by Glenn Dixon
I smiled at the security woman in the chair and continued on past her, up another set of stairs, to a larger room on the second floor. A massive fireplace took up one wall, with two high-backed chairs set in front of it. Over the fireplace was a copy of the Cappello coat of arms—the same emblem of the bowler hat that was set in the bricks above the courtyard. The rest of the room was empty, with planked floors and huge shuttered windows. This was meant to be the ballroom where Romeo and Juliet first met.
In another room, in glass cases, were costumes from the Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet’s dress looked heavy: thick, brocaded wool sweeping down to the floor. Romeo had a tunic of blue-and-gold vertical stripes and a billowy white shirt underneath it. I remembered the exact scenes in which he wore it. A few of the Montague boys had snuck Romeo into the Capulet party, hoping to distract him with other girls, hoping he’d get over the heartbreak of Rosaline. And it worked. He saw Juliet across the dance floor and was instantly smitten. “Did my heart love till now?” he declared. “For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”
* * *
“Do you think it was love at first sight?” I asked the class.
“I don’t know,” said Devin. “That seems kind of dubious.”
“You’re dubious.” Sadia whirled around in her seat, facing Devin head-on.
“C’mon,” he said. “It’s just a story.”
“It is just a story,” I jumped in. “But if Shakespeare was anything, he was a genius at capturing how people really are. He was all about writing something real, you know, about the human condition.”
“Dubious,” Devin repeated under his breath. Sadia grumbled at him, making a low menacing sound in her throat.
“Romeo sees Juliet across the room,” I went on. “He’s interested for sure. She’s dancing and he says, ‘I’ll watch her place of stand.’ In other words, he’s going to watch where she goes to stand after the dance.” I paused. “I’ve been there,” I said.
Sadia raised her eyebrows. “Been where?”
“To Verona. I’ve been in the room where Romeo first saw Juliet.”
A few more heads popped up, wondering if I was laying a trap. Teachers do that sometimes and these students knew it.
“You’ve been to Verona?” Sadia asked.
“To Juliet’s house, yes. It’s a real place.”
“But this is a story. It isn’t real.”
“I know. But there was a Capulet family and there’s this old house that belonged to them. On the second floor, they have a big hall. Supposedly, that’s where Romeo and Juliet met.”
Devin glanced at the clock.
I decided to move on. “Anyway,” I said, “Romeo ambles over to where Juliet is standing and he brushes his fingers against Juliet’s hand ever so lightly, as if it’s an accident. That way he can stop and say sorry to her. It’s just an excuse to talk to her.”
“Smooth,” Devin mouthed.
“Exactly,” I said. “Boys, pay attention. This is pretty good.”
Andy grinned at me. Even Marc, a rough kid sitting at the back, cocked his head.
“Take a look at line 95. Andy, why don’t you read that?”
Andy’s grin disappeared.
“C’mon,” I said, “there’s nothing difficult in this part.”
Andy cleared his throat. “If I profane with my unworthy hand.”
“Unworthiest.”
“. . . unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”
“So what’s he talking about?”
“I have no idea,” Andy said.
“Well,” I explained, “it’s religious imagery. Romeo is saying to Juliet, ‘I am like a pilgrim come to see a holy shrine, and you’re that shrine.’ ”
“In this room you went to,” Sadia said, “was there a shrine?”
“No, no, it’s just a figure of speech.”
“You mean like Romeo is putting her on a pedestal, like she’s some sort of goddess?”
“Exactly. Romeo’s often over the top like that. Juliet, on the other hand, is more pragmatic.”
Sadia nodded.
I scanned the room. “Allison, how about you read Juliet’s lines?”
Allison didn’t say no, but her voice rose a little in pitch, tight and nervous. “Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much.”
“Now, Andy,” I said, “you read Romeo’s lines.”
I let them stumble through the dialogue until the stage directions say they kiss. Andy pulled to a stop, a red blush creeping up his thick neck.
“They’ve hooked up,” said Devin.
“Yep. They are about to kiss. They’ve been testing each other. Like in a game of chess or something. Look carefully,” I said. “Romeo says four lines, then Juliet says four lines. Look how it rhymes. And look how it goes on for exactly twelve lines like that, back and forth.”
Sadia studied the text.
“Then they each say a single concluding line. That makes fourteen. Do you get it?”
“It’s a sonnet,” said Sadia.
“It is a sonnet,” I said, “buried right in the middle of the scene.”
“Are you allowed to do that?” said Sadia.
“And it’s the very first words they say to each other.”
“That’s kind of cool,” said Sadia.
“Do you see what I mean now, when I say that Shakespeare is the master?”
Devin nodded. Andy was still glowing over his reading with Allison, keenly imagining the stage directions where they were about to kiss. Tough guy Marc at the back had his eyes glued on the text, still counting the lines.
