Shakespeare’s birthday is generally assumed to be April 23. And what better way to celebrate it than by visiting Canada? Okay, I mean, since I wasn’t able to sneak in a week in Cuba I was looking for places to kill a week that were 1) not in the United States and 2) easy to get to from New York City, since that’s where I was flying out from. Canada’s an obvious choice, and I was all set to fly into Montreal when I realized I was basically visiting at the start of the Stratford Festival in Ontario. So I found myself flying into Toronto once again,¹ this time with theater tickets in hand.

My mother loved Shakespeare. I never knew exactly why. Not that there aren’t plenty of good reasons one might; I just never quite knew specifically what my mother’s were. My mom was an English teacher, the first of their family to go to college, and it always seemed to me one of the ways to navigate that transition was to become a bit of a classicist. Mom loved Cervantes and Dickens and Chaucer. But Shakespeare was special.

Shakespeare is special. Is Shakespeare the greatest writer ever? There are two ways to answer that. The first is to say that what makes a writer special depends wholly on the circumstances in which you meet them, that you will need and love different writers at different times for different reasons, and so the question doesn’t make sense. The second is to say yes. And I think that that’s undeniable, for reasons that are only partially because of Shakespeare’s not inconsiderable talents.

I was a double major in English and Theater in college, and I spent a fair amount of time in higher level seminars about Shakespeare. And a few of them, especially on the Theater side, had to do with how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.² It was a century after Shakespeare’s death before the plays were generally regarded as especially good, and it took a century after that before Shakespeare was commonly regarded as the preeminent English poet.

It was the Victorian age that really made Shakespeare. That era burnished Shakespeare’s reputation to where it is today. A combination of academics, producers, and critics all effectively conspired to promote the “natural genius” of Shakespeare. The plays became treated as sacrosanct, a kind of secular bible verse.³ They were staged with a pomp and grandeur similar to opera. A whole industry cropped up producing popular engravings of famous Shakespeare performers and performances. Things got a little silly; Coleridge writes haughtily about how Shakespeare is best read privately rather than ruined by live performance.

It’s that frenzy of what’s been termed “bardolatry”⁴ that made Shakespeare what they are today. That’s when so many of the words Shakespeare coined entered the lexicon, when so many of the phrases from the plays became common idioms. The characters and plots became so well known that they formed a kind of foundation for quite a lot of subsequent literature,⁵ and the dominance of England’s empire at the birth of mass media ensured that that would have a global impact.

None of this is to say that Shakespeare isn’t fantastic, just that the reputation and influence of the plays is as much a product of serendipity and history as skill. If Shakespeare’s friends hadn’t published the First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, we wouldn’t have Macbeth or The Taming of the Shrew or Julius Caesar or Twelfth Night or The Tempest or a dozen other works. If Samuel Johnson had decided to put out an annotated version of Paradise Lost rather than Shakespeare’s plays it’s possible Milton would have been ultimately been anointed the preeminent English poet. If the British Empire hadn’t developed at just that time, there wouldn’t have been the same drive for promoting the cultural superiority of English literature.

So I love Shakespeare, in part because Shakespeare’s fantastic, and in part because my mother loved Shakespeare and wanted to pass that on, and in part because the richness of the plays has been woven into English literature in a way that makes it inextricable with English literature in general. And I’ve gradually found myself making pilgrimages to the various theatrical shrines celebrating Shakespeare, and I’ve watched plays in all of them: the New York Shakespeare festival, the Globe Theater, Stratford-upon-Avon. When I realized I could add Stratford, Ontario to the list, why would I pass it up?

They run a bus out from Toronto which gets to Stratford in time for lunch and a matinee and another bus back just after the matinee finishes; you can totally see a show as a day trip if you’re willing to chill for the four hours on the road. I came out Wednesday morning and returned Thursday, staying the night and catching two shows.⁶ Like a lot of Shakespeare festivals, they’ve filled out their season with what might be called counter-programming; of the thirteen plays they’re putting on, only four are Shakespeare.⁷ This early in the season there’s only a few shows running⁸ so my choices for Wednesday were Rent or Spamalot. I chose Spamalot.

I’d never seen Spamalot. Although I guess I technically had seen most of it. If you’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail you’ve heard 80% of the jokes and if you’ve watched Monty Python’s Life of Brian you’ve heard the best song. I grew up as a geek right at the point when Python quotes were becoming inescapable across every geek circle I trafficked in, from theater to D&D to computers,⁹ and as any comedian will tell you nothing ruins a good joke like ubiquity.¹⁰

So if you’re nostalgic and you want to replay the hits, and you’re happy to pay $100 to go and sit in a crowd while you do it, it’s a fine time. I did appreciate the massive upgrade to the Carol Cleveland role and I thought the whole His Name is Lancelot number was pretty great. Overall, it’s a perfectly respectable Mel Brooks show.¹¹ But Monty Python isn’t supposed to be Mel Brooks. Python always stood in furious opposition to the kind of easy gags and broad Borscht-Belt style humor that pandered to the lowest common denominator. I guess if you need to put a thousand butts in seats night after night on Broadway, this is no doubt a smarter way to go. I just don’t think the Python troupe of 1975 would have approved.

