Happy Birthday, Shakespeare

I had hoped Jack might share a birthday with old Will Shakespeare, but unless something starts happening soon, well, it’s unlikely.  Labor takes a long time, and there are only 15 more hours in this day.  Anyway the 23rd is only an approximation of Shakespeare’s birthday, based on the fact that (a) he was baptised on the 26th, and (b) he died on the 23rd of April and everyone thinks it’s pretty cool to have him born and dead on the same day of the year.  However, given the empirical evidence it is just as likely that he was born on the 24th or 25th, so maybe Jack WILL be born on Shakespeare’s actual birthday and though I’ll never be able to prove the truth, I’ll know it deep down in my heart.

 

Or, much more likely, the rest of this week will go sailing by and Jack will remain firmly positioned in the womb, and really who can blame the kid?  Why hurry to get out in the world?  Everything gets harder from your birth day on.  Why not delay it as long as you can?  To be honest, these past few nights Patrick and I have enjoyed some nice evenings.  We take walks, we read, we watch Netflix.  I’m not so sure I’m in any hurry anymore, either.  I’ll take these last few days/weeks to enjoy our adults-only household.  In fact, last night I had a wee mini internal panic attack and decided I didn’t want a baby anymore, that this was too nice a life to throw to the wolves, and I stared wild-eyed into Jack’s little cradle and thought – oh, God, in a matter of hours that could be filled with a tiny 8 pound dictator and my life will never be the same.  The panic passed, though, and as I lay down in bed that night and settled in to read myself to sleep, I got a good round kick from the dictator, as if to say – THAT’S for doubting me, Mom.  (I also had bright pink shiny feet when I went to bed last night.  They have been swollen and itchy and painful through the last parts of pregnancy, but they have never been that ungodly color.  Patrick said the looked like strawberries.  I put them up for an hour but they stayed Pepto Bismol pink, so I pulled out my "What to Expect When You’re Expecting" and looked up late-stage pregnancy diseases to make sure I wasn’t about to die of Strawberry Foot Syndrome or something.  After I’d satisifed myself that I didn’t have preeclampsia, or eclampsia, or any of a hundred other scary things that have swollen feet as a symptom, I just shoved them under the covers so I couldn’t see them anymore and in the morning, they were back to normal.)

 

In my dream last night, I was standing backstage in a huge auditorium.  There were three of us preparing to do a synchronized Middle Eastern type of dance, wearing veils and belly-baring outfits and no shoes.  I stepped out on the stage, the lights came up, and then I looked apprehensively down at my belly, uncovered for the whole audience to see.  I was expecting to see a big flabby pooch, an empty sack swinging back and forth, but it was back to exactly how it was before I got pregnant.  Smooth, a little round, with taut brown summer skin and fine golden hairs and my normal old deep dark belly button.  I breathed a sigh of relief, and then an announcer said over the PA – Ladies and Gentlemen, our middle dancer this evening, a Mrs. Gillian E –, is joining us tonight after having a baby only yesterday!  Isn’t she amazing, folks?  And the crowd oohed and aahed, and I beamed and spun around and around and around, like a whirling dervish, basking in the praise and marveling at the return of my beautiful body.

 

Later, as I left the auditorium after the show, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember meeting my son, or labor, or giving birth.  I couldn’t remember any of it, and I began to cry, cursing the drugs that they’d given me that rendered the experience painless, but made me forget it all.  Oh, I moaned, if I could do it again I wouldn’t take the drugs!  Never again will I take the drugs!  Oh, my son, my son!!  I beat my breast and tore my hair in the middle of a subway station, and I missed my train because I was so upset.  My dream self, it would appear, suffers from bipolar disorder.

 

In closing, because it is Shakespeare’s birthday after all, a little Shakespeare factoid for you.  This is one of my favorite Shakespeare stories.  I can’t recall every detail, so don’t quote me in a term paper, but the story goes something like this:

 

John Burbage (I think) had built a theatre on the London-proper side of the Thames River, having leased the land for a set period of time.  He called it, simply, The Theatre.  By the time the lease ran out, his son Richard (I think) and Will Shakespeare (and lots of others) were the actor/owners of the interest in the The Theatre, and they attempted to renegotiate the lease terms with the landowner.  At the time, though, as London was expanding and becoming more crowded and socio-economically stratified, the very people who flocked to all of the City’s theatres in droves were equally vocal about driving them out of the city limits, onto the other side of the Thames (aka the other side of the tracks, where actors, prostitutes, tramps, and other disreputable folk belonged.)  The land holder would not meet any kind of reasonable terms with Burbage et. al., claiming ownership of the building and everything in it, and it looked like The Theatre was doomed.  So in the dead of night while the landowner was away, Burbage, Shakespeare, and the rest of the crew descended upon The Theatre with carpentry tools and began to dismantle it, carrying as much as they could that night into a warehouse down the street.  By the time the city woke up in the morning, The Theatre was largely pulled down and in pieces, and large bits of it had been carted away.  The land owner sputtered and spat and called the Privy Council and tried to make a fuss, but Richard could prove that his father John owned every stick of lumber in the place, and the landowner had no claim on the building itself.  The Privy Council agreed.  The next spring the actor/owners rebuilt it in its new space across the Thames River.  They called their newly located building The Globe.