowds. Camping in Ashland was awful: summer heat baked us dry, and the only division between our campsite and our neighbor’s was a tan log. We very much enjoyed taking refuge in the Ashland Starbucks, and in a charming bookstore/coffeeshop called Bloomsbury (named after the Bloomsbury group, a collection of intellectuals headed by Virginia Woolf). Bloomsbury, I remember, was where I ordered a chai tea and the barista, leaning over her counter confidentially, said, “It’ll kick you in the ass.”
It was very strong tea.
We saw three plays, all for moderately low prices (the cheapest was $20): Henry VIII, All’s Well That End’s Well, and Equivocation, a modern play about the elusive character of Shakespeare himself. Two of the plays involved an actor whose last name was Tufts. This caused me no end of delight. It just seemed like the perfect name for a Shakespearian actor, seeing as Shakespeare was the man, after all, who named characters “Bottom”, and “Sir Henry Belch.”
And another thing that made me happy: nowhere did we encounter any of that Anti-Stratfordian nonsense. The Anti-Stratfordians are the people who insist that, despite a great lack of evidence, Othello and Juliet and the rest of the merry band were not, in fact created by the man we call Shakespeare. These scurrilous scholars put forward a lot of other candidates ( i.e. Sir Francis Bacon), all of whom were members of the ruling class--as if a peasant could never have been brilliant. I find the Anti-Stratfordians almost as aggravating as the 19th century folk who insisted that Bramwell Bronte, not his sister Charlotte, wrote Jane Eyre.
I had a professor in college who trounced the Anti-Stratfordians roundly in the ongoing battle of wits. She was a blond with a deep Southern twang and crooked teeth, and whenever an Anti-Stratfordian accosted her, she’d say two words: “William Faulkner.” William Faulkner was another Southerner, one who wrote such disjointed modernist novels as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He was as common-born as they come, and had no formal education after middle school. “I would have liked,” my professor often said, “to get a look at William Faulkner’s brain.”
Her point was that some people, whether forced through a school system or not, are just really smart.
As you can probably tell, I’m quite a bit protective of good old William Shakespeare. Maybe it’s because he invented the word “eyeball.” Maybe it’s because of all the cross-dressing women in his plays, like Viola in Twelfth Night, and Rosalind in As You Like It. Maybe it’s because of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are dead.
I can tell you that my favorite line in all of Shakespeare’s plays is when Hamlet leans toward Polonius (leering, I’ve always thought), and says, “Buzz buzz.” I can tell you that my favorite stage direction in all of his plays is when, in A Winter’s Tale, a character is directed to “exit, chased by a bear.”
Where did the bear come from? This question has puzzled scholars for centuries. The bear waited, a shadow in the wings, ready to lumber into the story and take a bite from the Player, as it will from us all…
But I digress.
The drive to Ashland was pretty, especially taking the route through the coastal redwoods. Near Crescent City, these ancient trees closed in on the road, giving me the eerie sensation of being transported to the Third Moon of Endor.
That drive was also when Greg and I stumbled upon Confusion Hill. Confusion Hill, as some of you may know, is one of those zany West coast tourist attractions (of the same caliber as the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot and the Oregon Vortex) where something has purportedly gone wrong with the laws of physics. I’m not exactly sure what they claim has gone awry with the laws of physics: there was a tour, but Greg was too freaked out and disgusted to want to take it. I think what really got his goat about the cluttered little stop were the numerous signs saying “Confusion Hill: Home of the Chipelope!” Not to mention the gift shop full of stuffed chipmunks with antlers.
In fact, we ate mediocre burgers at Confusion Hill, then sped away through the forest. If we were characters in a play, the stage directions would have surely been, “Exit, chased by a chipelope.”
&
I could end this post by talking about why I think Shakespeare has such an enduring place in our culture. That, however, is one of those questions that can never be adequately answered; and far greater scholars than I have tried. Instead I’ll just say, “Zounds!” and have done with it.
The course of the Intergalactic Coffeeship never did run smooth.
No comments:
Post a Comment