Ironically, because I'm actually writing this year, I have totally abandoned this blog. For one thing, writing about writing is at best self-indulgent and at worst crazy-making; and for another, well, there is only so much writing you can do in a day. But in honor of Shakespeare's 450th birthday, I have decided to post about the only thing I'm doing these days that's not either writing or parenting. This would be our community theater's production of Romeo and Juliet, in which I am playing the Nurse. At least until this coming Sunday, when the production will be over forever.
My relationship to Shakespeare is conflicted. I get very irritated by the Shakespeare industry, and especially the way Shakespeare is promoted as the be-all and end-all of drama in the English language. In one of my classes years ago I was puzzled by the fact that this one very bright student kept asking me why all the plays we were reading were so short. It made more sense when I discovered that he had never read a single play that was not written by Shakespeare. He had deduced from this that all plays were five acts long. This is the thing that drives me insane. It's not that I don't enjoy Shakespeare. But there's so much other drama out there that is, to me, equally interesting and compelling and life-changing and whatnot, and people either don't know or don't care about it because it's not supported by the same kind of CanonMachine.
And yet, being in this show has reminded me of how important Shakespeare once was to my relationship with both literature and theater. It has caused me to have flashbacks both to my ninth grade English class, during which we devoted a large chunk of time to reading the play out loud (those not assigned speaking parts were assigned to play the 'groundlings') and watching the Zeffirelli film. For some reason I particularly remember an assignment that asked us to illustrate a Shakespearean expression with a visual pun. (More than one of my high school teachers must have used this assignment, because I also remember doing this with Macbeth.) One of my friends chose "thou and my bosom must henceforth be twain," depicting a dude wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Mark Twain on it. My contribution was a can of lite beer breaking through a windowpane (but soft, what light through yonder window breaks). It has also often reminded me of the two big Shakespeare survey courses I took in college, of which I also have unusually vivid memories, and of all the Shakespeare productions I saw while my family was living in London. They moved there during the 1980s, and I caught what must have been part of the first wave of modern-dress productions of Romeo and Juliet, set in (then) modern-day Verona. Everyone wore Armani suits, either Tybalt or Mercutio drove a red Ferrari which was on stage (there was a bit during the fight scene where both stopped to check and make sure that the car had not been damaged), when Romeo climbed the orchard walls he set off a burglar alarm, and so on. It evidently made an impression on me, given how well I remember it. And yet, I cannot remember anything about what that production did with the Nurse.
The Nurse is not what people usually remember about Romeo and Juliet. As I recall, Zeffirelli makes her a kind of doddering old bat who's pleasant enough but pretty stupid and maybe not totally compos mentis. I've been avoiding seeing more recent film treatments because, you know, the anxiety of influence; but my impression is that this is sort of the default version of the nurse: a dotty old grandma given charge of an intrigue which turns out to be waaaaay over her head. This, at any rate, was the interpretation that became the basis for the character Nursie on the second series of Blackadder. Described by Blackadder at one point as "a sad old woman with an udder fixation," Nursie is always sitting there at Queen Elizabeth's feet telling loopy and inappropriate stories full of bodily functions and double meanings she doesn't understand.
Not being old or dotty enough yet to pull that off, I looked at the character and discovered a few things that had heretofore eluded me. For better or worse, the way I approached her has a lot to do with my own experience both as a nonbiological mother and a mother who employed a nanny. The mother-nanny relationship is a complex and fascinating one. For a lot of women the hiring of a nanny seems to bring up feelings of inadequacy and anxiety which then sometimes leads to them getting jealous or competitive with the nanny. It was not like that for us--partly, perhaps, because neither of us ever expected to be our daughter's only female caretaker; but more, I think, because our daughter's nanny was experienced at handling this relationship and was good at drawing boundaries. I think one of the things that makes the nanny thing difficult for modern women is the strangeness of seeing someone genuinely care about your child, not in spite of the fact that she's being paid to do it, but because she's being paid to do it. We have this idea that real love is something that cannot be bought or sold and can have nothing to do with money; so a nanny's emotional bond with the children she cares for has to be read either as spontaneous disinterested love or as a mercenary deception. But I get paid to care about people too. Technically I am paid to teach literature; but everyone knows that we are also paid (or perhaps not-paid) for the work of investing in our students and caring about their success; and the caring is genuine, even though it derives from the accidental fact of their having signed up for a course that you teach. Those teachers who were shot at Newtown protecting the children in their care were being paid too; and although the job and the salary created the relationship, it obviously did not prevent them from being willing to sacrifice their own lives--and their own families--in order to protect the children for whom they were, between 8 and 3, responsible.
