Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

by Adam Bertocci

  a fair friend, who never can be old. He died as did so many of his generation, ere his time. In Thy wisdom, Lord, Thou didst take him, as Thou took so many bright flowering young men, i’ the jungles of the Orient. These young men gave their lives, and Donald too; Donald who loved to play at ninepins.

  And so, Sir Donald, in fairest accordance

  With what your wishes last well might have been,

  We make commitment of your last remains

  To the deep bosom of the ocean buried,

  A peaceful progress to the ocean, which

  You loved so well. Now cracks a bowler’s heart.

  He scatters the ashes.

  Good night, sweet prince,

  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

  THE KNAVE

  But soft! The sorrow’s wind hath strewn the ash

  And cover’d me in that we came to spill.

  WALTER

  Alack! Blown winds and crackèd cheeks! Raged! Blown!

  THE KNAVE

  Thou art an ass! A stupefying ass!

  WALTER

  Apologies.

  THE KNAVE

  Thou hast ruin’d all again!

  Thou makest all a travesty of pain!

  _____________

  WALTER

  ’Twas accident! I meant not for the breeze.

  THE KNAVE

  Thy statement, man! The stuff on jungle war.

  What signifies thy foreign conflict here?

  What signifies thy deadly-standing speech?

  I’ll have no more; thou art a raging fool.

  WALTER

  I stand before thee tainted with remorse, and beg thy mercy; I am overcome. A pox upon’t, Knave; let us play at ninepins.

  Exeunt.

  SCENE 5

  A game of bowls.

  The tavern near the bowling green. Enter THE KNAVE and MISTRESS QUICKLY.

  THE KNAVE

  I’ll have two ales of oat-brew, hostess fair.

  MISTRESS QUICKLY

  Anon. My fondest wishes for the sport

  In tourney celebrated on the morrow.

  THE KNAVE

  I give thee thanks.

  MISTRESS QUICKLY

  And I thee sadder thoughts;

  It rent my heart to read of Donald’s fall.

  THE KNAVE

  ’Tis well; sometimes thou exits in pursuit

  Of bear, and sometimes he doth pursue thee.

  Enter CHORUS.

  But here’s the man of whom I had these words!

  I wonder’d if he’d cross my path again.

  CHORUS

  I dare not miss the semifinal games.

  How fares my good and noble friend the Knave?

  THE KNAVE

  Thou knowest; strikes and gutters, ups and downs.

  CHORUS

  Marry, be of ease, O gentle Knave;

  I know thou wilt.

  THE KNAVE

  Thou know’st. The Knave abideth.

  Exeunt all but CHORUS.

  EPILOGUE

  CHORUS

  ‘The Knave abideth’. I dare speak not for thee, but this maketh me to be of good comfort; I deem it well that he be out there, the Knave, being of good ease for we sinners. I hope he proveth well in the tourney.

  If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this and all is mended,

  That you have but slumbered here

  While these visions did appear.

  And all wrapp’d up be this idle theme,

  A noble and a pretty story-dream

  Made me laugh to overtake the band,

  Parts, in sooth; and others less so scann’d.

  I did not like to see Sir Donald go,

  But then, the fellow wise is like to know

  That on the way’s a little Lebowski

  Perpetuating human comedy

  Down through the generations; westward on,

  Across the sands of time—but heed my song;

  I ramble yet, and so must take my leave,

  And hope thou liked my tale of the good Knave.

  If we be friends, I’ll catch thee down the trail

  And we shall share sarsaparilla ale.

  For never was a story of more glee

  Than this of Geoffrey and the Big Lebowski.

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  THE REST IS SILENCE

  “The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement … They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach.”

  —Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

  Hamlet had his question and I had mine: “What if”—pause for effect—“William Shakespeare wrote The Big Lebowski?”

  I suppose I owe you an explanation.

  The summer of 2009 was a magical time to be a Bardolator. Visionary director Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest was in postproduction. Noted Shakespearean actor Brian Blessed was making plans to explore outer space while boisterously shouting in iambic pentameter. Academy Award nominee Anne Hathaway was playing Viola in Twelfth Night. And the failing economy meant more time for reading instead of gainful employment or the trials of home ownership.

