Worlds Elsewhere (25 page)

In the nineteenth-century American West, he was certainly not on his own in his passion for Shakespeare. In January 1861, an item appeared in the
Rocky Mountain News
advertising an eccentric bet by the paper's editor – that it was impossible for an amateur to play Hamlet alongside professional actors with ‘only three days' study'. The prize for anyone willing to do so was $100.

The challenge seems to have fallen on deaf ears, at least until July, when the paper printed a follow-up:

Sure enough, the ‘gentleman' (an infamous gambler) learned the part and triumphed. This was the paper again, four days later:

A trapper spouting Shakespeare? A gambler making the gamble of his life and winning, with
Hamlet
? I thought I had already gleaned a fair amount about the history of Shakespeare in America. I wondered if I really knew anything at all.

The longer I stayed at the Folger, the more it seemed that this monumental edifice of learning was also a kind of fortress. It was a definitive statement, writ in Georgia marble, that Shakespeare was best appreciated not on the stage, but on the page – more precisely, in the thousands upon thousands of pages kept down in the vaults, safe from prying eyes and grubby fingers.

Perhaps it was something about Washington, too. After five days here I had begun to tire of the city, its inhabitants' constant sense of being on Important Business. The chinos and trouser suits and official lanyards and trilling mobile phones I found irritating. The runners in military T-shirts trekking up and down the National Mall had begun to get on my nerves.

At night, I played truant. I couldn't stop walking. I quartered the city block by block, snapping blurry photos with my phone: the Capitol in weak moonlight; the slim point of the Washington Monument cool white against a bouillabaisse-coloured sky. The shadow-puppetry of trees and streetlights against the National Gallery of Art.

Even the FBI's 1970s Hoover building, beige and blocky and overbearing in daylight, acquired a mysterious poetry in the dark; rounding it one evening, I dislodged a flock of starlings gossiping in the shadowy recesses of its cliff-like walls. It was the loudest sound I'd heard all day.

Late one evening, in search of Shakespeares from less domisticated American locations than the District of Columbia, I spotted on the bookshelves of my B&B a novel I'd been meaning to read for years, Jane Smiley's
A Thousand Acres,
an adaptation of
King Lear.
For someone interested in the westward expansion of the United States, and of Shakespeare, it was a serendipitous discovery.

Published in 1991, the book transplanted
Lear
from the baronial castles and wind-blasted heaths of ancient Britain to the limitless plains of Iowa in the dying days of the 1970s. A thousand acres was four hundred hectares, give or take: the size of the family farm in Zebulon County, in the grip of Larry Cook, aka Lear, for as long as anyone can recall. The story was told in the flat, undeviating voice of his eldest daughter Ginny, a stand-in for Goneril. Regan was Rose. Cordelia was Caroline, who had escaped to the city and trained as a lawyer. At the story's fringes, on a collision course for its centre, was Jess Clark, a drifter recently returned from years in California; a shaggier but no less treacherous force than Edmund.

Shakespeare's main source was an old play,
The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters,
and the figure of Lear also crops up in Geoffrey of Monmouth's semi-mythical history of British kings, completed by 1139. But the story's roots surely lie in folk tale: a king cursed with daughters instead of sons, a kingdom divided and sent to rack and ruin. Even in Shakespeare, one has the sense that Goneril and Regan are struggling to escape the shackles of being cast as fairy-tale wicked sisters.

Smiley's was an audacious decentering. She painstakingly fleshed out these women, making them into sympathetic figures with their own tragedies – Rose, raging against breast cancer and a violent partner; the luckless, abused, browbeaten Ginny, worn almost to the bone. Caroline is an ambiguous figure: impulsive and headstrong, coddled from her father's worst excesses, she is the first to round on him when he proposes splitting up the farm, before fatefully taking his side.

For his part, Larry isn't a cuddly father figure more sinned against
than sinning; this ‘Daddy' is vindictive, cussed, stubbornly silent when it suits him but given to volcanic eruptions of rage. ‘Perhaps there is a distance,' Smiley writes in the voice of Ginny, ‘that is the optimum distance for seeing one's father':

Yawning Midwestern farms, the dun towers of grain elevators, fertiliser-tainted lakes – all of it emphasises the pinched interiority of these characters' lives.

For all that its most famous setting is a heath,
Lear,
too, is surprisingly domestic in scale. An early performance took place at court in front of King James I on 26 December 1606 and was perhaps restaged at the original Blackfriars. The play is obsessed by the consequences of not having enough space: too many knights, multiple imprisonments, a hovel on the heath that can't squeeze in everyone. One of its most poignant exchanges takes place between the King and his Fool:

Smiley's Midwestern landscape offered her characters something similar, I thought: more land than they knew what to do with, but not nearly enough room to breathe.

