SHAKESPEREAN RHAPSODY

From The Shakespeare Oracle Tarot deck

In Runaways, my unpublished sequel to The Witch From the Sea, my hero, Jack, a Georgian-era actor-turned-pirate, rhapsodizes about William Shakespeare:

"Everything you could ever think or feel or want, Shakespeare has already written about it. And everything that happens in your own life affects how you to respond to him, so his words always seem new and fresh, however often you play them."

Or hear them.

I put these words in Jack's mouth because I believe the reason Shakespeare's work continues to be performed and to stir audiences over 400 hundred years later is not only due to his timeless themes and elegant poetry.

It's mostly because of his keen sensitivity to the quicksilver fluctuations of human nature and his incisive ways of expressing it.

So it doesn't matter how many versions of a particular Shakespeare play you've seen, its effect on you is different every time, depending on what's going on in your own life.

The Zefferelli version: lush

Case in point: the opening Santa Cruz Shakespeare's handsome new production of Romeo and Juliet last week. Who knows how many times I've seen this play?

There was the lush Franco Zefferelli movie (seen when I was an impressionable 16-year-old — which is two years older than Juliet is in the play), the gorgeous full-length production staged by the San Francisco Ballet back in the '80s, and, I believe, two (possibly three) previous productions at Santa Cruz Shakespeare (the entity previously known as Shakespeare Santa Cruz).

(But what's in a name?)

The point is, no matter how familiar I thought I was with the play, I was not prepared for my own reaction at the finale, this time around. (Spoiler Alert: don't expect a happy ending.) Typically, one mourns the tragedy of the young lovers' wasted lives as they  choose suicide, one after the other, when each believes the other is dead.

Romeo and Mercutio: fervor and fury

But recent upheavals in my own life have altered my perspective. This time, when Juliet awakens from her sleeping potion, finds Romeo's lifeless corpse stretched across her bier, and seizes his dagger, I found myself sort of cheering her on.

Not because I wanted to see the poor girl dead, but because it seemed like the only logical solution, faced with the enormity of her loss. This way, at least, it flashed through my mind, they are together.

Shakespeare is always interactive — what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it!

Particular virtues of the current SCS production include an exuberantly acrobatic Romeo (Taha Mandviwala), the giddy poise of Isabel Pask's Juliet, and a fierce, female Tybalt (Maggie Adams McDowell), Juliet's hot-headed cousin. In the showpiece role of Mercutio, Lorenzo Roberts may have been overly encouraged to ham up the physical clowning, but he also conveys every potent syllable of Mercutio's dark, dry wit with fervor and fury.

Random festival-goers, 2017!

Mike Ryan brings both playfulness and moral authority to the role of Friar Lawrence. And director Laura Gordon concludes the first half on a lovely, visual grace note, and opens the second half with a sharply choreographed and dynamic street brawl. The action is swift and engrossing.

I was especially interested in seeing this play again after recently reading the novel The Master of Verona, by David Blixt, sort of a prequel to events leading up to Shakespeare's tale. Another novel I loved, Queen Mab, envisions a romance between Mercutio and the fairy queen he describes with such lively intensity in his first speech in the play.

That's the thing with Shakespeare — he's always ripe for reinterpretation!

PS: There's a new innovation at Santa Cruz Shakespeare this season: shelves are now installed along the back of each row of bleachers so the people sitting the next row back have a place to put their stuff. It's a revelation! James would've loved this device when we went to SCS last summer — we would have had a place to set down those champagne glasses between sips!

WILD RIDE

Fasten your gauntlets for this wild ride! In The Master of Verona, actor-author David Blixt  merges the historical realities of life in the Renaissance Italian city-states with what you might call the origin stories of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays.

The plot begins when the infamous poet Dante Alighieri (long exiled, and now a caustic celebrity) joins the court of his new patron, Francesco della Scala, called Cangrande, the cunning, charismatic, ruthless, and dazzling Lord of Verona.

Over the template of Cangrande's raucous real-life exploits, Blixt sows the seeds of themes, plots, and characters that will evolve into some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, to be further developed in the next three books (and counting) in the series.

Despite teasing hints, few of Shakespeare's actual characters appear in this book, but the devilish glee with which Blixt foreshadows conflicts and stories to come keeps us turning the pages.

The story is so dense with historical action and intrigue, I meant to skim an early, detailed battle scene, but the character-building was so excellent, I didn't want to miss a word. (Also, the busy plot demands you pay attention!)

Statue of Cangrande, Verona

It may take Blixt 100 pages to describe the events of a single day, but he knows his Shakespeare, his Dante, and his Renaissance Italian history. And there's literally never a dull moment!

It's fascinating to watch protagonist Pietro Alighieri evolve from studious youth longing for the approval of his famous father, accidental war hero, and confidant of Cangrande, into a man for whom honor and justice are so ingrained, he doesn't even realize how extraordinary his values are.

Full disclosure: I started reading this book for practical (or possibly piratical) reasons. Working on my own Italian Renaissance project, I was hoping to steal, er, sample some of the period color.

Evidently, flamboyant Cangrande laughed at danger!

In a sudden fit of de-cluttering (the kind I only seem to do when I'm supposed to be writing), I found a postcard for this book and another novel with a similar historical setting in an old file of tchotchkes from a long-ago book conference.

So, I found both books online. The first one was a little too YA for me. Then I picked up this daunting volume: it weighed a ton, the pages were numerous, and the print was tiny.

Well, I thought, I'll just skim through it and hopefully pick up a little of the flavor of the era through osmosis.

Hah! Flavor? This book is a fourteen-course meal! No point standing on ceremony; better just dive in, for all the reasons mentioned above!