The Nurse, however, has no boundaries. For one thing, the Nurse literally breast-fed Juliet through her toddlerhood; for another, she's still living with Juliet's family and still caring for her just about 24/7 even though she's on the verge of what her society considers adulthood. In that sense, the Nurse's role in Juliet's life is closer to that of a nonbiological mother. The Nurse's first long speech establishes that Juliet was the same age as a child of her own who died in infancy. This was how wet-nurses got into the business--a woman with milk and no baby went to work for a woman with a baby she either couldn't or didn't want to nurse--but the fact that infant mortality was common in those days (Lord Capulet implies that he and Lady Capulet have lost a few children as well; Juliet's an only child, and Romeo an only son) doesn't mean that it didn't hurt, or that the experience of having just lost your own baby wouldn't encourage you to project those disappointed maternal feelings onto the baby you're nursing. The wet-nurse was an object of cultural anxiety--I know about this mainly through colonial anxiety about Irish wet-nurses who might be filling up their English charges with sedition, Catholicism, and wild irishness along with milk, but there were also the periodic campaigns (feminist and otherwise) calling for middle-class and aristocratic women to do their 'natural' duty as women and nurse their own damn children--and the relationship between caregiver and child was in those days far more intimate, physically and otherwise.
And yet, the Nurse's tragedy is that no matter how much she may feel like Juliet's 'other mother,' to everyone else--including, in the end, Juliet--she's a servant, and when push comes to shove she has no power and no rights. The one thing that's established about the Nurse early on is that by God, she can talk; and her ability to speak freely and get away with it has given her a false sense of her own status. In her opening scene with Juliet and Lady Capulet, she's all but openly insubordinate. That long speech of hers about Juliet falling down and bonking her head, which is so often taught focusing on the double-entendres and the foreshadowing, is from the Nurse's point of view about competing with Lady Capulet. She jumps at the chance to prove that she remembers the details of Juliet's birth and early childhood better than Lady Capulet does; she talks at some length about weaning Juliet, stressing the fact that Lady Capulet was not present for this milestone; and when Lady Capulet tells her outright to just shut the fuck up, she gives only token obedience before busting out with another reiteration of her husband's off-color joke. Though she obeys Juliet more promptly and reliably, the Nurse also uses her talent for rambling off-topic monologues to get her own back when Juliet bitches about how old and slow she is (in our production, the Nurse is within earshot when she does that).
This makes it all the more terrifying when, during the big knock-down drag-out Capulet family fight that happens toward the end of Act III, her license to speak is summarily revoked by an enraged Capulet. She makes one attempt to defend Juliet, to which Capulet responds with "And why, my lady wisdom? Hold your tongue,/ good prudence, smatter with your gossips, go." Her last line before the Capulet parents leave is "May not one speak?" And for her, the answer is no. Her silencing teaches her for the first time exactly how precarious her position in this household is and how little agency she really has. So for me, when she does what she does at the end of that scene, it's an expression of the panic she feels at suddenly discovering that she is unable not only to assert herself, but to protect Juliet from her parents' anger. She advises Juliet to do what she believes, after the shock of discovering her own powerlessness, is the only thing she can do to save herself: capitulate to the people who have the real power, viz, the Capulets.
It's a terrible moment for both of them. Juliet has just been verbally thrashed by her father and abandoned by her mother; now she's betrayed by the last adult that cares about her. The Nurse, meanwhile, has opened the door to a world of hurt. Juliet's rejection of her is the beginning of an unusually long and protracted period of loss, during which the Nurse not only loses access to Juliet while she's alive but is forced to mourn her death twice--and from a place both too close and too far away. It's the Nurse who finds Juliet's apparently 'dead' body in Act IV; it's the nurse who has to tell Juliet's parents that she's dead. But the Nurse is then shunted to the side while the Capulets and Paris mourn over a woman in whom they, unlike her, have a legitimate and recognized interest. "Heaven and you had part in this fair maid," says Friar Laurence, trying to comfort them; but the more he talks about "your part in her" the more it drives home to the Nurse that she's not the one he's talking to. The "part" she played in making Juliet who she was is invisible and inconsequential to everyone else.
