Student Blog: I Fear Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

Before the time of pyrotechnics, holograms and projections, before a giant chandelier crashed down into the audience: there was a guy with a quill. Who loved to invert his beautifully constructed eloquent metaphors, and wrote those metaphors in Early Modern English. A man who somehow found his scripts sitting on the desks of tenth grade honors English students, but had never been inside an American high school, let alone stepped foot on this continent. 

The swan of Avon, the Bard, Mr. Bill himself! William Shakespeare! I can hear the groans now, but humor me, Shakespeare fans are too few and far between, and right now you’re reading the words of a certified fan club member (English Major). 

But while we’re actively acknowledging it - is that ire and frustration because of the nature of Shakespeare’s work? Or because of how it is being presented to us when we are just tired, angsty, high school students, when honestly we are more concerned with our college plans, drivers test, and any other host of teenaged contextual life events. Back then, if Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, or the affeared Scottish play came across your desk, you wanted to bolt from the room as if someone had just your chair on fire. And since no one took the time to explain to you that you had been hoodwinked and misdirected, your ire misplaced, and apprehension misappropriated…..you still hate Shakespeare a whole lot! 

If you are a longtime (3 articles in as a matter of fact) reader of mine you’ll know that I am big on shifting perspective, and eliminating negative talk around things that are ‘difficult’ at first glance. I just love to challenge everyone, including myself, to take up arms against what’s confusing and try to etch out a compromise with it. 

So let's unpack the Anti-Shakespeare mentality. According to David Ball, author of Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays: Plays are not books. Wow shocker! Thank you David Ball! But yet we treat them exactly the same, the truth is right there in front of us. Plays. Are. Not. Books. But we hold them to exactly the same standard. Thank you David Ball indeed! We have gotten completely caught up in the ‘if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck’ logic. That duck ain’t a duck at all! A play is a collection of words,yes, but that doesn’t make it a book at all. It’s a play! 

Shakespeare has become, in our minds, the author of our despised English textbooks, and not the author of the great Folios which have formed a great codebook for all of Western civilization. And trust me I get the confusion. I too committed the grave offense of treating Shakespeare’s plays like books. And for a while that worked very well for me! When Shakespeare came up in high school I took it as my time to shine, I grabbed the mic and would not let go because I understood it so well in the literary sense, but oh was I wrong. If I knew then what I know now! Shakespeare’s plays as seen on stage are a different beast entirely. I had been hoodwinked! Lulled into a false state of ease and complacency. Then, in college, when I was cast as Alonso in The Tempest, I got slammed in the face with the fact that I did not know diddly squat about what it took to get the text from a passage in a script to a real life piece of authentic dialogue. 

I sat through table-read after table-read laughing to myself that “this was all pointless” and “I don’t need to be taught how to read the Bard. I’m an English major for crying out loud!” “All I do is read!” Then as we began to block the show I realized that just like my character, I had been stranded on a foreign island with no idea how to get off or where my son (in this case my understanding of the English language) was. Instead of responding to this in the Alonso fashion of wandering this island in vain, I tried to work my way out of my confusion as best I could without giving up and crying about it. 

In my experience, crying over Shakespeare does not yield a better understanding of the work itself, but I’m only 19, what do I know. And I’m not saying don’t cry about it! Active emotion is always good and okay, as long as it serves you. If working through and releasing your frustrations over the text is what leads you to stop blaming yourself for your lack of understanding, and lets you start asking the important questions and doing the work, then by all means cry it out. Scream your Shakespeare to the rooftops as Will himself intended. 

I read my lines over and over and over again until I actually understood what they meant. I realized that I couldn't look at Shakespeare like a writer myself if I was going to be acting it out and taking on the character and the concept he represented. I couldn’t be the playwright or the academic, or even the reader of novels. The only brain I could engage was the actor's brain. And I hated it! 

But that’s when the beauty of the text began to shine up from the pages. I had always loved Shakespeare but now it is beautiful and difficult and complicated in a way that makes my head spin. And even though I have made significant strides in getting to the right place with my material in the Tempest, I’m still so in progress. But because of all the work I put into it I’m emboldened to charge into confusion with more confidence. Tomorrow I may want to scream and cry about it. And that is okay. Even the things we love can be frustrating. I’ve tried blaming the Shakespeare, I’ve tried blaming myself. Neither option worked! So instead I acknowledged every feeling in my body, validated how it sat it my conscious, and moved towards doing the work. As I’m writing this it is 27 days till show night (wow that is not a lot of days). I will take those next four-ish weeks to be as active in my production as I can. I’ll fail and I’ll rejoice in the wins and it will be okay. I love Shakespeare! I love theater and I love that I get to be apart of this production. Multiple things can be true at once. 

If you still hate Shakespeare…I’m not mad at you. Just give good old William another chance. Lean into it, feel your feelings about it, and see what happens. After all “one man in his time plays many parts,” and maybe one of yours can be a Shakespeare lover.