Art is a form of the verb to be...or not to be...The Making of a High Priestess of Bardolatry Tattoo #1

My first tattoo came from Harold Bloom, really.  If I could have been branded with the same design which I had tattooed, I would have been. 

W.S.  with a quill behind the letters and a crescent moon hovering above the initials.

William Shakespeare.

Sorry about the quality, this is on my right shoulder blade and really hard to photograph

I had to decide what I could live with for the rest of my life.  I had already accepted that I would be getting a tattoo – that I wanted to begin the ancient tradition of recording my life story on my skin.  I had to decide what that all important first mark would be. 

As soon as I had decided, there could only be one answer to that question, then. 

W.S. 

I saw myself as a High Priestess of Bardolatry (the worship of Shakespeare…a word coined by Harold Bloom in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) – hence the crescent moon above the initials.  I worshipped his work as if they were sacred texts and held the answers to all of the secrets of the universe…because they did…still do. 

 For me, Shakespeare was my portal into real poetry.  I had been exposed to nursery rhymes and trite pieces from my mother’s poetry books – beyond the classics in her high school English Lit text to which I had little access as a child, and little understanding until I, too was in high school.  Those pages entombed Keats and Milton and Blake.  They made no sense to me, yet.  I had no way into them.

But Shakespeare was magic. 

Mrs. Toal’s grade 10 English class…Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.  That was my first exposure to the spoken word:

..what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

What the fuck did I just hear and what happened to my head? What was this musical language and how do I get more of it?  And why did my heathen classmates hate it so much?  How could they not understand it? Love it?

Very early, I discovered that Bardolatry was a selective religion and not many people chose to be members but those who did choose to worship at the altar of the Bard were passionate and had differing opinions and interpretations of his work.  I was thrilled to count myself among them.

Fast forward several years, decades…I am a young mother with two small children and I find myself sinking in the drudge of diapers, dinners, and play dates.  I needed something for me.  I needed an artistic outlet. My therapist prescribed Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way as a way for me to find my outlet. 

I started to write a play which I produced and had directed for the local Fringe Festival.  That led me to audition for acting classes at the local University College where the policy was to perform a Shakespeare play every year in the Spring.  This particular year the play was Macbeth…my favorite. 

I auditioned, with a monologue from King John, which, I am certain I could perform much better now.  I was accepted into the class, auditioned for the fall show, performed in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood and, just before Christmas of 1996, auditioned for Macbeth.  I won a role as one of the witches…and the spell was cast. Down I slipped into the vortex of Shakespeare.

This is not a bad thing, quite the contrary.  I found myself in those words and roles and the deeper I read, the more characters I stepped into (or, more truthfully, the deeper they slipped into me) the deeper I slipped into myself.  I learned so much about myself from those roles, was so electrified by the women/men I became, that I wonder if I would have reached those places without the catalyst provided for me by Will.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom talks about how Shakespeare “…invented us.” (xvii of preface).  He says that “We need to exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenuously as we can, while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still.  They read us definitively.” (xx of preface)

His plays read me like marble braille…fingertips on goose flesh…I was the instrument and he was the master orchestrater. And he did play me.

I am in the centre - the owl witch

 It was exhilarating to howl every night at the approach of Macbeth to the witches cave in IV,i.  I plugged into the ancient magic I carried as a pagan Priestess and surrendered to the work.  It was ecstasy.

The only thing to do after the first taste of performing Shakespeare was to (1) join a local Shakespeare company and (2) become a director.  The choice was obvious, and made for me, actually…Hamlet.  How the fuck was I going to step into that piece?  Like dolphins to water, apparently because all I had to do was to channel my grief for my recently deceased mentor; a beloved teacher who had encouraged me to write and to honour my talents. 

So, I took the job.  I directed Hamlet…the magnum opus in the opinion of some.  I read several different versions, did an in depth dramaturgical study of the play and put together a piece I think would have made Will proud. 

We performed in a park, at night, and it was crazy hard but beautiful.  Today I still go there and sit on the bench, located in what used to be the main entrance to the castle, and meditate on the beauty of the place, my life, and the magic of the Universe.  I actually scattered some of my mentor’s ashes there (shhhh) so that when I need to work out a writing snag or just need someone to listen, I sit on the bench and tell him what I need to tell him and read what I am working on.  It is one of my sacred places.

After Hamlet, came Othello and a dramatic reading of Venus and Adonis in the winter following the summer in the park. 

Othello showed me that the magic of the Bard was not limited to life in the play.

*sigh* Yes.  That is me.

I was cast as Desdemona and, from the start, should have seen that this piece was going to be weird.  The man cast as Othello did not seem to understand the concept of imagination and acting; my dear friend, who was cast as Iago was tormented by the character for a number of weeks beyond the “post partum” acting stage (many are who take on that character and I have heard the same of those who have played Macbeth).  For me, though, the strangest thing happened:  my husband at the time began to act like Othello – jealous and grasping.  I was suffocating.  I was terrified.  I was fuelled by this in my performance and, in the end, just wanted the run to be over.  I loved the play but hated the weakness of this woman who would not fight back. 

I would not make that same mistake.

I guess that is why the natural progression from there was Venus – a goddess.  And, yes, Will made me feel like her, then.  It was exquisite!

After that came Twelfth Night.   I played Feste and directed – definitely a challenge. 

A female Feste worked really well in Twelfth Night

This was the time I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to Bardolatry and when I read Bloom.  I was all in.  And when the needle hit my virgin skin, I sank into the bee sting-like pain.  It was my initiation and I was earning the right to carry Will’s moniker on my flesh forever.  I closed my eyes and ran my lines from past shows; words from other lips – Shakespeare’s humans. 

I loved the pain and pretended that he did, too.

And, when the time came for the run of Twelfth Night, we played in the same park as where Hamlet played.  This time, instead of sun and heat, we played in torrential rain storm after torrential rain storm.  It became a joke, a long lasting joke, that when Olivia said to Viola-Cesario:  “…tis beauty truly blent; twill endure wind and weather…” the sky opened up and the wind blew and the actors were completely soaked, makeup running down Olivia’s face.  We still laugh about that today.

A couple of years after that performance, Feste married Orsino… “…unclasp’d To thee the book even of [our] secret soul…” (I, iv, 12-13). 

And then I became Cleopatra. 

And utterly, fucking butchered the role.  I was too young for her and too small and I hope to be allowed the privilege of playing her again from where I am now.  I know I am older now than she was when she died but, hey, I look 39.  I just feel like I am big enough for her now. 

I was an ant walking in the sandals of a colossus. 

Today, after my morning pages, I read a line in Julia Cameron’s Walking in This World, a companion to The Artist’s Way and read these words: 

                                Art is a form of the verb to be. 

My heart skipped a beat.  It is.  It really is. 

And, for me, nowhere have I learned this more intimately than from Will.  I am because Shakespeare invented me…and will continue to be because he wills it to be so.

My Bard altar