Shakespeare: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bard

During the spring of my freshman year in high school, my English class put on a production--and I use that term loosely--of Romeo and Juliet. It wasn't love at first sight. Our Romeo (Dusty) and Juliet (Mara) refused to hold hands, much less paw each other like star-crossed lovers are supposed to. As Friar Laurence, I ambled around in a brown bathrobe with a bottle of vanilla extract (poison!) doing my best impression of a cranky old man. The language was tough. I'd read the play and studied my lines, but I think most of us only had a foggy idea of what we were talking about. All in all, it was an awkward, stilted couple of hours.

I'm sure a lot of you have a memory like this. Each year, thousands of Friar Laurences with vanilla extract bottles amble around high school classrooms across America, and teachers try to show students how Shakespeare can be relatable and fun. Why? Because the education powers that be believe Shakespeare is important. Students should be exposed to him, even if they struggle to understand him. Now that I'm better acquainted with the Bard, I think they're absolutely right.

In fact, even the most cranky and pretentious academics agree that Shakespeare is every bit as brilliant as your high school teacher said he was. It's not possible for me, in a short column like this, to get at all the reasons why, but it helps to read him in the context of the literature of his time. I compare it to the experience I had walking the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Uffizi is arranged chronologically to show the progress of painting during the Italian Renaissance. Walking from the early Renaissance rooms into the first gallery of Botticellis, you see two-dimensional representations explode into the rich, realistic, and beautiful works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci that still stun us today. A light had gone on in the art world. Shakespeare was his own light--his own explosion of structural complexity, beauty of language and psychological realism (and thus, real emotional impact). He wrote with enough depth to entertain the masses at the London theaters and thrill today's stodgiest, corduroy-suited academics.

Of course, appreciating Shakespeare isn't as easy as appreciating a great painting. In high school, his English seemed to me to be another language, or at least another dialect. This difficulty was partly due to the vocabulary of Elizabethan English (and some words Shakespeare may have just invented). It's hard to appreciate a play when you're constantly checking definitions at the bottom of the page. Beyond that, I had trouble adjusting to reading plays in verse, with their line breaks, metaphorical complexities, and musical effects. I knew all the words, but I couldn't make sense of them together. I've heard a lot of students complain about this. I call it the "concussion effect" because it's how reading anything went for me for a few days after having cracked my head on a manhole (don't ask).

With a little work, all of the difficulties can be overcome. It was in college when I first read Shakespeare in earnest. I read slowly and worked at untangling the linguistic knots, and that's when his work's brilliance unfolded. The passage below from Act V, Scene V in MacBeth is one of the first that struck me. Most of you probably know it. If not, I'm excited for you--it's still one of my favorites. Here's the context: Macbeth, on a castle wall under siege by his enemies, has just learned that his wife killed herself. His murderous attempt to win power has collapsed. Stoic and accepting, he's now resigned to what he sees as the barren futility of life.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

You can pore over a passage like this for hours. It's hard work, sure, but you're digging for gold in a gold mine. William Faulkner pulled a major theme (and his title) for The Sound and the Fury from the passage. And the depth and richness here isn't a rarity. I swear you can find at least a half dozen movie titles buried in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy alone.

If you're new to Shakespeare, he has a lot, literally, to offer. He wrote 38 plays, and very few of them are considered, by his own lofty standards, to be duds. Where should you begin? Popular opinion (mine too) is that Hamlet is his greatest play, Literature scholars tend to prefer King Lear. Scholars of the Theater hold up Macbeth as, at least structurally, perfect. So make a date with the Bard. Pick up an attractive tome of his collected works (it really is a good investment). Draw a bath. Light some candles. And for God's sake, don't rush things.

Comments

[shedances]

John ~ though many of us were turned off of Shakespeare as kids by the boring, often dispassionate teaching methods of our well-meaning educators ... the good news is, that there are fine productions for adults & youth alike of such popular works as Macbeth, As You Like It, Henry VI, & so on. I've been to a few of these, & found such theatrical readings to be an excellent way to 'reintroduce' Shakespeare into my adult life. It's also been wonderful for my teenagers!

