When I was 11, and moping around the house acting bored, my father handed me a book and told me to read it. The book was a 19th-century edition of Shakespeare's Works and it was opened to Hamlet. I reacted the same way I had when my father had handed me a book of Shelley's poetry to read: I took it and said thanks and pretended to read it. But this time, I actually looked at the opening of Hamlet and started to read it. I was hooked. From that time, Shakespeare became my life and, eventually, my career.
My father was a Sicilian named Gaetano Ioppolo, who emigrated at age 14 to the US with his family because, as he told me once, they were all starving to death in Sicily. Nearly every year for the previous 20 years, his father had worked six months each year in the US as a manual laborer and then returned to Sicily for the next six months to be with his family. My father never seemed connected to his father and thought that the family's permanent move to the US would give him the whole, loving family, and the unlimited opportunities promised by America, that he so desperately wanted.
But just as the ship was about to leave Italy, his mother used some excuse to get off, claiming she had to look after her married daughter in Sicily a little longer and that she would come to them in the US on the next ship. My brother, with his two other sisters and his father, dutifully stayed on the ship, assuming that his mother was speaking the truth. In reality, her arranged marriage to my grandfather had never made her happy, and the idea of leaving Sicily and living with him full-time was so upsetting that she was willing to sacrifice my father and his sisters to avoid her husband. My father didn't see his mother again until almost 20 years later when he was sent as a US Army officer to Italy at the end of World War II. My two aunts never saw their mother again. My grandfather returned to Sicily for the last years of his life, with my grandmother, ironically, nursing him through a slow death by cancer.
My father, the boy who must have been at the top of his class in his hometown in Sicily, arrived in New Jersey with no English, and his new teachers decided that he should be put in 2nd grade. At 14, my father was so humiliated at being in a class of 7 year-old children that he never went back after the first day of his new school in America, or so my aunt told me many years later. Instead, my father decided that he was going to educate himself, as my mother told me many years later, by sitting in the library each day reading classic books and encyclopedias in English.
It was only when I was a student in college that I learned the term for my father's self-education: "autodidact". But I always thought the word was too clinical and dispassionate to suit him. As a teenager, I asked my mother why he had just spent a large amount of money buying a complete Encyclopedia Britannica, but she patiently explained that this set was the latest version of the set he had used each day in the library to teach himself everything.
My father's brilliance was legendary in my family and among our friends. As a professor, I meet a lot of brilliant people, but I still think that my father was the smartest person I've ever met (my husband is a close second, which explains why I married him). My father spent many happy years in the US Army, where an intelligence unit finally made use of his brilliance and assigned him to serve first as an Italian interpreter and then a reconnaissance photo-interpreter. As World War II ended, he was sent by his commanding officer at his base in Germany to look at some "camp" near Dachau, arriving two days after it had been liberated. What my father saw there caused him tremendous trauma for the rest of his life.
But the Army's use of his brilliant mind was never matched for my father, who ended up working first as a carpenter and then as a building inspector for the city of Los Angeles in order to support his growing family. He did manage to spend the last 30 years of his life in retirement, and true to form, he taught himself astronomy, bought a large telescope and spent many happy evenings trying to map the skies (his repeated invitations to teach me went unheeded). He also continued to read the Encyclopedia Britannica volume by volume. I'm not sure if he ever finished.
My father died in 2006 at the grand old age of 93. He never stopped reading Shakespeare, as well as Shelley, especially as I had returned his earlier favor to me with his Shakespeare edition by giving him some of my used English literature books, including English Romantic Poets. I also bought him several literature books in Italian, but he had long abandoned his native language, and the Sicilian dialect he also spoke, except when talking to relatives, or telling my mother something he didn't want us to hear. Verbally abused and bullied as a "wop" in New Jersey, he decided his children would only speak English so that they could have the best possible American education. But my sister and brothers and I were not really amazed when he reverted to speaking only Italian as he drifted in and out of consciousness in the days before his death.
After my father died, I found the book of Shakespeare's plays that he had thrust into my hands as a child. The spine was a bit bent from use, but the gilt-edged pages which must have attracted my father into purchasing the book after his arrival in the US were still intact. I took the book with me back to England and displayed it proudly on my office shelf next to the academically "more important" collected editions of Shakespeare. But after I did editions of Measure for Measure and King Lear for Norton, I sandwiched my father's edition between these two because I knew that his edition had led me to mine.
I've now spent 30 years teaching Shakespeare at universities in the US and the UK, including UCLA, UC Berkeley, American University, The Shakespeare Institute, and the University of Reading, and I always tell my students what we can still learn from Shakespeare about history, drama, theater, poetry, and all the other usual things you're supposed to tell students.
But for me, everything that I learned from Shakespeare I learned from my father, even from his tales of how each weekend while based in England in 1944 he had commandeered a US Army jeep to go to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch Shakespeare's plays on stage. So, every time I teach, read or write about Shakespeare, I'm with my father, the man who introduced me to the man who became the center of my career, and who both have taught me that books are life and love, in that order.
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