I won’t be able to post this for at least four days because the nearest Wi-Fi is eight miles away in Caernarfon. And if I choose to go into Caernarfon for a day, I won’t be lugging my laptop with me. I am currently in a remote part of Wales in Snowdonia National Park. It’s absolutely beautiful here! There are mountains and a lake and fresh air and wide open spaces...everything that London is not. I even passed the ocean and some beautiful beaches on the train ride here. I had to take three trains and two buses to get to the hostel, which tells you how remote it is. Even more telling is the fact that neither the man at the train information center nor my first bus driver knew where I was supposed to be going. They were able to point me in the right direction, but they both told me to ask the next person in the ‘information chain’ for further directions. (This is absolutely insane because it’s almost impossible to stump these people...and to stump two of them with one question, well, I should win a prize or something.) The only problem with the remoteness of this location is that I told my parents I would call them today because I assumed I’d have access to internet (and hence, Skype) but I definitely won’t be able to make it into Caernarfon tonight. Hopefully there is a pay phone that works for international calls within walking distance, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Since I haven’t written for a while, I may as well take this opportunity to review what I’ve done over the past few days. I think my last blog post left off with my excursion to the Bristol science museum. The following day, I took a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. It really doesn’t make much sense to go from Bristol to Stratford, but it isn’t that much worse than going from London to Stratford, and those were my only two options for seeing the revered birthplace of the Bard. And by ‘the Bard,’ of course I mean William Shakespeare himself.
I went to a matinee production of The Taming of the Shrew (because I wouldn’t have been able to catch a train back from an evening performance), and it was really well done! (Well, that’s to be expected, as it was the Royal Shakespeare Company.) The entire Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play. The opening scene involves a drunk man who is passed out. Some people decide it would be a funny joke to dress him up as a lord and try to convince him that he had always been a lord, and then see how long it takes him to believe it. They also dressed up another man as a woman who pretended to be ‘the lord’s’ wife. Some players (acting troupe) come to town, and they suggest that they perform a play for ‘the lord.’ This play is the main storyline of The Taming of the Shrew. Though this narrative framework is a very small part of the beginning of the play, it really sets the rest of the storyline in context. Interestingly, it begins with two men who are superficially transformed—one is transformed into a lord and the other into a woman. (Obviously, this is pointing out the societal constructions that go into defining genders and attributing power to one person and not another.) This production kept the story, as I think Shakespeare intended it to be, rather uncomical for a ‘comedy.’ Many adaptations (Kiss Me Kate, Ten Things I Hate about You) transform the story into the typical jovial ‘battle of the sexes’ where, in the end, the two fall in love and live happily ever after. Shakespeare’s version is a lot more uncomfortable because the man is truly cruel. In my Rhetorics of Violence in Medieval Literature class last semester, we talked about torture being a means for destroying the victim’s mindset, beliefs, and personhood and replacing these with the torturer’s. One of my brilliant classmates brought up The Taming of the Shrew as an example of how physical pain and deprivation can be used to transform a person. Through Petruchio’s ‘taming’ methods of depriving Katherine of food, sleep, and decent clothing, she changes from a fiery shrew to the most ‘obedient’ of all the women in the play. The reactions of Shakespeare’s audiences would probably have been more varied than those of modern audiences. Of course, the acting may have been more ambiguous as well. Like the Guthrie’s recent production of The Merchant of Venice (in which the audience is clearly supposed to understand and pity Shylock’s misery), this production of The Taming of the Shrew definitely emphasized the more feministic elements of the play and modern audiences are able to resonate with that in a way that Shakespeare’s audiences probably wouldn’t have.
After the play, I saw Shakespeare’s birthplace (which may or may not have actually been the place where he was born, though the people who work at the house will swear up and down that there’s enough evidence to say he really was born there). Then I was going to walk around the town a bit more and see the outside of the other houses associated with Shakespeare (because it was after 5:00 p.m. and of course everything shuts down at that point in the UK), but it began to rain and I decided to just catch a train back to my hostel. I kind of wish that I would have stayed around longer, but it was really miserable in the rain (and it would have been even more miserable to ride the train home in sopping wet clothes), so I guess it made sense.
The following day I went to Glastonbury, one of the fruitiest places you will ever see. It’s a haven for hippies and New Agers and people who believe in witchcraft. I knew that before going, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. Every single shop on the High Street made me vaguely uncomfortable! But I did the things I had come there to do. I toured the ancient abbey ruins, parts of which date from the 600s! Supposedly (according to Glastonbury’s myth-obsessed culture), Joseph of Arimathea founded a church there in 60 A.D. or something like that. But still, it is impressively old without adding on that bit of uncorroborated evidence. Also, the supposed site of Arthur and Guinevere’s tomb is in that cathedral. (Again, completely unsubstantiated, as is most everything related to Arthur. But it was fun to see anyways.)
I also climbed the Glastonbury Tor, which is this exceedingly tall natural hilltop with a fourteenth-century tower on the top of it. Supposedly (gee, this word is coming up rather frequently in the paragraph on Glastonbury), the Holy Grail is buried at the foot of this hill. Also, it is supposed to be the Isle of Avalon, where Arthur sailed to when he was mortally wounded. (Apparently at that time the water was higher, so it actually was an island instead of just a hill.) At this point, the two myths of Joseph of Arimathea and Arthur converge. Joseph is supposed to be Jesus’ uncle, and he brought the Holy Grail there after Jesus’ ascension. And Arthur sought the Holy Grail his whole life (which I don’t think is actually true according to the Medieval stories because it’s usually Gawain or Perceval who is after the Grail...in fact, I think it’s always one of those two). So yeah, it was definitely a fun place to visit once, but I don’t have a big desire to return.
In the evening, I walked around my hostel in Bristol a little bit. I saw some of the pretty areas nearby, including the harbor (my hostel was actually right on the harbor, but I saw more of it), St Mary Redcliffe Church, the cathedral, and the Silver Jubilee statue of Queen Victoria.
The next day, I went to East Coker, which is the second of the four sites Eliot writes about in The Four Quartets. I took a train to Yeovil, the nearest big town and then I had to take a cab to East Coker. Fortunately, it was only ten pounds each way. It was funny because I actually thought to myself, ‘Wow, it’s fun to ride in a car!’ I have been taking trains, subways, and the occasional bus for the past two and a half months, but I’ve been in a car only three times round trip (including that taxi ride). Once again, it was raining too much to walk around the town a whole lot, but I did get to see the church where Eliot is buried. At first, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do that because there was a wedding going on. But after eating a wonderful lunch at the Helyar Arms pub, I returned and asked someone outside in a tux if the church was empty yet. He was like, ‘Oh, they’re still taking pictures, but they won’t mind at all if you go in.’ And I asked if he was sure, and he said he was. So that was interesting to see. One of Eliot’s strongest themes in East Coker is cyclical time, or human/earthly time. And that was strangely evident in the town as well. It had been around since the 1600s or so (when Eliot’s ancestors lived there), and some things are still the same (like the church building) but obviously some things are vastly different. The church also had a prominent clock on it, which I thought was appropriate.
That evening, I went to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol because it’s really famous. As my French roommate in the hostel said, ‘If you visit Bristol and you do not visit the Bristol Bridge, it is like you do not visit Bristol.’ Very true!
And now we’ve come full circle. I was travelling all day today, and I’m now in a hostel in remote Wales. I am REALLY hoping for nice weather because that will make hiking and horseback riding and whatever else a lot more fun. But I’m excited to be surrounded by nature again!
**Note: For everyone who is interested, I was able to call my parents on a payphone that gobbled up ten pence every few seconds.