Kelli

[glitzqueen]

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" should be required reading in second or third grade. I chanced to find it at seven and fell in love with Shakespeare for life. (Even better would have been seeing a lively outdoor production, as I later did in London, with Puck and other fairies swinging through the trees.)

I felt terribly sorry for my classmates whose introduction to Shakespeare was "Julius Caesar" in 10th grade. No wonder they couldn't get into it, despite being students in Honors English. I wouldn't call that play a favorite, even now.

To me, the goal should be matching the text with the timing. Very young children can delight in the fairy play and farces; the romances and adventures are ideal for teens, and then the tragedies, as angst kicks in; most of the history plays -- face it -- should be saved for adulthood.

[kwestionauthority]

It's fun to listen to recordings of the plays and keep the book in front of you and follow along. Some legendary actors have made wonderful recordings and nothing beats hearing the lines delivered the way they were written to be. I did this in grad school and the drama and the language came alive in ways I could never have imagined. It's a powerful presentation that makes Shakespeare and early modern English easier to grasp.

[Jude2004]

I love Shakespeare. As a mom, my greatest gift was having a daughter who became a Shakespeare fanatic too. When she was 13, she watched Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and ended up memorizing vast quantities of the play. I spent a day comparing Derek Jacobi's BBC Shakespeare version of Hamlet scene by scene with Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Watch the movies with closed captioning turned on, and all your problems are solved. I'm tagging this one in del.icio.us so I can share it with non-Shakespeare lovers.

[AsaNisMasa]

Ahh, I had the same experience in high school. Well, we had this drama teacher, she was a sweet old lady but she was crazy. She completely ruined Shakespeare for me, but I just finished one of the most rewarding college classes I've ever taken, on Shakespeare, and I have a brand new appreciation for him.

His insight into the human condition is unparalleled.

[Ravenlea]

And the language just SOUNDS so pretty... It doesn't even matter (to me) if I understand it literally - it has the musical quality of poetry, that speaks above and beyond the words themselves.

I still don't like Othello, though. I don't buy the plot (though I do still love the writing). Just doesn't seem like Othello would have done the things he did. Got me in trouble with my college Shakespeare professor who unfortunately loved it best of all the plays. Being me, I didn't have the sense to keep my mouth shut about my feelings. The only way I could make it Othello's plot work was if I looked at the main characters as aspects of Othello's character, so I renamed Othello as "To-Hell-o," Iago, as "Ego," and Desdamona as "My Destiny." I thought it was clever. My professor thought it was stupid. Genius is never appreciated in it's own time... well not mine, anyway.

[OtayPanky]

The best way to get into Shakespeare is by SEEING and HEARING, not reading. That way, even if you don't understand every word, there is a LOT of context for you to simply enjoy both the action and the characters.

And the comedies are much more "fun" than the tragedies or the histories.

If you are assigned Shakespeare in high school or college, and are unfamiliar with his work, do what I did:

1. Get a recorded version of the play and LISTEN to it.

2. Then listen again as you read along in the text.

3. Finally, dig into the text, looking at the footnotes (or comments on the facing page), to get a deeper appreciation of Shakespeare's unparalled brilliance...both as a poet and as a chronicler of the human condition.

[Berettasskeeter]

I too had trouble with Shakespeare in High School, but have grown to love his use of the language over time. Now, at 56 years, I absolutely love his prose, and the stories it tells.
I used to think noone could do better than Olivier at portraying some of his protagonists, but have since changed my mind. I like Kenneth Branagh's interpretations immensely, particularly his Hamlet. My 18 year old son, no great admirer of scholarly pursuits, loved Hamlet when he first saw it at 14 years of age, though he likes Branagh's "Much ado about nothing" better.
Semper fi

[MissingAmerica]

I recall detesting Shakespeare, and was failing English. My family was dragged kicking and screaming to the Festival in Ashland, where I saw Stacy Keach so brilliantly performing in Henry V Part 2; I saw Shakespeare as it was intended.

I aced English and, to this day, I remember Hecate's speech from Macbeth. The messages in all the plays are brilliantly presented, and always there. Thank you for reminding us of this beauty overlooked!

[Myrrhis]

And, ah, if we only knew who Shakespeare actually was . . .