As I neared the former schoolhouse on Capitol Hill that was the Taffety Punk rehearsal space, the night air was filled with the raw clang
of electric guitars and the
whump
of a drum kit. Inside, in a black-box theatre, two dancers were writhing on the floor in what looked suspiciously like carnal embrace. On a bar stool in front, a singer/performer dressed in black was speaking slowly and with flat irony into a microphone. Her words I half recognised:

The poem was Shakespeare's early narrative work
The Rape of Lucrece
; this is the desperate moment just before Lucrece is attacked by her rapist Tarquin. It was the first time I'd ever seen it performed, never mind reimagined for the age of post-post-punk.

When the performers had come to a pause, I hesitantly introduced myself to the person who seemed to be in charge – a thin, wiry man in his early thirties with a scarecrow of peroxide hair and a purple T-shirt. He introduced himself as Marcus Kyd, artistic director. His eyes, cavernous with tiredness, shone with ragged enthusiasm.

Taffety Punk had got going when Kyd and a few fellow acting graduates had begun to get work professionally in the early 2000s. They'd been shuttling between acting gigs and teaching jobs when they realised that what they actually wanted to do was make a less boringly middle-aged kind of theatre than the stuff generally on offer in Washington.

Kyd had been in the world's most short-lived rock group; one time they'd performed with a few dancers, and it had seemed to work. They'd decided to form a theatre company, run on the lines of a band, playing in dirty basements and pop-up venues: live dancers, acting, guitars, tickets as cheap as they could make them. They'd named themselves after a line in
All's Well That Ends Well,
the clownish Lavatch's description of a ‘taffeta punk', Jacobethan slang for a prostitute dressed in silk. Impressively – though perhaps unsurprisingly for a group based in the same city as the Folger – they had adopted the Folio spelling.

‘We're all punk-rock, classically trained weirdos,' Kyd said, reaching for a tall tankard of coffee.

My contact had described them as ‘cool dorks', I said.

‘Yeah,
dorks,
that's way better. We're obsessed with Shakespeare, Greek material, anything older than the eighteenth century.'

The
Lucrece
project was their latest and largest so far – also their most improvisational. They'd been fiddling with it on and off for the past few years. Lucrece, Tarquin, Lucrece's husband Collatine and the poem's narrator were played by a cast of four, doubling musical instruments where possible. (Lucrece, played by Kimberly Gilbert, played bass.) Two dancers interpreted various parts of the piece, notably the rape scene. The rest was sort of made up, with the music remixed and looped live.

But the text was pure Shakespeare, Kyd grinned. ‘The poem endures. We keep fucking with the rest, but we don't want to fuck with that.'

I was struck by the fact that they didn't seek to treat Shakespeare's poem, difficult and neglected as it was, as a historical curiosity.

Kyd shook his head. ‘We looked at the poem, and it was just so compelling: what happens to Lucrece, the way he shows her as a rape victim. Women are still going through that all the time. We talked about that a lot as a group. Tarquin, too, the bullshit he does when he's justifying himself?' He put on a Midwestern farm-boy accent.
‘Oh yuh, she wuz askin' for it, look at how she dressed …'

It was nearly time to go: they only had the space for another hour, and had the whole final section to run. As Kyd was plugging in his guitar, I asked him what he thought about the Americanness of Shakespeare.

He looked thoughtful. ‘You know, the whole continent, but DC especially, suffers from a certain …
preciousness
about Shakespeare. I think it's misleading, to tell people that plays are literature, you know, and I think that's partly the impetus of the company. Theatre is not church, Shakespeare is not church.'

He grinned and hit a power chord:
keowang!
‘It has to be contemporary, y'know? There's no other way of doing it.'

ON THE FLIGHT FOR SAN FRANCISCO,
I started where I'd left off: with Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville's thesis in the second volume of
Democracy in America
was that, more or less, the US had no real literature of its own:

Shakespeare was one of these ‘known' European authors. Copies of the plays had been imported from London from the 1770s onwards, and American publishers – free of copyright restrictions – eagerly reprinted them. The first self-proclaimed ‘American' complete works was produced in Philadelphia in 1795 (in fact cobbled together from previous versions), and subsequent editions were printed in Boston and New York. The plays began to make their way on to the bookshelves of normal middle-class households.

Tocqueville continued, Although America is perhaps the civilised country of our day where people are least occupied with literature, one nevertheless meets a great quantity of individuals there who are interested in things of the mind.' It was presumably one of these ‘individuals' whose
Henry V
he devoured in a log cabin at some point in 1831 or early 1832.