“The whole point,” I went on, “is that they each see the other is intelligent, that the other has a sense of humor. They are enjoying the give-and-take. It’s not just physical attraction. They really like each other.
Sadia scrunched her lips together. “It’s still pretty fast.”
“This whole play takes place in five days,” I said. “From beginning to end, it’s five days in their lives.”
Sadia started to grumble. “Five days? That’s kind of crazy.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t take that literally. Sometimes you have to play with time to tell a good story.”
“And then Romeo kisses her,” Andy piped up, eager, I think, to get back to the story.
“Yes, and what does Juliet say to that?”
“You kiss by the book,” Allison read. “What does that mean?”
“Ha,” I said. “Scholars have been arguing over that line for centuries. It could mean that Romeo kisses perfectly. You know—like a textbook example of a kiss. But . . .” I paused. “Do you think you could learn to kiss from reading a book?”
“No,” Andy blurted. Then he quieted and sunk down behind his desk.
“Exactly,” I said. “There’s no instruction manual for love, no matter what anybody says. You can’t learn about love from a book. That would be crazy.”
* * *
It was nearing four o’clock. I didn’t want to miss Anna, so I stepped back into the daylight, into the crowds, and spotted her standing by the archway that led to the street. Two younger women were with her, all of them scanning the crowd for me. Beside them, set into the stone wall, was the red letter box. “Scusi,” I called, elbowing my way through the tourists.
“You are here,” Anna said. “Good.” She held up a large brass key. “Soa, Veronica, this is Glenn.”
“Hi,” I said.
Soa clutched a tote bag in both hands. Her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail, though the tips were tinted an almost copper color. She wore glasses with canary-yellow frames. “You’re the Canadian?” she asked.
“That’s me,” I said.
Behind her, Veronica grinned. She looked young—a teenager—and even Soa was probably only in her early twenties. Veronica looked Italian, with long dark ringlets of hair. Soa not so much. Were they
really secretaries? Were people so young allowed to answer the letters, or were they merely collecting them?
“Allora,” said Anna, “we open it now.” She clicked the key into the padlock and lifted it from its eye hook, then swung open the tiny door, handing the padlock over to Veronica.
Soa pulled the tote bag open and held it under the letter box while the letters spilled out. Behind us, a few tourists were snapping photos.
“Chiudi la porta,” said Anna.
“Yes, boss,” snapped Soa, swinging the door closed. Veronica clicked the padlock back into place.
“To the other office,” Anna said.
“There’s another office?”
“Yes. But it is difficult to find,” Anna admitted. “You must walk until you are lost, and then you must go a little farther.”
The four of us walked up the Corso Porta Borsari, a wide street that started with an ancient Roman gate and ended at a medieval church. The lane opened into a triangular courtyard. A bright orange Vespa scooter hovered on its kickstand there, and from a window above came the clank of cutlery and the smell of frying onions.
Anna unlocked a door tucked into one of the corners; inside, a flight of marble stairs led up to an open foyer. We crossed over to a glassed-in room and waited for Anna to unlock that one too. She flicked a switch, and fluorescent lights hissed into being.
“This office,” Anna explained, “was a goldsmith’s shop three or four hundred years ago. It’s very old.”
Soa heaved the tote bag onto a table in the middle of the room and turned it upside down, shaking out all the letters, her bracelets rattling.
“Now we sort them,” said Anna.
Veronica plucked one from the top. “English,” she said, creating an English pile. Anna found an Italian one and started another pile. She picked up a third but passed it over to Soa. “Russian,” Soa said.
Four pairs of hands flitted through the letters, like a lightning game of rummy, and in fifteen minutes or so, we had more than a hundred of them sorted into stacks by language. A whole world of heartbreak.
“Shall we answer a few?” asked Anna.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do this thing.”
* * *
It’s time now to fess up. I was in Verona for a reason. There was somebody in my life, but it wasn’t going according to plan. In fact, it was kind of messed up.
Let’s call her Claire.
I’d met Claire when we were both still in university, almost twenty years ago. We were doing our master’s degrees—different faculties, mind you—but within the first few moments of talking to her, I felt not just like I’d met someone but like I’d discovered someone. Someone, finally, who was a lot like me. It was a revelation. I’d been in love before—or so I thought—but this time it seemed different. This one seemed right. This was how it was supposed to be. I guess you could say that I fell in love with her right from the start. She was pretty and smart, but it was more than that. She seemed to “get” me, just as I seemed to “get” her.
She had a boyfriend when I first met her. I knew that. I also knew that it wasn’t going well with the guy. He didn’t like the idea of her being in grad school. He thought it was a waste of time. Once, she told me, he flew off the handle when she used what he considered big words—words with more than two syllables, words like accumulate. Claire launched into an imitation of him: “What the hell kinda ten-dollar word is that?” She stopped and shrugged.
“That’s preposterous,” I said. “Who gets angry over vocabulary?”
“Completely egregious,” she said.
