[Download] "Flesh and Fortune: Coming Back to Measure for Measure (Essay)" by Northwest Review ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Flesh and Fortune: Coming Back to Measure for Measure (Essay)
- Author : Northwest Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 179 KB
Description
I'm sitting in the campus cafeteria eating lunch with Gary Blackton, Professor of Management at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. My turkey sandwich refuses to hold together no matter how many times I rearrange its elements. Despite Gary's laryngitis and the raucous chatter of students all around us, despite having heard him speak only once in the last forty years, his baritone voice is so familiar to me that it triggers a rush of memories. He's silent now, eating his split pea soup, but I keep hearing him cry out "Death is a fearful thing." I know Gary not as Professor Blackton but as Claudio, the condemned romantic hero of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, from a 1967 production we acted in together as students at Franklin and Marshall College. While he played the heartthrob, his thirty-five speeches filled with poetry and memorable lines that showed great depths of soul, I played Pompey the pimp and bartender, a typical Shakespearean clown or fool, whose sixty speeches contained exactly two lines of poetry that showed his sense of self-inflation. The part seemed to fit Gary well; for me, portraying Pompey let me become something altogether alien. But I loved being the bawdy jester, someone wise to the ways of the world, especially the ways of men and women together, trusting his own instincts, listening to the counsel of city officials but determined to make his way "as the flesh and fortune shall better determine."