  My own plans were less ambitious: chill with friends, get a little writing done. Panic about being in my late twenties and not having done anything with my life.

  Although I did catch Twelfth Night. Great show. Hathaway signed my program afterward, took a picture with me. Laughed at my dumb joke about her name. Big fan here.

  Then glorious summer blazed out, winter came, and I was discontent.

  A few weeks later, there I was, bedecked in my finest bathrobe. Typing like a madman at two o’clock on a cold Sunday morning, with a Shakespeare concordance at my side and a half-liter of Coke Zero acid-frying my innards.

  I can’t explain why I thought it was a good idea. I’m not sure I thought, period. Bloggers, fans, and cultured types of every stripe ask what made me do it. I wish I knew. It just kind of happened.

  Someone always brings up the authorship question: Did Shakespeare write all of his plays? I demur. Honestly, I don’t care who wrote them. Why should I? So what if it was Kit Marlowe? Does that help me get through the day?

  Instead, I’d like you to join me on an imaginative adventure. A voyage of consciousness, of the mind. The only kind of journey worth taking.

  London. The tail end of the Elizabethan era. A contingent from the Globe Theatre attends an extraordinary new play.

  The audience for The Big Lebowski is small but appreciative. The group pours out praising the inventive staging, the idiosyncratic characters, the marvelous dances. Only William Shakespeare remains quiet, kicking a piece of litter down the road. He’s seen something of himself up on that stage.

  He becomes inspired. He swipes the prompter’s notes from the theater company and decides he’s going to write his own version. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, he calls it, and he knocks out the first draft in a weekend. He cackles to himself, shows all his actor friends, starts figuring out which part will go to Richard Burbage and which to Will Kempe. And he finds that the more time he spends with the work, the more he wonders how anyone but he wrote something so Shakespearean.

  This is my contention: If The Big Lebowski had premiered in 1598, Shakespeare would have ripped it off by 1603.

  It’s not so hard to believe. The vast majority of Shakespeare’s plays (the bulk of the series, if you will) can be linked to prior sources: history, classic stories, even the original work of other writers.

  Romeo and Juliet was based on a pair of all-too-real doomed lovers, celebrated in a poem by Arthur Brooke and a short story by William Painter. Hamlet may well have its roots in a lost Thomas Kyd play from the previous decade. The Taming of the Shrew stole a subplot from the poet Ludovico Ariosto. Othello came from a short story by Cinthio; Shakespeare’s contribution was partially a rewrite and partially a translation into Elizabethan English. (Why someone would do that, who can say.)

  In Shakespeare’s
simpler, happier, plague-ridden times, plots and ideas were freely shared and adapted and reworked. Shakespeare thrived in an entertainment industry obsessed with remakes, adaptations, and mashups—just like Hollywood today. No wonder they say his stories are timeless.

  But the beauty of Shakespeare was never in the plot alone. To think of The Big Lebowski only in terms of its narrative of toes and marmots and ringers is to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The real beauty is in the language, the wonderful characters, the text from which springs one memorable quote after another. Shakespeare regularly thumbed his nose at complex plots and thorny details: he waffles on Hamlet’s age, fudges the geography in The Winter’s Tale, wraps up loose ends with magic fairies and impromptu weddings, and hurls about wacky coincidences with sitcom-level abandon. That’s life. That’s why he would have loved the Dude’s story. He knew what was important.

  The facts are these: (1) William Shakespeare was unquestionably the greatest writer who ever lived. (2) He loved a good dick joke. The Big Lebowski is certainly a piece of art, worthy of study and intelligent criticism, but it’s also obsessed with the status of one’s Johnson and legendary for its profanity. The clash of high and low culture is quintessentially Shakespearean as well, and the groundlings who giggled at “country matters” and “Faith, her privates we” in Hamlet are treated to a host of lowbrow hijinks in Lebowski, with its merry misadventures of roguish rascals chasing fast cash and drunken sport. We can easily imagine an Elizabethan Dude and Walter lost in some enchanted forest, cussin’ along the way.

