By Mary Ann Koory

In 2010, Linda Swanson, I, and friends attended a thrilling CalShakes production of Macbeth in Orinda.  As we took our seats, twilight filling the bowl of the Bruns Amphitheater, Linda said, “Did you hear that?”  As a non-birder I am used to Linda noticing the presence of birds no matter where we are.  Perhaps your friends have remarked on the same thing about you.  It’s as if there is another world co-existing with our ordinary, urban world, one that we non-birders are only intermittently aware. I looked up from setting out cheese and crackers and listened. A Great Horned Owl hooted.

In about 15 minutes, Lady Macbeth would pace across the stage, waiting for her husband to say that he had stabbed King Duncan. As she waits, she hears a noise – but it’s not Macbeth. “Hark! Peace!/It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman . . .” (2.2.3-4) she says to herself. The sound of the owl reminds Lady Macbeth of the bell that rang in Renaissance towns to announce a death.  She, waiting for news of a murder that violates social connections, hears the owl calling like the bell that signals a community to pause and mourn the loss of a neighbor.

Most of us have no idea what a “fatal bellman” is without a footnote. Over 400 years separate us from Shakespeare, the customs of rural England, and the commercial theaters of London. But when the actress spoke Shakespeare’s words, her voice, the sounds of a Great Horned Owl in the 21^st-century Orinda twilight, the play-acted owl outside a castle in medieval Scotland, the “shriek” described by a 16^th-century playwright for his rowdy city audiences, and the solemn tone of a church bell in Renaissance England all resonated together in the same moment.

Linda and I, both English teachers, were enchanted by the way the imaginary and the real owl connected us to Shakespeare and our world to Shakespeare’s natural world. Since then, Lesley and Bob Currier at Marin Shakespeare Company in San Rafael have given us the opportunity to explore connections between the metaphorical birds that appear in Shakespeare’s plays and the literal birds that appear here in California where his plays are performed.  Since 2013, Linda has led a bird walk through the lovely Dominican University campus where Marin Shakespeare’s Forest Meadows Amphitheater is located, afterwards I, over dinner in the Amphitheater, talk about the birds that will appear in the Shakespeare production that follows.…