In Love With Shakespeare

At heart, I will always be an English teacher, and I love Shakespeare. I love reading his plays, particularly with a class full of students, and I love watching his plays, whether on stage (preferably) or on the screen. I can’t get enough. When Joe and I visited England several years ago, the Globe and Stratford-upon-Avon were two of my favorite and most anticipated stops.

True story: when my husband and I were first married, we could walk to a nearby park and see Shakespeare in the Park, which we did every year that we lived there. Our first year, they showed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet. I was enthralled by the first, which I had never seen, but halfway through Hamlet, which I had read several times, I leaned over to Joe and whispered, “You know, the play is amazing, but Hamlet was actually an idiot.”

He recoiled in shock, and we argued fiercely about whether or not Hamlet was a moron for the rest of the play. My apologies to the poor people sitting around us. This is the kind of thing that happens when two English majors get married and experience literature together. Thankfully we have grown as people enough that last summer we could return to the same park to watch As You Like It and only share smiles of delight. 

Shakespeare in the Park

Shakespeare is intimidating for lots of people though, and I’ll admit that love him as I do, he still intimidates me. That’s why my favorite way to read Shakespeare is in community. I loved reading him with classes of students, and I love reading kid versions with my children. But mostly, I love watching the plays. Whenever I can, I still love to go to an outdoor performance, hose myself in bug spray, and watch Shakespeare under the stars. But, much like original performances in Renaissance days, the weather is not always amenable to outdoor shows, so luckily I can turn my attention to the screen.

There have definitely been awful movies made of Shakespeare’s plays as well as beautiful ones, and some truly amazing remakes, including one of my favorites, 10 Things I Hate About You. But when I’m longing for the Bard, I tend to turn to the movie version I love above all others: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Look, I’m not going to make any pretenses that it’s the best Shakespeare movie ever made, or anything like that. I’m just saying that Kevin Kline as Bottom is one of the performances that most touched my heart and kept me coming back again and again, and watching those silly boys racing around in the woods finally standing up in the end with the women who are right for them, finally becoming men--it catches my breath. The performance at the end performed for the couples could not be more full of mishaps and hilarity, but in it I see humble people reaching for their dreams, and catching, for one brief, shining moment, a glimpse of the stars.

If quarantine has you down, you could do a lot worse than renting this movie or reading this play. We all have dreams, both realized and not, and we reach for them with varying degrees of skill and success. But the reaching--that’s where the grit and the glory are, and it’s where we may, if we’re lucky, watch the whole world opening before us, and we catch our breath in wonder at the possibility.

Shakespeare must have felt this, to be able to so beautifully show us how.