Last night I helped to spike the set for 11:11 Theatre Company’s new play, Syllabus of Errors. The time came for me to choose which books in my library would appear on the desk of my character, David, a respected physics professor at Amherst College. Naturally I kept trying to fit Shakespeare into his collection. It was disappointing, in the end, to realize that David probably doesn’t read Shakespeare. Not because he’s a “math guy” as opposed to an “English guy”—there’s probably a converse relationship between teaching physics and loving literature—but simply because I don’t think he’d be into theatrical fiction. Or even fiction in general. He’s too practical. Too convinced that things like Shakespeare aren’t grounded enough in the real world to be worth becoming intimate with. Theatre, as a very critiquable, subjective, and publically vulnerable method of expression would probably scare someone who needs to have all his ideas sorted and rationalized prior to having conversations. Tossing convictions frivolously around a stage in front of hundreds of people probably seems childish to him. Irrational. Too emotional.
The issue of what it means to be a “rational” person as opposed to an “emotional” person has come up a lot for me recently, in both my personal life and on the stage. I think that, in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare, or even most theatre in general, you have to be a little bit susceptible to your emotions. David isn’t. He doesn’t think his emotions will get him anywhere. He puts too much weight on thinking things through at a desk.
It’s exactly that point of view that thousands of very intelligent academic folks make when they address Shakespeare. They focus far too much on the intellectual nature of the works. The parallels. The allegories. The lessons. The history. The hidden messages. Overthinking the words will kill their meaning (not to mention their wit and freshness); sometimes you have to feel them to learn from them. Sometimes that gets you farther than dismissing emotional impact as a side-effect of great literature. Maybe emotions are great literature. Indeed, much of the action in Will’s greatest plays (Hamlet, for one) doesn’t make sense if it’s rationalized. How can Hamlet be so bloodthirsty and eager for revenge at one moment as to kill Polonius, thinking him to be the Claudius, without even checking to see who it was, when at other times he’s seemingly able to hold relatively civil discourse with Claudius? It feels inconsistent. …Until you put yourself in Hamlet’s shoes. Then it feels real. Nobody makes rational decisions in a situation like Hamlet’s. They make emotional ones. And you have to be an emotional audience member to be able to understand that properly.
So I left Shakespeare off of David’s desk. Instead, he’s got nonfiction. Nice, rational explorations of fact followed by clearly marked paragraphs of opinion. You might think that choosing these sorts of books makes David more of a grownup. But I think, instead, it makes him less of one. He’s failed to recognize the importance of feeling those scary emotions that Shakespeare and other playwrights explore so often.
I tend to do the same thing. So maybe it’s time I stopped. Thanks, David, for a wonderful lesson.
(P.S. If you’re around Boston this week, come see the show.)
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