The finding-the-body scene in Act IV has been the hardest thing for me about this part. That moment--the moment when you touch your child and discover that she is dead--has always seemed to me like the most unspeakably horrible piece of the hideous process of losing a child. One wishes that, in the manner of method actors, one could use one's emotion memories during that scene to make it real. But in fact, I can't. For one thing, I have discovered that for whatever reason I can only do this on the outside-in model: I figure out what reaction the Nurse should have and then I make my body do it. Not perhaps the best method; just the only one I can get to work. For another, that moment, in my mind, has become a kind of Lacanian Real--something which is actually too horrifying to perceive, and which would, if you could actually represent it, just rip the fabric of perception apart. By the same token I am acutely aware of the fact that no amount of performing will ever produce the emotional impact of a real mother's grief over the loss of her real child. Which is perhaps just as well. Sharing a room with that kind of grief is not an experience people would pay money to have.
Our show opened the weekend before Easter. The day before Palm Saturday my daughter went to a little workshop at our church and came home with a tomb. It's a planter using dirt, gravel, a flowerpot, and grass seed to represent Jesus's tomb; you water the grass seed and by Easter the grass is growing. She showed it to me proudly, and I thought, wow, you're building a tomb and I'm building a tomb, what are the odds. In fact the timing has been interesting. What Friar Laurence wants to do by pulling this insane stunt with the sleeping potion is create a kind of artificial resurrection, in which Juliet is laid in the tomb 'dead' and emerges on the third day (he's fuzzy about the time, but the first watchman says when he finds her that she's been in the tomb for two days already). This turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea, as his hoped-for resurrection becomes a spectacular illustration of the power of death. When you summarize the plot of this play for people who've never read it--my nearly-seven year old daughter, for instance--the first thing that strikes them is how very preventable Romeo and Juliet's deaths seem to be. My daughter will, apropos of nothing, occasionally come out with questions like, "Why didn't they make sure Romeo knew about the potion before Juliet drank it?" or "Why couldn't Romeo wait, like, another ten minutes before he killed himself?" That's before we get to the question of why Capulet and Montague couldn't just get over themselves, or why Juliet didn't just tell her parents why she couldn't marry Paris. At the end of the play, the men in charge--Capulet, Montague, and the Prince--try to make all this death generative by presenting it as the birth of peace. But the tomb is gaping open behind them, and I'll tell you, there are so many dead bodies in there at this point that it actually creates quite serious logistical problems for those of us who have to work with small stages and simple sets. ("Bear hence this body," says the Prince, indicating Tybalt's bloodied corpse; and the seven of us delegated to accomplish this task move warily into position, silently praying we won't trip on our way down the steps.) The outrageous waste of life in this play--something emphasized by all the arbitrariness that my daughter complains about--is a rebuke not just to the feuding parents but to Friar Laurence, the young couple's other surrogate parent. You think you can play around with me? says Death. Think again, bro. I own you, I rule you, and I will EAT every last damn thing you care about.
Heavy as the tragedy part of this play is, the Nurse has been a lot of fun to play. Her language, as befits her level of education and intelligence, is comparatively simple and accessible, and in general our audiences seem to get most of her jokes. I will say that I am also grateful for how kind Shakespeare seems to have been to his actors. Nine times out of ten, before a character enters, someone on stage will call out, "Here comes X"--just in case, maybe, X was chatting with an orange wench behind the scenes and forgot he had an entrance coming up. Most of the Nurse's cues are bleeding obvious; during the telling-Juliet-the-news scene in Act II, for instance, all I have to remember is that whenever Juliet says OMG would you SAY SOMETHING, I say something.
But because I'm still a director at heart, I guess, in a way the most fun thing about being in this cast is getting to see what the other actors are doing. I remember the first time I saw our Romeo and Juliet do their balcony scene. We've all had bits and pieces of that drilled into us for so long and parodied and travestied in so many places; and yet watching them do it their way it was suddenly fresh again, with both characters so young and ardent and alive. At moments like that, you realize, no, it's not just the industry. It's not just institutional power, it's not just canonization, it's not just the myth of the white male genius, it's not just the way we've never really gotten over the Victorians' values when it comes to our definition of the 'classics.' All those things are there, and they are a major part of the reason why Shakespeare survives culturally in a way that, say, Marlowe doesn't. But this crazy edifice was actually built on something. There are infinite adaptations and imitations; but there's only one balcony scene.
So happy birthday, William Shakespeare. I'm not going to make you a cake. But thank you for showing me at a relatively early age what the English language could do; and thank you for making it possible for me to have this experience at my advanced age. But don't think I'm giving up modern drama for you.
