Instead of doomscrolling at night, I decided 2024 would be my year to read all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays. I wanted to understand and appreciate the tragedies & comedies better, outside of the forced learning of academia.
The first step was to unlearn what I retained from my English teachers in public high school. Admittedly, that wasn’t much. The teachers pulled off amazing and ambitious lesson plans with limited funding. Junior year focused on Old English and Middle English works. As a senior, I took the AP English class that counted for college credit. We started with Shakespearean sonnets and plays and ended with contemporary short stories.
Mr. A was eager for us to learn. Shakespeare-inspired movies were all the rage during the Y2K era (10 Things I Hate About You, O, Romeo+Juliet), and I respected that he didn’t attempt to use their pop culture moment as a crutch. No, Mr. A was old school. He distributed unannotated versions of the plays and had us read aloud and discuss what it meant. He studied our faces, perched cross-legged on a stool at the front of the class, impatiently flipping the bangs of his feathered mullet. We were not picking up on the complex wordplay and entendre that the Elizabethan theatergoers prized.
He once asked for my interpretation of the scene that contains Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia. I had no clue how to respond. The fact that Shakespeare didn’t come naturally to me bruised my gifted-kid ego. I wanted to like Shakespeare for the sake of the disappointed teacher, but I didn’t. I wanted to be smart because people told me I was, but it never felt true. I’d always read at an advanced level and had a near-photographic retention of the written word, but none of that matters if you don’t’ “get” what you’re reading.
The comic elements didn’t hit for me. (Not even the penis jokes!) The Tragedies seemed flat. (Who was more morose and bitchy, Hamlet or a 17-year-old girl with PMDD?) I didn’t find the history of England’s kings particularly engaging. I certainly didn’t want to hear about Richard the Ugly-MF’ing-III while struggling with body dysmorphia.
It was Richard III that ultimately made me declare to Mr. A that I did not like Shakespeare. Mr A. touched his bangs and stared with calm resignation at the ceiling. “Ok, but just give it a chance sometime later. It’s important to go back and revisit things at different stages of your life.”
Collegiate snobbery of English Lit departments killed any remnant of Shakespearean interest in my twenties. In 2012 they discovered Richard III’s remains while building a carpark in Leicester. He probably wasn’t deformed as the Elizabethan play suggested, just a moderate case of scoliosis. When you’re in power, you control what information is passed on. I remember briefly thinking “Yeah, well, screw that guy, anyway!” when his reburial showed up on the news.
I read Richard III last out of all the 37 plays. I enjoyed it. I might’ve liked it the whole time, if not constantly being told that I must. If not expected to publicly prove something.
I hope somewhere out there, Mr. A knows that I am grateful for his attempt to think critically, be passionate, and give things another shot.
I hope if there are any people-pleasers out there trying to make something work for the sake of others, maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe let it sit for a bit.
Decades, even.
There’s always time to unearth it and craft a new narrative later.