“Incongruous, vexatious,” I added.
“It’s proprietorial,” she continued, “and highly solipsistic.”
I couldn’t top that, so I stopped.
Claire fixed me with her jade-green eyes. “I guess you can’t choose who you fall in love with,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I guess you can’t.”
At Juliet’s house, on the very top floor, the ceiling is lined with painted stars. Hundreds of six-pointed stars fret the ceiling between the ancient wooden beams, orderly rows alternating in white and mustard-yellow. I knew what they symbolized: Romeo and Juliet were star-crossed. They were meant to be together.
Shakespeare references stars throughout the play. Our fate is written in these stars; all our loves, all our foibles, all our missed opportunities tracing unalterable paths through the heavens and, whether or not we like it, this is our destiny.
I know now that that’s not true. That’s all horseshit.
Star-crossed
On my way to Italy, I stopped in London. In the formidable British Library, among a collection that holds such treasures as the Magna Carta and Gallileo’s drawings of the moon, there is a very old manuscript of Romeo and Juliet. The so-called second quarto is nearly perfect. It’s the text from which most other copies derive, and it was printed in 1599, only three or four years after Shakespeare wrote the play. In fact, it’s likely that Shakespeare sanctioned this printing, and it’s almost certain that it was printed from his original handwritten manuscript.
I’d spent months applying for permission to see the quarto. I had to become a member of the British Library. I needed a special security clearance, which meant explaining exactly why it was so important that I see it in the flesh, so to speak.
And finally, though I’d done everything properly, my application was denied. That seemed to be the end of that, until a few days later I got an e-mail from a member of the Rare Books and Special Collections Group. Tanya Kirk was her name. She said she’d looked at my application and was intrigued. Could I send her some more information about my intentions? I did. I told her all about the Club di Giulietta. I told her that I’d taught Romeo and Juliet to high school students for twenty years. I quoted lines from the play, and I must have sounded pretty earnest because within just a few hours, she replied. “Right, then. We will make a special exception. You must present yourself at the security desk at five p.m. on the tenth of August. We are just off King’s Cross station and you must not be late.”
So there I was on the appointed day, straight off the plane, trying to feign alertness but addled by jet lag, scruffy with travel. When I got to the British Library, the security guards at the front desk balked. They scanned their computer and insisted I had no appointment.
“No,” I said, “Tanya Kirk has made an exception for me. I’m supposed to meet her here at five.”
They eyed me suspiciously. Phone calls were made. There was much glaring at the computer screen, until Tanya Kirk herself appeared behind me. She was younger than I’d imagined. She wore hipster glasses and a necklace with big blue baubles. “Don’t mind the guards,” she whispered. “Just follow me.”
Tanya led me down a flight of stairs into the basement of the British Library and stopped in front of an unmarked metal door. She pulled a lanyard from her pocket and pressed the security fob against a wall-mounted sensor. The door buzzed open and then we were heading down a corridor. It could have been a custodial hallway under any busy office building. “Not very glamorous, is it?” she said.
She buzzed us through another door and we entered a large room with a hive of cubicles. It looked like a call center. I had no idea what all these people were doing. Tanya showed me into a small conference room off to the side with just a bare Formica table and a whiteboard on the wall. “Wait here a moment. I’ll be right back with the quarto.”
When she returned, she carried a small cardboard box that opened like an envelope. She set up two gray Styrofoam platforms on the table. They were angled so that a book would sit open in their wings. And then she took out the Shakespeare manuscript. I’d imagined some oak-paneled room. I’d imagined white gloves and a silver platter. But now the manuscript lay before me, nothing like I’d imagined.
It was so small, not much bigger than my two palms. I’d spent months working to attain permission to see this—the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet—and now, here it wa
s.
“How did you know,” Tanya asked, “to ask for the second quarto?”
“The first is called ‘the bad quarto,’ ” I said. “It’s two years older than this one, but it’s missing almost half the lines of the play.”
“That’s correct,” she said.
It’s generally agreed that the bad quarto was put together by one of the actors in Shakespeare’s company. That actor’s lines are all there, but for the other characters in the play, the lines are only sketched in or just skipped over. The gist of the story is present, but so much is missing or just plain wrong that the bad quarto is rarely ever consulted.
“The second quarto is the complete play,” I said and Tanya nodded. She turned to the manuscript and opened it carefully. The pages were in almost perfect condition.
“You can see,” she said, flipping to the end, “that someone has written in a date just after the last lines: 1621. It may have been the original owner.”
I looked down at the print. Was she suggesting this could be Shakespeare’s handwriting or—no, he was dead by then—but maybe that of someone who had known him? Maybe. My eyes swept back to the lines before the date. There they were. Lines that would ring out across the centuries:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
I think I shivered involuntarily.
“Are you quite all right?”
“It’s amazing.” The text had the word woe spelled wo. Other than that, it was identical to the text I’d spent so many years teaching.
