Last Week in Oxworld

This week - my last in Oxford and England - the sun was shining, and while the paper occupied most of my waking (and dreaming) hours, I did manage to explore. There are a few things I never did get around to - piking on the Thames (that's similar to pushing along in a Venetian gondola), wandering through Blenheim palace, where they filmed Branagh's Hamlet, going back to the orgasmic British Museum. But all in all, I covered a lot of territory.

Tuesday I saw The Tempest in Stratford upon Avon, with Patrick Stewart portraying Prospero. It was a ticket I had procured on my own, not with the school, and so I had my first experience in the nose-bleed seats of the RSC Theatre, where I, the poor student, would have sat if I weren't in this masters program. All six of the productions I'd previously attended were tickets bought by the school a year in advance, so we were front and center, able to gauge shoe sizes and the viscosity of actors' spit. The balcony seats were a whole other experience. We were so high that at points the actors, walking forward on the stage, were cut off from vision. Having attended numerous balcony productions in the past, I hate to say, it does make a difference to the theatrical experience if you can only see the tops of performers' heads.

The performance was excellent, though, I could tell. :) The Tempest is set on an island off of Africa, and as such is usually imagined as a warm, even tropical island. This one set it in the Arctic/Antarctic, apparently based loosely on the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica 1914-16 expedition, in which their ship was crushed by pack ice but, despite lack of supplies, all the men survived. So this production had most of the characters bundled up, although, interestingly, only Caliban wore animal skins - and Prospero's magic cloak was made of animal skin. For those not familiar with the play, Caliban (of African origin) is enslaved by the Italian ex-duke and magician Prospero; Caliban is referred to as a deformed monster. But is he deformed, or does he just look different than the Europeans? That depends on the production. You can see the post-colonial issues this would raise.

The last day of class our professor, John Fyler, took the six of us to London to the National Gallery, British Museum, a cheese shop, but most importantly, the British Library, where we drooled over the oldest manuscript of Beowulf (circa 1100 a.d.), the Magna Carta (1215), a 15th century edition of the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's first folio, and original hand-written manuscripts or scores by Woolfe, Joyce, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Mozart, Handel, et al. English teacher candy.

Every spare moment I worked on the paper...through dinner and breakfast, then with Sorina over my shoulder telling me to hurry up so we could go see Stonehenge. So I reluctantly emailed in an imperfect version that wouldn't get more perfect in the next few hours. We caught the train for Salisbury and a bus from there to Stonehenge.

Ah, Stonehenge.

You drive along the highway, come up over a hill and there it is - directly in line of view, just off the highway. Enormous. The stones are much taller and larger than I'd imagined. They won't let you walk within the stones or touch them anymore. Conflicting reports as to why: tourist destruction, the Druid/new agey congregations who descend on it for summer and winter solistice. It wasn't built by the Druids, who apparently came to England 1,000 years after building began in 3100 B.C. OLD.

Friday evening and Saturday Paul came to visit from Birmingham, and I dragged him all over Oxford, to the top of St. Mary's cathedral, past the ancient Egyptian arefacts at the Ashmolian museum, to the dark oak-paneled walls of the Eagle and Child, where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien met and smoked pipes.

Saturday evening was graduation, and I sang soprano (!) with the madrigals. Sort of glossed over the high F, but otherwise, we sounded fine. It was an easy crowd, most of them just glowing with the knowledge that they'd finally completed a five-year master's program and were going to drink Pimms in the rector's garden (normally off-limits to us plebians). They knew they'd made it when they got to walk on the grass - the green, green grass that the master lawnsman would cut every other morning and lovingly smooth with fertilizer. I put my toe on it, and it was soft and spongy like moss on a faery hill.