A final Byron-related story ...
Okay, yet another Byron connection. In her Lord Byron and Her Daughters, Markus
mentions a play I’d not heard of by a playwright I most definitely had heard of—Tom Stoppard. I think the
first play of his I ever read was Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead, first performed in 1966, the year I graduated
from Hiram College. I did not read the play in college but a number of years
later—not long after I was married (December 1969)—I began a membership in what
I think was called the Theatre Guild.
The Guild was like
the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild (in fact, I think the Theatre
Guild was an offshoot of the latter), but instead of novels and works of
nonfiction, the TG specialized in plays. Every month we’d get a circular from
the Guild that described the main selection for the month—and all the other
titles they had available. They offered not original publishers’ editions; no,
their volumes were cheap reprints (like the BOMC and LG titles). But at that
time I was not very knowledgeable about the future value of books; I was more
interested in what they could supply to us now.
Joyce and I would buy quite a few of them over the years (she’d had a theater
major in college), before we realized that if we ever wanted to sell any of our
books, we would need to focus on original publishers’ editions, first
printings. And so we have.
Anyway, one of the
first ones we bought was Stoppard’s Rosencrantz,
and, some years later, teaching Hamlet
at Western Reserve Academy, I would sometimes whip that play out and show it to
the students (I seem not to have done so in later years … not sure why).
One day an
English-teaching WRA colleague—who shall remain nameless and genderless—asked me
if he/she could borrow Rosencrantz
(he/she also taught Hamlet), and I
quickly supplied him/her with our copy. Months passed. More months. Finally, I
asked him/her about it: Oh, I gave that
back to you months ago, he/she lied.
And I, like
Hamlet, cried, O, vengeance!
But dithered and
didn’t do anything about it. Just like the Melancholy Dane.
No comments:
Post a Comment