Doubling the Cape

Wendy Vardaman

    We go way back, Shakespeare
    and me. Even before the Gilligan’s Island
    that forms the basis of my generation’s thin acquaintance with Hamlet,
    I watched my dad Laurence-Olivier it for the mirror
    or for any audience he could impound, eyebrows working overtime
    while he intoned, To be. Or not. To be. That is. The question.

    And if Mom sailed through after he’d had a few more and the question
    turned to his inevitable declarations about the Absurd, she’d mutter, I hate Shakespeare,
    and, before it was even time
    for the evening’s sitcoms to end, catch the last boat off the island,
    stranding me and my brother at kitchen stools, moored
    to our father while he hammed

    it up. I didn’t stop seeing Hamlet
    as a bad actor in mid-life crisis until answering questions
    for Orals at grad school,  Miranda
    to a committee of  disapproving Prosperos. Shaking
    on their academic island,
    clueless about longitude, about the single book that I should keep, about time’s

    passage, I read over time,
    though failed to chart, much of the hamlet’s
    library hoping, not as much for rescue from that humorless land,
    as answers to the big questions
    I tacked between, episode to episode: how probable was one, let alone a pair,
    of shipwrecks in a narrative? how’d I get stuck to begin with? and was it mere

    coincidence, or miracle,
    that every time
    I drowned, no matter the direction the boat set out, I reappeared
    exactly where it started, bone dry but shivering, second mate to any Hamlet
    who might appoint himself Inquisitor/
    Master. Before watching my own daughter play that part, I

    blamed the helmsman for landing
    us in this castaway quagmire,
    on some slap-stick, quixotic, whale-of-a quest,
    no time
    to locate our bearings, one voyage to the next. But Hamlet’s
    also the Father/Ghost who shocks his poor

    son off his islet of sanity, when—given time
    to grieve—he might’ve left the doldrums, even married Ophelia. If not for Hamlet
    Sr.’s insistence on his questions, his truth, his own despair.

    
Wendy Vardaman - Wendy Vardaman, has a Ph.D. in English from University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Engineering from Cornell University. Co-editor of Verse Wisconsin, her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. She lives in Madison, WI with husband, Thomas DuBois, has three children, and works for the children’s theater company, The Young Shakespeare Players Wendy Vardaman  in this issue... Tags: Thanal Online, web magazine dedicated for poetry and literature Wendy Vardaman, Doubling the Cape
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