How I came to share my life with Shakespeare
The first Shakespeare work I saw was Orson Welles’s Macbeth. We watched the black and white movie in the school auditorium. The play was made without any special effects, one could almost say without costume, so simple were clothes they wore. But like any well performed Shakespeare play, the costumes are simply to set the scene. The whole, is listening to the story.
While on vacation, after I started working, I visited Toronto and Montreal. I enjoyed the cities, the food, the music. I have always had a great time on vacation. I was never possessed with the desire to be back at work. I now believe I liked my vacations because I could think, and not have to fill out forms. How many of us, can truly say we think at work, and if we do, anyone cares? At the time I was certain the work I did mattered to the companies I worked for. It might have. Hardly anyone, anyone, at work had any interest in travel, seeing new places, or excitement. One year on my way back from Montreal I called home and my mother told me of travel article in the Chicago Tribue. The paper reviewed the Shakespeare Festival, which took place in Stratford, Ontario. The Festival began after World War II. Near my home on the South Side of Chicago, there were dinner theatres, started in the same years, by other men who had come back from World War II, and through entertainment sought a different life.
My family went to plays at the dinner theatre on Sundays, when there were plays for children. Also, we went downtown to regular shows, mostly musicals in the Loop. I always enjoyed, seeing actual people perform. However, during and after college, plays became a rare event, because movies had attained such power. Driving towards Stratford, and the Festival, from Montreal, I was interested in seeing a play again, so I stopped on my way home.
Driving fifty miles out of my way, from the 401 highway, changed the trajectory of my life. I did not arrive in time for an afternoon show, so I had to wait for an evening performance. I have no recollection of what play I saw. I should have saved my ticket stubs, but I have never been a physical collector. After the play, there were no motel rooms in Stratford, or London, or even outside Detroit. I drove the entire way home, without sleep. From then, until four years ago, I went to Stratford, at least once, most years twice. I still went to Toronto and Montreal, but I always stopped to see plays.
Stratford being a small town, is not overflowing with hotels. People have added rooms in their homes to rent during play season. This works very well, Airbnb, before the sixties. Usually, the homeowners served breakfast in the morning. I enjoyed these gatherings. After awhile it dawned on me, people usually spoke about particular actors, rather than the play. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, because Hollywood, built worldwide audiences around stars, not authors. I especially liked the histories, the tragedies and the romances, but I thought little of the comedies.
It wasn’t until a friend took me to dinner in downtown Chicago to hear a pitch about attending the University of Chicago, Great Books course, I thought more intensely about books and plays. The great books, was a four year course. In one of the later semesters, we read Othello. I then wrote a paper comparing Henry VIII, to Othello. It was my first English work since college. After the paper I called, The Queen is a Saint, I wrote on the Merchant of Venice, Shylock is Laban, then Hamlet, Hamlet in Elsinore, Luther in Eisleben. I found many more works in Hamlet than I had in the Merchant of Venice. Even more came to me, when I read Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, Guests at the Wedding Feast of Christ.
Nothing I wrote about any book is tied to events after 1615 A.D. I didn’t attempt to modernize them. How could they be? A man can only think about what other older men have thought and published, or a new thought given him by either God, or a god. Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, share the first half and the second half, of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid had been accepted as the word of God, to the Romans, as the Bible was to the Jews, since the time of Christ. Both Dante and Shakespeare were a great part of this tradition. The cover for my book, on Romeo and Juliet, is Bellini’s Great Conversation, which depicts the Holy Mother, with the child in her lap, while standing next to her are St. Catherine and St. Lucy, both with a martyr’s palm, Lucy, in addition, holds a dish with her eyes which had been gouged out. St. Peter holds the Keys to the Kingdom, while St. Jerome, holds his translation, the Vulgate Bible. Martyrdom and knowledge are inseparable, for martyrdom is always about knowledge. One always suffers for believing in Christ. This is true in each of the plays I have written about. Antonio is Christ, and the trial, His trial. Hamlet is both Luther and Christ, Christ suffering from the attacks of his own priest. Romeo and Juliet, considers whether exertion for Christ which leads to an early grave is martyrdom.
Considering the past, it is possible, probable, my thinking about ideas detracted from my being as attached to my work as others expected. Are their really demands placed upon men in a group? Almost everyone would agree, yes. I would agree if one opposes the group, but why would thoughts outside the task at hand matter? This is the question I see now, of the Great Conversation. How is it possible to be in this world, and consider the next? If you do not worship the gods of your neighbors, they will be disturbed, even if you have nothing against them. Men, even from school days, want other men to bend to their will. Children do this without concerns for ideology, but they do, I now see, deeply consider belief, just not beliefs about anything beyond the school yard. If you think about the Great Conversation, you are not bending your will to theirs. The children who do this have no understanding of what they are demanding. Only they are bending you to their will. The adults do.
I have found Stratford and its Shakespeare festival to be a great source of thought. What can the artistic world offer, greater than Shakespeare?
Robert L. Hunt