Dawn Reader

Dawn Reader
from Open Door Coffee Co.; Hudson, OH; Oct. 26, 2016

Monday, November 27, 2017

Our Revels Now Are Ended?

2018 Stratford Festival
information booklet
A week or so ago I had to make one of the most unpleasant decisions of my life. Oh, on the World Scale of Unpleasant Decisions mine would not have registered much weight, but in my wee life, it was ... consequential.

Since the summer of 2001, Joyce and I--every single summer--have driven to Stratford, Ontario, for a week at the Stratford Theatre Festival (used to be the Stratford Shakespeare Festival), where we would see as many as eleven plays in six days--usually three or four by the Bard. We were able, over the years, to see just about all the plays he ever wrote--a journey we completed a few years ago by seeing Richard II at Shakespeare and Co. in Lenox, Mass.

We would arrive on Monday afternoon, park our car at the inn downtown where we almost always stayed (Mercer Hall, Room 201); we would not drive again until we headed home after the Sunday matinee at the end of our week. We walked to shows at the four main venues: the Tom Patterson, the Festival, the Avon, and the Studio.

We found the coffee shops we liked, the bookstores, the restaurants ...

And had a week worthy of a let's-all-be-happy ending of a Shakespearean comedy.

We had to plan, though. We reserved our room a year ahead. We could begin buying our tickets early in November. (I would always print out the list of shows and give them to Joyce in a Christmas card; she would always feign surprise.)

So ... we have our room reserved. But when the day for the ticket sales recently came, I could not pull the trigger. Not this year.

As regular visitors here know, I will soon be undergoing a new cancer treatment. (I'm scheduled for January--but it's tentative: We have to get insurance approval; we have to hear from the two venues--the Red Cross in Akron, Seidman Cancer Center near University Circle).

I don't know what this procedure is going to do to me. I don't know how I will feel in the ensuing weeks, months. I don't know how my pesky, determined, and deadly disease will behave.

And so--after talking it over with Joyce--I decided I would not buy tickets this year. I would cancel our room reservation.

Since 2001, we've seen more than 150 shows up there, and it has always been, for us, about the best week of the year. Food for conversation for months.

Not long before the end of The Tempest (perhaps my favorite of all the plays), Prospero delivers that famous speech beginning with "Our revels now are ended" (see below for the whole thing). I have some history with that speech. I memorized it shortly before I retired from Western Reserve Academy in the spring of 2011. I had planned to recite it to each of my three classes just before I dismissed them for the final time.

But when I started in with my first group of the day, I didn't get very far before I broke down. Could not continue. I didn't even try later in the day. I knew I had dissolved into a Weepy Old Man, and I didn't really want to confirm it to every class.

But ... perhaps "ended" is a bit strong here. I'm hopeful that the health issues that both Joyce and I are facing will stabilize--next year? A year after that? One can dream ... didn't the Bard write about that, too? (Often, often.)

But I also know the wisdom of Prospero. I know now that, indeed, "our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." I'm just hoping--dreaming!--that it does not commence too soon.


[there's a little bit before and after this--but this is the heart of it all]


Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack* behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1)

*a broken cloud

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