SHAKESPEARE AND ME.

ONE AFTERNOON, when I was eleven or so, my father came home from work with a sheepish look on his face, and a record in a paper bag under his arm. Now, that wasn't an uncommon happening: Papa might wear the same fashion in shirts and trousers for years on end, much to Maman's wry despair, but the shelves at our place groaned with books, including beautiful old leather-bound ones that he'd picked up in second-hand shops, with an unerring eye for the overlooked treasure; and our record cabinet in the living-room was stuffed to bursting with recordings of music from all over the world, and all times. Papa's sheepish look was not uncommon, either, because of what he knew Maman would say, when yet another candidate joined the motley throng. For in the cabinet's gleaming red cedar depths, jazz and blues jostled baroque concertos and ancient Greek hymns; Bill Haley rocked around the clock next to cathedral choirs singing Gregorian songs, Scottish pipe bands competed with Ravi Shankar ragas and Carmen cocked a snook at Faust!

But this particular record was to have a deep resonance in my life, for it marked the first time I had ever met the work of the man who was to have one of the deepest influences on my creative life. I can still see it now: dark green, elegant, with a reproduction of an Elizabethan miniature of a gentleman on its cover, it was called Shakespeare Songs and Consort Music: songs performed by the great English singer Alfred Deller (1912-79) who singlehandedly revived the lost, exquisite art of the counter-tenor, so popular in Shakespeare's day, and in the process, also hastened the rediscovery of the entire corpus of Elizabethan and other "early" music.

It transfixed me, that music. I can still feel the skull-tightening chills that washed over me as I first heard Deller's strange, otherworldly voice issuing from the speakers, for when you first hear a counter-tenor, you can hardly believe it. It seemed to me then exactly like the voice of fairytale, the strange voice, neither male nor female, that guides the hero through the woods and into the perilous castle. The tunes struck me next: the only one I knew was "Greensleeves", whose melancholy strains, frequently interrupted, you could hear every other week floating from the elderly ice-cream van that chugged its slow, black-smoke-blowing way through the quiet Sunday streets of our Sydney suburb. It had always meant just "Vanilla or choc-covered, love?" to me before; now I saw that Henry VIII was supposed to have written it, and marvelled with chaste twelve-year-old scorn at the extravagant lovelornness expressed in the lyrics. And then, I read the lyrics to the other songs: songs from Twelfth Night and The Tempest, from As You Like It and Measure for Measure and Hamlet and Henry V and Romeo and Juliet and Othello and King Lear. Thus it was that I first met Shakespeare, not as playwright, but as songwriter, and thus it was that he got under my skin and into my bones and blood.

You see, I was not born to Shakespeare's own mother tongue; that brisk, rich, sprawling, beautiful language which was so much more than just a bit player on the stage of his genius. No; the parental tongue that first licked this child into early shape was French. Even now, thirty-five years since I first arrived in Australia, French cadences still ride subtly, but not clearly, in my speech, so that people often glance at me, a little puzzled, and say, "And where exactly is it that you come from?" (They never guess France, by the way.)

Now, in our household, English was not supposed to cross the family threshold. My parents both speak and write and read English very well, but feeling like a tiny besieged island in a sea of Anglo-Saxonness, they insisted on the powerful language of that sea being dyked firmly outside. So if we children, rushing home from school, spoke heedlessly to them in English, they closed their ears and their faces until we remembered the edict.

My father wondered aloud how anyone could love in English: it was such an unromantic tongue, he averred--not surprisingly, as for him it was the language of business. He was determined we'd love in French, I think. And so he read the great French classics to us, complete with dramatic declamations, and often, appropriate music playing in the background: playwrights such as Moliere and Racine and Edmond Rostand. And he encouraged us to read a great deal, too, especially the great rumbustious nineteenth-century French novels, for my father's temperament is for the romantic, the extravagant, the wild and poetic and beautiful. Indeed, if he had but dared, he would have found much to nourish him in English literature: but he saw the Anglo-Saxons in Napoleon's terms, as a "nation of shopkeepers": all this despite the fact that he despised Napoleon and all triumphalism, and his natural inclination has always been the championing of the underdog and the marginal, not really a characteristic that stands out for its Frenchness!

On the other hand, my widely-read, reserved, intellectual mother--who, by virtue of being a homemaker, paradoxically saw rather a lot more of the English-speaking world than Papa did, especially as it was expressed on the shelves of the library where she went once a week to borrow armloads of books--did not make such a naive judgment. But in a sense, and despite the fact that as we grew older, she would often point us in the direction of such modern authors as D.H. Lawrence, or Anthony Burgess, or Graham Greene, she had more of a hostility to Englishness than Papa. This was expressed in a subterranean sense, by an ignoring of the English canon of literature, chief amongst whom, of course, was Shakespeare.