  And the Dude fits into a glorious tradition of lazy, cheery scamps in literature. One can hardly think of Shakespeare’s jovial, iconoclastic, dissolute genius Falstaff without wondering how he might enjoy White Russians or bowling. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom asserts, “It is the comprehensiveness of Falstaff’s consciousness that puts him beyond us.” He goes on: “I hear a great wit, but also an authentic sage, destroying illusions … rather in the mode of certain great poets who were not exactly wholesome and productive citizens.” The Knave abideth, indeed.

  “Lebowski is a bit like a Shakespeare comedy, if only in the light-hearted sense that it celebrates life and love,” observe J. M. Tyree and Ben Walters in their BFI Film Classics study of The Big Lebowski. Indeed, the film hews so close to classic Shakespearean comic devices that it verges on parody. It’s a comedy of errors of mistaken identity, narrow escapes, and wise fools. The refined establishment against the wilder fringes of civilization. A little slapstick. Even cross-dressing gets a sly nod when Maude dons her future lover’s robe, slyer still when one recalls that Shakespeare’s Maude would have been played by a boy. All it’s missing is twins.

  Like many dramatists of his day, Shakespeare often employed a prologue and/or an epilogue. The role would be assayed by a character or an outside narrator; occasionally Shakespeare would blur the two for artistic effect and/or metatheatrical comment. (Our appreciation of Rosalind’s direct address in As You Like It, for instance, depends in part on our recognition of the actor’s identity. Sam Elliott, anyone?) Consulting A Study of the Prologue and Epilogue in English Literature, from Shakespeare to Dryden by G. S. Bower, we learn that costume was a key element of identifying a character “not known otherwise than by his style and title of ‘The Prologue.’” We can conclude, then, that Shakespeare dug his prologue’s style.

  Every kid suffering through middle school English gets the fun little handout about the words and phrases that the Bard invented. As Bernard Levin famously pointed out, we’re always quoting Shakespeare. What’s more, Shakespeare was always quoting himself. Witness his use of the “rain it raineth” song, first in Twelfth Night and later in King Lear. Notice how his characters employ repetition, as in Iago’s grilling of Othello in Act III, turning the Moor’s words against him. And in Julius Caesar, as Antony emphasizes that Brutus is “an honourable man,” each restatement adds new meaning to the message. As Stockton Axson notes in Shakespeare: Thinker, Showman, and Artist, “The same thought is repeated in many different situations through the mouths of many different characters … And in the very repetitions there is a suggestion of an echo of Shakespeare’s own personal thoughts.”

  Thoughts, but also words. Lebowski is the ultimate example of linguistic propagation. Characters pass language back and forth, often quoting one another, and before long idiosyncratic verbiage on the order of “unchecked aggression” and “in the parlance of our time” is careening all over California. A trademark precision in word choice is on full display in Lebowski, with every pause, phrase, and epithet calculated in masterly style, and close attention to the text upon repeat readings only adds to our appreciation. Only a Shakespearean mind could play with words the way these characters do. Time and again, they ask each other, in effect, what the fuck they’re talking about; even the subtle shifts in tone between “special lady” and “lady friend” are brought into fullest examination. The Big Lebowski could hardly not be Shakespearean, because it’s about one of the most Shakespearean things of all: the English language.

  And that’s what it all comes back to: language. “Words, words, words,” as the fellow said. I’ve loved these words. I’ve loved poring over the canon, discarding elements of the “bad quarto” and incorporating more accurate texts to create this, the definitive edition of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, the lost work that the immortal Bard never wrote.

  It’s ironic, but I’m left with an authorship question of my own. I mean, I wrote it, I dig seeing my name on the cover. But I just don’t think it’s that simple.

  Call me a receptacle, a steward, an avatar. Call me the conduit of an important idea. Maybe Shakespeare himself played muse to me, reaching down through history, flicking me on the forehead, instilling in me the strength—no, the responsibility—to finish his last work.

