Sweet Sorrow(40)

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene …

I’d resolved that I would take it slowly, understand each line before I moved on to the next, and to begin with, this was fine, easy, practically normal English, the words following one another like handholds until I felt my grip loosen.

… where civil blood makes civil hands unclean …

Because how could blood be ‘civil’ and what were civil hands anyway? Whose hands? Civil as in ‘civilian’, or as in ‘polite’ or as in ‘civil war’? There were two ‘civils’ in the line, and perhaps both ‘civils’ had all three meanings; perhaps that was the point, perhaps it was a ‘play on words’. I remembered Miss Rice, our old English teacher, telling us not to think of Shakespeare, of any poetry, as something that needs translating: ‘It’s not a foreign language, it’s this language, your language.’ But something would have to be done to make this comprehensible; not translation exactly, more like the solving of a riddle. Taking it one word at a time, I came up with: ‘the blood of civilians dirties hands that should be friendly in the course of this civil war.’

There, that sounded right.

But this was the fourth line of the play, and now I remembered the long, sleepy afternoon spent staring at Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, the instinctive pleasure at the sound of the word turning to frustration as every phrase demanded to be explained, paraphrased, referred to in footnotes, those maddening Yoda-like inversions repaired. ‘Don’t worry if your head hurts sometimes,’ she’d said. ‘That’s normal. It’s like when you exercise and your muscles ache.’ Perhaps I was trying too hard. Perhaps Shakespeare was like one of those ‘magic eye’ paintings that were popular at the time: find the right balance between focus and relaxation and the picture will emerge. ‘Oh, I get it!’ someone would shout from the front of the class, but I didn’t get it and sat, feeling increasingly stupid and frustrated. Did Fran Fisher struggle like this? Did any of those kids?

… misadventured piteous overthrows

Three random words that might as well have been ‘pig umbrella satellite’. I checked the number of pages – one hundred and twenty-four. A lifetime wasn’t long enough to unpick all of this stuff, and like generations of actors before me, I decided that I’d concentrate on my own part. Perhaps there’d be something there to make Fran smile.

Sampson: Gregory on my word, we’ll not carry coals.

Gregory: No, for then we should be colliers.

Sampson: I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.

I slapped the script down onto cement. I mean an we be in choler we’ll draw; even in Elizabethan England, I imagined black-toothed serfs turning to each other and asking ‘What did he just say? Something about choler?’ I’d been told that there were jokes. Choler, collar, collier. These were the jokes. And why was there no ‘d’ on the ‘and’? Why?

I closed my eyes and reminded myself that, after the read-through, I would not actually be playing this part. It would just be a means to an end. ‘Ay, ’tis but a means to an end,’ I said out loud, picked the play up from the patio and read on. There was some stuff I recognised as ‘bawdy’, about maidenheads and maids and the line ‘My naked weapon is out,’ which made me wince, because I knew that I’d have to point to my groin. ‘Tis well thou art not fish. If thou hadst, thou hadst been Poor John.’ I had to say this. In front of Fran, in front of Lucy Tran and Colin Smart and Helen Beavis.

Sampson: I will bite my thumb, which is a disgrace to them if they bear it.

Abram: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Sampson: I bite my thumb, sir.

Abram: But do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

All in all, this was too much about thumbs. I bit my own at Shakespeare, hooked my fingernail behind my teeth and made a clicking noise. Perhaps Sampson came back later with better material. I skimmed a few more pages, words, words, words, and found myself back in the classroom, my brain skittering over the surface like a pebble thrown onto thick ice.

I closed the script again and closed my eyes. As a kid, I’d once dismantled a broken old watch, determined to repair it for Dad, the initial satisfaction at the intricacy of the workings turning to boredom, then frustration, until I’d simply crammed the cogs and springs back in, taped the whole thing shut and secretly dropped it down a drain.

Monday morning, nine o’clock, and still it poured.

If I didn’t go now, I could never go, and if the rain was a sign to stay away, it might just as easily be a test of my determination, divine and supernatural forces presenting me with a knight’s errand, a quest! Through the wall, I heard Dad in the bathroom. Thought of the two of us, watching morning TV, talking about the rain …

Quickly, I dressed, pulled on my old school anorak, stood at the front door with my bike and launched myself into the downpour like a boat down a slipway. Before I reached the end of the close it was as if I’d been pulled from a lake. The wax from my carefully moulded hair stung my eyes, the jeans that I’d selected scoured the inside of my thighs with every turn of the pedal. Rain on summer tarmac created a grey chemical broth and each passing car threw more of this oily sump into my face, burning my eyes and blurring my vision so that even before I faced the steep lane up to the Manor, I was ready to turn back. Quests were bullshit. Still, I cycled uphill against the current then on through the gates, pushed my bike over wet gravel, hurled it onto the lawn, went looking for the orangery, which I remembered as a massive greenhouse with nothing in it. I skirted the Manor, found it, pressed my face up to the glass to see movement through the condensation, found the greenhouse door and threw myself through it.