A Chainsaw for Romeo

Yesterday, I got revenge on William Shakespeare.

Needless to say, studying Shakespeare in England is one of the reasons I'm here in Bristol. But let's clear the record right now: I don't like Shakespeare. I don't froth at the mouth when given the opportunity to bask in the genius of his verse. By "studying Shakespeare," I really meant seeking revenge by pulling him down from his throne. I wanted to understand him. I wanted to understand his plays. It was the best kind of revenge I could think of. And here's why.

My relationship with the holy grail of English majors was rocky from the start. The first English essay I ever wrote was on his Romeo and Juliet. I was a new high school freshman.

Even in the early days of our author/reader relationship, Romeo and Juliet brought me to tears. Not because it was tragically sad, and not because it dramatized the timeless tragedy of unrequited love. I cried because I was drowning in my confused frustration. I cried because Shakespeare gave me a 16th-century beatdown: I stubbed my toes on cryptic language until I could hardly stumble through another scene. The verse was not only way over my head, but just low enough to slam me right between the eyes. I hated every minute of reading. When I finally finished the book, the relief that flooded me was sweet...but short-lived. I found out soon after that I not only had to read the darn thing, but write about it. For a grade.

I don't remember writing the essay, probably because I didn't use any words I knew. At the time, my logic was flawless. If Shakespeare's cryptic style won him immortality, I reasoned, why couldn't I climb to the throne of genius by clambering up big concepts like "Petrarchan love" and "dramatic irony?"

But it seemed the dramatic irony was on me. I got a C- on the paper. Mr. Dillon was nice enough to scribble "A good first try, but..." After the "but" was a list of suggestions about what went wrong and what went horrifically wrong and what went so wrong that I must have gotten it from Cliff Notes and still gotten it wrong. After that, I decided to give up being a sesquipedalian.

This week, I picked up Romeo and Juliet again. Although I still struggled to make sense of it in some parts, I understood enough to conclude this: Romeo is a pathetic, solipsistic dweep. Sitting beneath the arched gothic ceilings of the law library and reading the greatest love tragedy ever told is not a time for laughing. But I did. Bitterly.

And you know what? Reading about Romeo's self-wrought fate born of consumptive and possessive adoration for his own melancholy (a vicious circle if there ever was), I realized that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was not much different from an Alkaline Trio song. I saw the Trio last night in the Bristol 02 Academy, once more enraptured with the Chicago-based punk band's ability to blend the most upbeat riffs with witty over-the-top macabre lyrics. Something like: "I took a hammer and two nails to my eardrums long ago." Or: "I hope you take your radio to bathe with you, plugged in and ready to fall." Or here's a doozy from their closing number called "This Could Be Love":

"Step one -- slit my throat

Step two -- play in my blood

Step three -- cover me in dirty sheets and run laughing out of the house."

But it's the very excessiveness of their dark lyrics that keeps the Trio from being, well, a trio of downtrodden punked-out reincarnations of Romeo.

Shakespeare's the same way. I laughed at Romeo for the same reason I grinned as the Trio sang "I couldn't meet 'em so you cut off my fingers…One by One!" Both blended comedy with tragedy to create a delightful concoction that, in acknowledging the horrors of life, also advised us to douse those flames with humor. The message I distilled from both: tragedy is not without its funny points; humor not without its tragic points. It's time we saw that.

For example, it snowed here more than it has in 18 years. Apparently, this was such a tragedy to Bristol that classes were canceled, café's closed. People barked on cell-phones about the weather as they sloshed in icy slush. When I arrived for a VISA appointment, the receptionist was astonished that I decided to come. I was baffled. I'd ridden my bike through ten times worse to deliver papers. What a joke!

When I read Romeo and Juliet seven years ago, my ear wasn't trained to hear the thin line between tragedy and comedy snapping. Now I did. I saw how Shakespeare wasn't a pompous genius philosophizing about love, but a master satirist totally belittling his own characters with the instruments of agony and irony.*

And I tasted vengeance, that impetus of so much tragedy, that poisonous fruit of ceaseless conflict. But as I bit it, I tasted something sweet. Seems that for Billy and I, the joke was on both of us. It took the Alkaline Trio to come up with the punchline.

* (That's right Billy, it's my turn to direct you to the footnote – not so funny anymore, is it?) Alkaline Trio's newest album goes by the same title: "Agony and Irony," a title that surely is a tributary of tragedy and comedy.