  Or maybe I’m just a guy in a bathrobe, grasping at poetic fantasies to justify what, let’s face it, could have been a complete waste of time.

  That’s good enough for me. It’s been a great ride either way. Besides, my college reunion’s coming up, and I needed something to show for the last five years besides some highlighted Folger editions and a picture of me with Anne Hathaway.

  I still can’t explain why I did it. Only one person ever could, and he’s been dead since 1616. Shakespeare knew human nature better than anyone else; he was our finest philosopher. And only through the imaginative experience can we know his mind. So I keep reading. Searching for some kind of truth. Not just for an age, but for all time.

  Lately I’m hearing a new voice woven into his words.

  “Fuck it, dude,” it tells me. “Let’s go bowling.”

  That gets me through the day.

  Chorus: a character who provides exposition and commentary. The role originated in ancient Greek drama.

  kin: family

  knave: a man of humble birth or position; a roguish chap; other meanings include ‘fellow’ or ‘boy.’ The word derives from the Old English cnafa.

  bowl: to play at a game of bowls. Such games were popular in Shakespeare’s time, though often negatively compared with the more noble sport of archery. The verb dates to the 1530s.

  homelands mine: unknown. Some scholars pin this play’s Chorus as out of Western England; others, merely far from Eastern.

  arid vale: dry valley

  fair Albion: beautiful Great Britain. The name stems from the striking white cliffs of Dover (Latin alba, white).

  bawdy songs: lyrical ribaldry. Other examples of the period include Stefano’s song in The Tempest, Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale,’ John Isham’s ‘When Celia Was Learning on the Spinet to Play’ and the unattributed ‘The Comical Wager, being an Account of a Lawyer’s Wife who laid a Guinea with her Husband’s Clerk, that he did not Flourish her Seven times in an Hour.’

  Arab kings: Shakespeare refers to the Arabian King Malchus in Antony and Cleopatra, but this is a wild guess until we are privy to new historical discoverie
s

  god Olympian: one of the twelve principal deities of Greek mythology, who resided atop Mount Olympus and ruled over the known world and beyond, perhaps even up to Pismo. The group was also called the ‘Dodekatheon.’

  sloth: indolence and world-class aversion to work. One of the seven deadly sins.

  forgive thee: i.e., forgive the debt, cancel the claim

  chamber-pot: a vessel used for urination and defecation. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Menenius upbraids the Roman tribunes for their immaturity, comparing them to overacting pantomime performers stricken with colic and ‘roaring for a chamber-pot.’

  ducats: gold coins of European origin. Shakespeare was rather free with the specific value of money, with a single ducat varying in worth.

  rash egg: impolitically bold child or spawn. ‘Egg’ also calls to mind ‘zero’ (as in the French l’oeuf) and hints at the thugs’ unimpressed reaction to the Knave’s dwelling.

  deadbeat: a person who evades the payment of, or defaults on, a debt

  profanes: debases, defiles, corrupts

  Geoffrey, the married man: Elizabethan mores viewed bachelorhood with suspicion. Men were expected to be married, and often had to be to accept public office or important civic responsibilities.

  baldric: a belt or sash worn over the shoulder

  lid of my chamber-pot: a lid is customarily placed upon the pot to contain odours. Leaving it off indicates the Knave’s incivility and lack of a wife.

  confounded: perplexed. Blanche means ‘confounding,’ though that is not the issue here.

  orb: sphere

  ninepins: the sport of kings. Variants and alternate names include loggats, kayles, and skittles. Shakespeare frequently referred to the sport: in The Taming of the Shrew, it is a metaphor for Petruchio’s courtship of Katherine; in Coriolanus, Menenius compares his over-committed loyalty to the title character to a poorly rolled frame; and, most famously, Hamlet’s line ‘Ay, there’s the rub’ refers to an obstacle deflecting a bowling ball from its course.

  colfer: a player of ‘colf,’ the Dutch predecessor to the Scottish game of golf. In the sixteenth century, as the modern game filtered down from Scotland, its variants were enjoyed by commoners and royalty alike; Mary, Queen of Scots, was an avid golfer.