To celebrate the beginning of Pride month, we look to a poem in which a man looks back longingly on a special kind of gender performance: his days as a boy actor in Shakespeare’s time, when he played the female roles that women actors could not. Mark Evan Chimsky’s “The Death of Juliet” presents a tender portrait of this grown actor and his sense of loss, and offers a moving paean to the beauty of fluidity.
Chimsky’s poetry and essays have appeared in Kind Over Matter, Wild Violet, The Oakland Review and other journals. In 1997, he received the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award as new/emerging poet, and in May 2019, his musical, “The Pledge” (with music by Zev Burrows), was given a staged reading at the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The narrator of today’s poem will also appear as the focus of a new short musical, “Juliet,” and in a full-length musical in progress, “Translation,” both with music by Zev Burrows.
The Death of Juliet
By Mark Evan Chimsky
In Shakespeare’s day, boy actors played all the female roles until the onset of puberty forced them to retire or play male roles.
I was the boy who was the woman
that people loved
before everything changed, before my body gave me away,
a worse betrayal than Guildenstern or Iago’s love,
my own voice exposing me with every syllable
so that neither desire nor wit sounded the lighter notes
of a music that once was mine.
What becomes of me now,
when I must give up the hair and bodice and gown,
the illusion that is more real than nature would allow
and I am left to live my days
as one of the unremarkable ones,
the inconsequential gentleman,
the figure in the crowd?
A prisoner in the Tower who must give up the world
for a window that looks onto it
but is too narrow and small
for me to be seen at all.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Death of Juliet” copyright 2020 by Mark Evan Chimsky. It appears by permission of the author.
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