A delightful podcast provoked three unexpected memories and a think about the differences between coincidence and serendipity.
Let me start with a PSA: if you have any affection for or curiosity about Shakespeare, then don’t miss the delightful book Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea, which is part discussion about the plays by two talented actors and part stealth memoir of Dench. I listened to the audiobook edition; O’Hea and Barbara Flynn, a soundalike for Dench, read most of it. Dench’s vision is now too poor to do the narration herself. However, Dench comes in at the start, to perform speeches throughout, and as one half of a 44 minute “podcast” at the end which is a bonus for audiobook listeners.
That charming podcast—which gives listeners a window into Dench and O’Hea’s loving yet combative friendship—is my focus today because it catalyzed three cascading and vivid memories, all during one quick trip to and from the gym.
I hope you’ll find the memories interesting by themselves, but the reason I’m talking about them is because they provoked me to think about the differences between serendipity and coincidence, which I’ll get to at the end.
Memory #1: O’Hea asks Dench to describe for the listeners her excursion of the night before—a celebration of Shakespeare at Windsor Castle where she sat in the Royal Box with King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
On display in the box was the Royal family’s copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632) that is additionally famous because it was owned by the first King Charles, who read it before his beheading by Cromwell’s revolutionaries in 1649. Before his execution, King Charles I annotated the Second Folio with the names of some of his favorite characters: including Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, Rosalind from As You Like It, and Pyramus and Thisbe from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (all comedies, and who can blame him?)
Dench waxed doubly hagiographic (look it up) about being able to touch a book of Shakespeare’s plays that the first King Charles had owned and annotated centuries ago (although the annotator might also have been his attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert).
For me, though, this story triggered a memory of a less quasi-religious experience. Back in grad school, I got a grant to travel to The Royal Library at Windsor Castle (I was already working in in London at the British Museum and Shakespeare’s Globe that summer) to inspect this very book. I appeared at the library, presented my credentials, stored all of my belongings except for pencils and paper, washed my hands, and then walked through the security door where the librarian handed me the book and pointed to a desk where I could work. No angels sung at that moment, not even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I spent a few hours with the book, which was indeed interesting, and then got on a bus back to London.
I am not devoid of wonder. Earlier that summer, when I walked into the Globe (a historically accurate reconstruction), it was the closest thing to transcendence I’ve experienced outside the births of my children. But the book was a book.
Still driving and listening to the podcast, that triggered…
Memory #2: A few years earlier, I’d spent a year on fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin, where I took a fantastic class in Shakespearean Theater History. (It troubles me that I can’t remember the professor’s last name: he was always “John.”) Early in the term, we had a class in the old documents library, where John passed around different early modern play texts: the originals. As the student next to me handed me one hefty volume, John pointed and said, “oh, that’s the First Folio.”
I froze. Back home in California were two different facsimiles of the First Folio: one a reproduction of Yale’s and one a copy of the remarkable Norton First Folio that compiles the best-quality copy of each page from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s extensive collection. It’s a sort of Platonic ideal or a facsimile of a book that doesn’t really exist. (There’s a long and fascinating story behind this one that I’ll share another time.)
But the book in my hands was no facsimile: it was the real thing, treated in a casual way that surprised me… but it shouldn’t have because I was at a university in Irelandwhere the British were the historical oppressors. John loved Shakespeare, taught the plays and history, but he didn’t have the same level of worship as Dame Judi at Windsor Castle.
Memory #3: Driving home after the gym I resumed listening to the podcast, where O’Hea talked about how at Robben Island in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for many years, the prisoners disguised a copy of Shakespeare’s Works as a religious book for fear that their jailers would take it away because the plays portray people questioning authority, rebelling, and otherwise causing trouble.
Next to these lines from Act 2, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, Mandela had signed his name:
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
This cast me back still earlier to peaceful, anti-apartheid, divestment protests in college—we’d sway and sing “free Nelson Mandela”—while asking our universities to sell off investments in companies doing business with South Africa.
I hadn’t thought about those protests in a long time, but the collisions among the Shakespeare audiobook, my other memories, and the story about Robben Island all combined to take me back.
Serendipity versus Coincidence
If you poke around dictionaries or ask pointy questions of ChatGPT or Perplexity, then the difference between serendipity and coincidence you’ll find is about the emotional qualities of the two phenomena. Coincidence is neutral; serendipity is positive.
But I don’t think that’s helpful. Instead, I think that serendipity is the product of certain kinds of attention. We bring something to experiences of serendipity. In contrast, coincidence is just surprise when you encounter something or somebody out of context.
Back in my Berkeley teaching days, for an example of coincidence, when I’d bump into my students outside the classroom or my office, they’d often seem jarred by seeing me—say, at a grocery store. I once quipped, “what, do you think I sleep in a coffin underneath my desk in the classroom?” The student didn’t laugh.
Earworms are neither coincidence nor serendipity. For the last several days, I’ve had the Waylon Jennings theme song from the 1980s Dukes of Hazzard TV show rolling around my head. I have no idea why, and I hope it will leave soon.
I have been building Shakespearean context in my head since I was 15 and found myself reading Romeo and Juliet in Mr. Holmes’ 10th grade English class at the same time that I had a spear-carrying role in a production of Twelfth Night. That was a long time ago.
Listening to Shakespeare: the Man That Pays the Rent, I brought all that context with me, so I was already in an associative frame of mind that the stories activated, and then activated again and again.
We create the conditions for serendipity. Coincidences just happen.
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Some background: in earlier Dispatches, I’ve explored reactivating old contexts by revisiting places, how stumbling across an old book or photo can provoke sudden time travel, and the physical side of experience stacks.
I’m also indebted to Steve Knapp, whose 1993 book Literary Interest: the Limits of Anti-Formalism taught me a lot about we create a sense of what counts as literary via the kind of attention we bring with us. This is far from my only debt to Steve, in whose Milton seminar La Profesora and I first started to get to know each other.
Image Prompt: I uploaded an image of Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” to Adobe Photoshop and asked the AI to replace the melting clocks with melting faces of William Shakespeare. It didn’t get there, but among the options this one was intriguing, so I decided to use it.
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