Just One Day

Twenty
Stepping into the classroom for Shakespeare Out Loud is like stepping into an entirely different school than the one I’ve attended for the past four months. Instead of a giant lecture hall, which is where all my science courses were located, or even a large classroom like Mandarin, it’s in a tiny, intimate classroom, the kind we had in high school. There are maybe twenty-five desks arced into a U, around a lectern in the middle. And the students sitting at them, they look different too. Lip rings and hair dyed colors not found naturally on the human head. It’s a sea of well-manicured alienation. The arty crowd, I guess. When I come in and look for a seat—they’re all taken—no one looks at me.
I take a seat on the floor, near the door, for an easier escape. I may not belong in chemistry, but I don’t belong here either. When Professor Glenny strides in five minutes late and looking like a rock star—shaggy graying hair, beat-up leather boots, he even has pouty Mick Jagger lips—he steps on me. As in, literally treads on my hand. As bad as my other classes have been, no one has ever stepped on me. Not an auspicious start, and I almost leave right then and there, but my way is now blocked by the overflow of other students.
“Show of hands,” Professor Glenny begins after he has dropped his artfully worn leather satchel on top of the lectern. “How many of you have ever read a Shakespeare play for the sheer pleasure of it?” He has a British accent, though not the Masterpiece Theatre kind.
About half the hands in the class shoot up. I almost consider raising mine, but it’s just too much of a lie, and there’s no point in brown-nosing if I’m not staying.
“Excellent. Ancillary question: How many of you have fallen asleep while attempting to read a Shakespeare play by yourself?”
The class goes silent. No hands go up. Then Professor Glenny looks right at me, and I’m wondering how he knows, but then I realize he’s not looking at me but the guy behind me, who is the only person who’s raised a hand. Along with everyone else in the class, I turn and stare at him. He’s one of two African American students in the room, though he’s the only one sporting a huge halo of an afro covered in bejeweled barrettes, and bubble-gum-pink gloss on his lips. Otherwise, he’s dressed like a soccer mom, in sweats and pink Uggs. In a field of carefully cultivated weirdness, he’s a wildflower, or maybe a weed.
“Which play bored you to sleep?” Professor Glenny asks.
“Take your pick. Hamlet. Macbeth. Othello. I napped to the best of them.”
The class titters, as if falling asleep while studying is so déclassé.
Professor Glenny nods. “So why, then, please—sorry, your name . . . ?”
“D’Angelo Harrison, but my friends call me Dee.”
“I’ll be presumptuous and call you Dee. Dee, why take this class? Unless you’re here to catch up on your sleep.”
Again, the class laughs.
“By my count, this class costs about five grand a semester,” Dee says. “I can sleep for free.”
I attempt the math. Is that how much one class costs?
“Quite prudent,” Professor Glenny says. “So, again, why take this class, given the expenditure and given Shakespeare’s soporific track record?
“Well, I’m not actually in the class yet. I’m on your wait list.”
At this point, I can’t tell if he’s stalling or parrying with the professor, but either way, I’m impressed. Everyone else here seems eager to give the right answer, and this guy is stringing the professor along. To his credit, Professor Glenny seems more amused than annoyed.
“My point is, Dee, why attempt it even?”
There’s a long pause. You can hear the fluorescent lights humming, the throat-clearing of a few students who clearly have a ready answer. And then Dee says, “Because the movie of Romeo and Juliet makes me cry harder than just about anything else. Every damn time I see it.”
Again, the class laughs. It’s not a kind laugh. Professor Glenny turns back toward the lectern and pulls a paper and pen out of his satchel. It’s a list. He stares at it ominously and then checks off a name—and I wonder if this Dee just got himself kicked off the wait list. What kind of class did Gretchen Price put me in? Gladiator Shakespeare?
Then Professor Glenny turns to a girl with weird pink Tootsie Roll twists who has her nose in a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare, the kind of girl who probably never deigned to watch Leo and Claire’s version of Romeo and Juliet or fall asleep while reading Macbeth. He looms over her for a moment. She looks up at him and smiles bashfully, like, oh-you-caught-me-reading-my-book. He flashes a thousand-watt smile back at her. And then he slams her book shut. It’s a big book. It makes a loud noise.
Professor Glenny returns to the lectern. “Shakespeare is a mysterious character. There is so much written about this man about whom we truly know so little. Sometimes I think only Jesus has had more ink spilled with less fruitful result. So I resist making any characterizations about the man. But I will go out on a limb and say this: Shakespeare did not write his plays so that you could sit in in a library carrel and read them in silence.” He pauses, lets that sink in before continuing. “Playwrights are not novelists. They create works that need to be performed, interpreted. To be reinterpreted through the ages. It is credit to Shakespeare’s genius that he gave us such great raw material that really could survive the ages, withstand the myriad reinterpretations we throw at it. But to truly appreciate Shakespeare, to understand why he has endured, you must hear it out loud, or better yet, see it performed, whether you see it performed in period costume or done naked, a dubious pleasure I’ve had. Though a good film production can do the trick, as our friend Dee has so aptly demonstrated. And Mr. Harrison,” he looks at Dee again. “Thank you for your honesty. I too have fallen asleep while reading Shakespeare. My college textbook still bears some drool marks. You’re off the wait list.”
Striding back to the whiteboard, Professor Glenny scrawls English 317—Shakespeare Out Loud on it. “The name of this class is not accidental. It is quite literal. For in this class, we do not read Shakespeare quietly to ourselves or in the privacy of our bedrooms or libraries. We perform it. We see it performed. We read it aloud, in class or with partners. Every last one of us will become actors in this class, interpreters for one another, in front of one another. For those of you not prepared for this or who prefer a more conventional approach, this fine institution offers plenty of Shakespeare survey courses, and I suggest you avail yourself of one of them.”
