By HENRY COLT
Sentinel Staff Writer
“I need a Flavius, I need a Marullus, I need a Carpenter, I need a Cobbler,” Gayle Hammons tells the three women sitting around the table Monday evening.
The women are part of an international community called iReadShakespeare, a collective of “reading circles” whose members gather regularly in their own communities to read Shakespeare plays aloud.
Since Hammons started the Baranof chapter of iReadShakespeare in November, the readers have been meeting 6:30-8 p.m. Mondays, first at the University of Alaska Southeast campus and more recently in a third floor meeting room in the Pioneers Home.
Hammons, a retired Sitka High English teacher who continues to teach literature classes online through UAF, has been teaching Shakespeare since 1976. During her time at Sitka High, she’d lead month-long trips to Europe, always with stops at Stratford to see Shakespeare plays performed at his place of birth.
“That was something I always wanted my students to see,” Hammons said.
But her love affair with the Bard began much earlier, in her ninth- grade English class, when she read “Julius Caesar” and “Romeo and Juliet.” (She said she preferred “Romeo and Juliet.”)
In college in Northern California, Hammons took three Shakespeare classes. She also needed to fulfill her P.E. requirement so she took a square-dancing class, where she met a blue-eyed forestry major who also loved Shakespeare.
English teacher Gayle Hammons, right, leads a reading of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” Monday night in the Pioneers Home. Residents Betty Decicco, left, and Shirley Anderson read lines from the play and discussed the meaning of the text. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
A year after graduating, she married the forestry major and moved to Sitka. “Our daughter was born here, we built our house here, and we’re staying here forever,” Hammons said.
Hammons has made it clear that in the iReadShakespeare group, she’s as much a participant as she is a teacher.
Monday night, having finished “The Comedy of Errors,” the readers start “Julius Caesar.”
In Act 1, Scene 1, Hammons reads the part of Marullus, and turns some heads with her spirited delivery.
Still the teacher, she can’t help but pause every few stanzas to enthusiastically explain some relevant nugget of Shakespearean information: a double meaning, a new word, a strange piece of Roman history, an example of Shakespeare’s categorical mistrust of skinny people.
The three members of the reading group, two of them Pioneers Home residents, pay close attention to these mini-lessons.
“I had a captive audience in the high school, but now I have an audience that chooses to be captive,” Hammons jokes.
Kim Hunter, a retired nurse whose three kids were Hammons’ students at Sitka High, reads the part of Flavius.
Shirley Anderson, a Pioneers Home resident who is also a retired nurse, reads the part of the carpenter. The other Pioneers Home resident, Betty Decicco, reads the part of the cobbler. In her working life, she says with a smile, “mostly I was busy raising my own kids!”
After the first few sessions at UAS, it was Decicco’s idea to relocate iReadShakespeare to the Pioneers Home. She wanted to be able to attend every session.
“It’s hard to keep it all in my mind, because I don’t really know anything (about Shakespeare),” said Decicco, who turned 90 last September. “But I like stimulation; I like to try new things.”
But Decicco’s statement about her lack of Shakespeare knowledge is becoming less and less true by the week. In conversation after Monday’s reading session, she summarized “The Comedy of Errors” in a few deft sentences.
Decicco said her children, who live in the lower 48, have made her “report in” on her Shakespeare sessions. She has also started a running telephone conversation about “The Comedy of Errors” with a 17-year-old granddaughter who is a high school senior in Seattle.
What inspired her to join Hammons’ Shakespeare reading group?
“I figured it was time to learn something new,” Decicco said. “If I didn’t do it now, I might not ever have the time to do it.”
