In a past life, Mana magazine editor Derek Fox asked me to take a photo of the bookbinder Bill Tito. Derek had written a human interest piece on a lovely man who came to the big city and landed an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, a master craft he has practised ever since. He’s nearly 80.
Bill is not only a lovely man but also interested in everything, and he had built a marketing style that revolved around pithy rhymes and his own natural charisma and charm. One of his catchlines was, “Don’t despair, think repair.”
Books are one of my indulgences and stepping into Bill’s workshop was to enter a wonderland of history and craftsmanship. It was filled with old and severely worn titles people had treasured over generations and couldn’t bear to get rid of.
Many were copies of The Bible the size of a modest doorstep. One was tiny and could fit into the palm of your hand. But it didn’t matter – Bill would lovingly restore them all. Many others were editions of Shakespeare’s works, also heirlooms that he restored to their former glory.
In a recent radio ad, he referred to Shakespeare as England’s kaumātua. That sounds to me like an expression of the utmost respect, which was how Bill intended it. Kaumātua can mean elder, but it’s more than that. It encapsulates wisdom and reverence. It’s a different meaning to rangatira, or chief/leader, but the two terms can overlap considerably.
It was too much for some listeners to Newstalk ZB, where Bill was the target of racist vitriol in letter and by phone from mostly anonymous dickheads.
There were insults about Māori literacy and just general racist nastiness. (Actually, in the 19th century, many Māori were more literate than many Pākehā getting off the boat, who weren’t exactly speaking Shakespearean English, while some iwi had their own printing presses.)
One woman accused Bill of virtue signalling. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have a clue what she was on about – he doesn’t use email, let alone Facebook. But it’s clear from her letter that this woman is a white supremacist, and a gutless one at that. She wasn’t the only one. Suffice to say, Bill Tito was baffled and hurt. He does not deserve that kind of rubbish.
Some Pākehā have a notion that everyone from the land of their forebears lived in castles and sat around reading Shakespeare all day, making them direct heirs and guardians to high culture and civilisation. The more likely history is that they’re descended from illiterate peasants who left a shithole of a place in the hope of something better on the other side of the world.
One of my first Pākehā ancestors to land here was a kid who, with his family, left County Monaghan in Ireland barely a generation after the famine and arrived here in the middle of the Land Wars. He was illiterate and spoke Gaelic. Within one generation, he and his sons owned several farms on confiscated land. Their something better came at someone else’s expense.
In his day, Shakespeare was entertainment mainly for the illiterate lower classes; his works didn’t become canonised and revered as a high point in English literature until some time after his death. Only then did they become objects of status for upper-class snobs (and colonial wannabes).
One of the strengths of the English language is that it’s a mongrel of a thing. It’s a mix of influences, including Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Celtic, Latin, French and German.
Shakespeare ripped off narratives and characters and locations from other countries’ histories all the time, including Italy and Denmark. Did the Italians tell him to cease and desist because he was sullying their high culture with lowbrow productions?
Like all great literature, Shakespeare transcends his own time and place because he’s dramatising the human condition, which is why his work has been produced in so many different ways. Leonardo DiCaprio featured in a version of Romeo and Juliet set amid a mob feud in a stylised Los Angeles. Do those who bitched at Bill Tito object to that?
In 2012, the recreated Globe Theatre in London staged 37 performances of 37 Shakespeare plays by 37 theatre groups from around the world. One of those groups was Māori, Ngākau Toa, featuring Rawiri Paratene, one of our country’s finest actors and a lover of Shakespeare. The costuming, language and performance were totally Māori and totally Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare aficionados viewing it were completely blown away by the intensity.
Does that offend the sensibilities of ZB listeners?
I reckon Old Will would be chuffed to be referred to as a kaumātua. And I also think Old Will would thank Old Bill Tito as a kaumātua and rangatira of his craft for preserving his works in physical form so lovingly.
