So Where Did My Love of Shakespeare Come From?

 

If you had told me in tenth grade (when we were supposed to read Julius Caesar) that I would end up loving Shakespeare, I would have laughed in your stupid face. I hated him. I just didn’t understand much of what he wrote. And I couldn’t understand why other students liked him—or pretended to do so.

Same thing senior year when we read Macbeth. Couldn’t do it.

Same thing in English 101 at Hiram College, when once again, we were supposed to read Macbeth. I just couldn’t manage.

And so I planned carefully: The professor who taught the Shakespeare course was on sabbatical the year I could have taken his class (he offered it only every other year). I was so happy: I got to graduate with an English major without having taken a single Shakespeare class!

My first teaching job was in a middle school, so I figured I wouldn’t need to know any Shakespeare. And I was right: I didn’t need to, but it wasn’t too long before I wanted to.

And soon I “needed to” in a very different way. I was hooked.

And I think it started with that old Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor version of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1967). I loved that film, saw it several times before I taught it to my eighth graders. Or tried to.

I was still mostly ignorant, you see. Relying on footnotes and quick trips to reference books before class (no Internet then).

But as the years went on, I added more and more to my Shakespeare efforts in class. We played Elizabethan games, ate their food, listened to their music, talked about their clothing and the like. I taught them some history—especially the “cool parts”—the severed heads on London Bridge, the behavior at the Globe, the behavior of the royalty, etc.

Soon, the Bard was consuming an entire 9-week marking period.

I learned that the best strategy was to read it aloud with them, sharing parts. Stopping to clear up a confusion. I saved Act V for after the film (all the Bard’s plays are divided into five acts—though the action was continuous at the playhouses).

Soon I found another film I liked even more—Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), a film that still moves me (Joyce and I streamed it a few months ago). One strength: the cast. It includes some people who are still notable now—Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Kate Beckinsale—along with some wonderful English performers: Richard Briers, Brian Blessed, and others.

So I taught it the last few years of my public school career (I retired in January 1997).

Meanwhile, I was reading books about the Bard and his world, reading all the plays and poems and sonnets (memorizing about twenty of the sonnets).

I traveled to England to visit his birthplace (in Stratford-upon-Avon), to London to visit the new Globe (where my son and his sons saw A Comedy of Errors).

Joyce and I went to see every play we could—in Cleveland, Stratford (Ont.), Staunton (Va.—at the American Shakespeare Center). After some years we were waiting to see the last play we had not yet seen, Richard II.

My younger brother called one day and said that play was now running at Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, MA, not far from where they lived. Off we went. And when the lights came up afterward, both Joyce and I were weeping.

A far cry (!) from Hiram High School.

My obsession really hasn’t waned. Although I can’t go out anymore, I still read books, still revisit the plays, still try to keep those sonnets in my memory. (A bit of a job these days.)

So what hooked me on the Bard? When I realized that I couldn’t read him if I didn’t enter his world (just as he wouldn’t know what-the-hell was going on in 2021 Hudson, Ohio). When I realized the profound truths that resonated through his sometimes unfamiliar words. When I recognized the beauty of his language.

My 1959-60 self would not believe what has happened to him. He would believe he’d turned in the biggest nerd in the world. Whereas I believe I’ve had the greatest education in the world—so much of it coming from a man who didn’t know what electricity is. What a Tweet is. What TikTok is. What ...