He pauses, as if to give people a chance to escape. Here would be my chance to go, but something roots me in place.
“If you know anything about this class, it’s that I coordinate our readings to go with whatever Shakespeare is being performed during the term, be it by a community group or professional theater company. I expect attendance at all the plays, and I get us excellent group rates. As it happens, this winter and spring bring a delightful selection of plays.”
He starts handing out the syllabus, and before one gets to me, before he finishes writing the order of plays on the board, I know it will be among them, even though Shakespeare wrote more than thirty plays, I know this one will be on our list.
It’s midway through the syllabus, after Henry V and The Winter’s Tale and before As You Like It and Cymbeline and Measure for Measure. But there on the page, it seems to jump out at me like a billboard. Twelfth Night. And whether I want to take this class or not is irrelevant. I can’t stand up here and read those lines. That is the opposite of tabula rasa.
Professor Glenny goes on for a while about the plays, pointing to them one by one with his hand, erasing the ink in his enthusiasm. “My absolute favorite thing about this class is that we, in effect, let the themes choose us by letting the plays choose us. The dean was skeptical at first of this academia via serendipity, but it always seems to work out. Take this sampling.” He points to the list of plays again. “Can anyone surmise this semester’s theme based on these particular plays?”
“They’re all comedies?” the girl up front with the Tootsie Roll twists asks.
“Good guess. The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline, though all have much humor, are not considered comedies so much as problem plays, a category we shall discuss later. And Henry V, though it has many funny bits, is quite a serious play. Any other takers?”
Silence.
“I’ll give you a hint. It’s most obvious in Twelfth Night or As You Like It, which are comedies—which isn’t to say they’re not also quite moving plays.”
More silence.
“Come now. Some of you fine scholars must have seen one of these. Who here has seen As You Like It or Twelfth Night?”
I don’t realize I’ve raised my hand until it’s too late. Until Professor Glenny has seen me and nodded to me with those bright, curious eyes of his. I want to say that I’ve made a mistake, that it was some other version of Allyson who used to raise her hand in class who temporarily reappeared. But I can’t, so I blurt out that I saw Twelfth Night over the summer.
Professor Glenny stands there, as if waiting for me to finish my thought. But that was it; that’s all I have to say. There’s an awkward silence, like I just announced I was an alcoholic—at a Daughters of the American Revolution meeting.
But Professor Glenny refuses to give up on me: “And, what was the main source of tension and humor in that particular play?”
For the briefest of seconds, I’m not in this overheated classroom on a winter’s morning. It’s the hot English night, and I’m at the canal basin in Stratford-upon-Avon. And then I’m in a Paris park. And then I’m back here. In all three places, the answer remains the same: “No one is who they pretend to be.”
“Thank you. . . . ?”
“Allyson,” I finish. “Allyson Healey.”
“Allyson. Perhaps a slight overgeneralization, but for our purposes, it hits the nail right on the head.” He turns to the board and scrawls Altering Identity, Altering Reality on it. Then he checks something else off on his sheet of paper.
Professor Glenny continues, “Now, before we part ways, one last piece of housekeeping. We won’t have time to read each play completely in class, though we will make quite a dent. I believe I’ve made my point about reading alone to yourselves, so I’d like you to read the remaining sections aloud with partners. This is not optional. Please pair up now. If you’re on the wait list, find a partner also on the wait list. Allyson, you’re no longer on the wait list. As you can see, class participation is rewarded in here.”
There’s bustle as everyone pairs off. I look around. Next to me is a normalish-girl with cat-eye glasses. I could ask her.
Or I could get up and walk out of the class. Even though I’m off the wait list, I could just drop the class, leave my spot for someone else.
But for some reason, I don’t do either of those things. I turn away from the girl in the glasses and look behind me. That guy, Dee, is sitting there, like the unpopular and unathletic kid who always wound up the remainder during team picking for grade-school kickball games. He’s wearing a bemused look, as if he knows no one will ask him and he’s saving everyone the trouble. So when I ask him if he wants to be partners, his arch expression falls away for a moment and he appears genuinely surprised.
“Just so happens my dance card is none too full at the moment.”
“Is that a yes?”
He nods.
“Good. I do have one condition. It’s more of a favor. Two favors, actually.”
He frowns for a moment, then arches his plucked eyebrow so high, it disappears into the halo of hair.
“I don’t want to read Twelfth Night out loud. You can do all the parts, if you want, and I’ll listen, and then I’ll read one of the other plays. Or we can rent a movie version and read along. I just don’t want to have to say it. Not a word of it.”
“How you gonna get away with that in class?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“What you got against Twelfth Night?”
“That’s the other thing. I don’t want to talk about it.”
He sighs as if considering. “Are you a flake or a diva? Diva I can work with, but I got no time for flakes.”
“I don’t think I’m either.” Dee looks skeptical. “It’s just that one play, I swear. I’m sure there’s a DVD for it.”
He looks at me for a long minute, as if trying to X-ray my true self. Then he either decides I’m okay or recognizes he has no other options, because he rolls his eyes and sighs loudly. “There are several versions of Twelfth Night, actually.” Suddenly, his voice and diction have completely changed. Even his expression has gone professorial. “There’s a film version with Helena Bonham Carter, who is magnificent. But if we’re going to cheat like this, we should rent the stage version.”
I stare at him a moment, baffled. He stares back, then his mouth cracks into the smallest of grins. And I realize what I said before was right: No one is who they pretend to be.