How does anyone truly express the fruition of a lifetime dream? Even if one is a writer by trade? Indeed, expressing the culmination of this particular dream is more difficult if one is a writer by profession and lifelong calling. Because every writer in the English language, no matter his relative achievements in books published, screenplays written and sold, articles and essays published, with critical or commercial success, for over 400 years has grown up with, has lived with, and writes with the certainty that he can only compete for second place regardless of the merits of his prose or poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction. Mr. William Shakespeare is so far ahead in first place that the gap will not grow smaller in another 400 years, or I venture even 4,000.
In early August, 2007, through the abundant beneficence of the Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival and its so very generous sponsors, this writer was finally able to kneel in long, prayerful silence at the grave of William Shakespeare within a small, beautiful old church in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I prayed to no god, because I no longer believe in any--but I did pray. The words of my silent prayer will forever be known only to me; and that is as it should be. To give them voice would be an act of arrogance beyond measure.
Yes, I and the three so very talented student-actors who traveled with me to London, Stratford-Upon-Avon and beautiful old Oxford as reward for winning first prize in the Third Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival, visited many grand and wondrous places within the cradle of so much of Western history, thought and ideals. We saw and experienced with awe and wonderment Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, the National Gallery, the British History Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace, (sans the Queen, she was traveling) a boat ride down the Thames, Shakespeare's Globe, magnificent, humbling Oxford University and its lovely village, and several memorable pubs with an abundance of Bells Whisky, great ales, beers, and marvelous Fish & Chips (but alas not a single good restaurant anywhere; I now better understand Great Britain's once insatiable need for colonies--it was in quest of chefs and cuisines).
But for me there was nothing even remotely comparable to those sublimely humble moments on my knees in Holy Trinity Church before the stones under which lay the bones of the greatest wordsmith who ever lived.
The gentleman pictured with the BFSU troupe in the photograph at the top of this post is Patrick Spottiswoode, Education Director for Shakespeare's Globe. Except for that candid snapshot, the other photographs were taken by Cui Xinyu and Liang Xingyi