The Thursday matinee was King Lear. It’s one of my favorite plays¹² and when I looked up the schedule I realized Paul Gross was playing the lead. Paul Gross is best known¹³ for Due South, playing a stereotypical Mountie (complete with a wolf/husky hybrid police dog) who solves crimes in Chicago.¹⁴ But for me, they’ll always be known for Slings & Arrows, the cult TV show in which Paul Gross played the artistic director of a Shakespeare festival. It remains one of the best representations of backstage theater life I’ve ever seen. So to see Paul Gross actually play Lear at a festival? I felt like I couldn’t miss it.

The staging was spare; black wooden slabs making up a central structure alongside some thin pillars of the same material, all with white LED strips running along the edges. The blocks could slide to the sides revealing the interior of the structure as needed, allowing it to be ramparts or a hovel or a throne room as the scene demanded. The LED lights would glow or flash when appropriate; during the storm the center stage pillar burst with light and cracked in a nice bit of theater magic. There was no other set dressing, beyond the occasional table or chairs brought out for a scene or two. The staging worked fantastically, austere and somber and ominous while otherwise staying out of the way of the actors.

Overall the company was very good. They had decided not to mic the actors and some of them were still struggling with filling the space — I think because it’s still so early in the run — but most of that had worked itself out after the intermission. And the actors playing Edgar and Edmund were particularly great, with Edmund in particular playing every inch out of the character.

But Paul Gross, as the lead, was incredible. I think it’s one of the most difficult roles in the theater, an unrelenting descent into horror and madness, and after a slightly shaky start¹⁵ Gross just owns it. One of the challenges of the play is how to balance all the different plots; virtually every character is playing out their own personal tragedy, and it’s easy for a production to err by giving either too much weight to Lear and stifling the others or too little weight to Lear and robbing the play of its anchor. This one nails it, with Gross deftly seizing the stage then handing that off as needed. You get those moments of Lear’s once-grandeur in the scenes on the heath, the sense of everything that’s been stripped from them during the fall into madness. And then at the end, when Lear weeps over Cordelia’s body, Gross instills the scene with a quiet, heartbreaking dignity. I wanted to watch it all over again, even as I suspect I wouldn’t have the heart to.

I’m now in a hotel by the Toronto airport.¹⁶ My flight leaves this evening — I got the cheapest ticket available so of course I’m landing near midnight — for a handful of days in New York before I return to London. I did do a little bit more in Toronto, visiting some friends and seeing some sights,¹⁷ but mostly I needed to recover.

I’m in my quiet time, slowly preparing for the social overload that is Knudepunkt. I’ll have roughly three weeks total to myself over the next three stops before the convention, then about a month to recover before I’m back socializing again. I shouldn’t need that long, but there’s still so much out there to see that I’m having trouble slowing down. There will be time eventually.

I don’t know when I’ll be back to Toronto. There’s Québec City and Montreal and Ottawa so very close, and I feel I’ve given them short shrift. I’ve also been kind of itching to do a road trip across Canada and see the Trans-Canada Highway over three or four weeks.¹⁸ But I’m sure I’ll find an excuse to return, all the same. I usually do.

Next: New York City (JFK) to London (LGW)
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Footnotes

¹ Not exactly a hard sell

² Theater professionals have a much more grounded approach to Shakespeare, I’ve discovered, because they have to get up on stage and actually read the damn thing out loud to an audience who possibly hasn’t even read it let alone skimmed the footnotes. So actors and directors are a lot more in tune with the actual nuts and bolts of the plays, for what works and what doesn’t in front of an audience.

³ As an example, a poet named Nahum Tate felt perfectly comfortable adapting King Lear to modern tastes in 1681, providing it with a happy ending: Lear and Cordelia survive; Cordelia becomes queen and marries Edgar; and Lear, Kent, and Gloster all retire. It was the definitive version performed on the stage until the 1830s, when popular opinion finally decided this was a bit presumptuous and maybe missed the point of the thing.

⁴ By George Bernard Shaw, no less

⁵ Hamlet strongly informs Ulysses and Infinite Jest, as Macbeth does for Throne of Blood and Wyrd Sisters and Romeo and Juliet does for nearly every damn Hollywood romance from West Side Story to Warm Bodies to Noughts and Crosses.

⁶ I’m attending at the very start of the season, so my only options were two matinees.

⁷ Five if you count the two-week run of Goblin:Macbeth they’re bringing in at the end.

⁸ In fact, I arrived before the season officially starts, so everything I saw was still in previews.

⁹ My primary programming language is Python and its package index is commonly known as the “Cheese Shop.”

¹⁰ I still shudder any time someone says “Well, that was unexpected” and there’s a pregnant pause.

¹¹ And I do regret not seeing the original Broadway cast. I would have loved to see Tim Curry and Hank Azaria in it.

¹² My top Shakespeare plays, in no particular order, are probably Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Richard III, and King Lear.

¹³ To the annoyance of a whole lot of Canadians

¹⁴ The show is very cute, and far better than that description suggests.

¹⁵ Again, we’re in previews here, and I expect some of this to get tightened up.

¹⁶ There is both a “Best Western Plus Toronto Airport Hotel” and a “Best Western Plus Travel Hotel Toronto Airport” and I am incredibly glad I figured that out before I caught a cab out here.

¹⁷ Most notably the Bata Shoe Museum, with over 13,000 shoes in their collection. It’s one of the few museums I really fervently wished was larger so I could have seen more of it.

¹⁸ Honestly, there’s even more similar road trips I’d like to do in the United States — Canada has a tenth the population of the United States so there’s just a lot more stuff below the border — but I’m hampered by visa restrictions as well as a lack of a driving companion. I’m looking forward to a time when those aren’t as big a concern.