[Prestidigitweeze]

A bit of perspective:

I'm the son of a high school music and English teacher. My mother was kind in most ways, but the classics were another matter. She drove her children insane by quoting Shakespeare constantly.

If I burned my scrambled eggs, then something was rotten in Denmark. If I stayed up all night studying, then yon Cassius had a lean and hungry look. At Passover, when the family lined up for borscht, she and her sisters would perform the three witches scene from Macbeth as my cousins and I quietly gave up on humanity.

You might think these experiences would be enough to drive me away from Shakespeare. Instead, they initiated a dialogue with "the Bard" that has lasted throughout my life -- lasted despite my mother's use of phrases like "the Bard."

Shakespeare's writing is too felicitous, too metaphysical, too expressive to be locked away by my personal embarrassment. It is poetic as well as dramatic; it is an exercise in what Keats called negative capability: the seemingly magical ability of a writer to stand outside the self and inhabit the thinking of everything and everyone around them. Shakespeare had the knack: His tramps and beggars expressed their likely thoughts and impulses in sophisticated language, and that language, even when caricatured and marked by deliberate misuse, is full of complex insights, nuances that would be lost on someone who simply watched the play once.

Shakespeare needs to be read as well as seen. Even the annotations need to be read.

To those who argue that Shakespeare shouldn't be read at all because he is a playwright and is therefore meant only to be seen:

By that logic, virtually all plays are meant only to be seen, and that is an absurdly limiting distinction between drama and literature. Better to say that one doesn't like reading Shakespeare than make such a dishonest argument.

It is the equivalent of saying that composition students shouldn't study scores because classical music is meant to be heard, or that architects shouldn't study drawings. And you can't argue that these are specialized fields and then apply the same argument to literature and writing 101. Everyone must learn to read and write. Everyone must try to master the ability to express themselves formally.

It's important for a young person to learn to understand different styles and levels of English. Sometimes boredom is a disease that can lead to stubborn ignorance. Mediocrity needs to be worked through.

We tend to think that culture = progress but, very often, the opposite proves true. This is illustrated by great writing which employs archaic usage, syntax and diction. Just because it isn't written for this moment in history doesn't mean it is untimely. Archaic work is not merely tedious or worthless because the student has not learned to understand it. We work to understand such writing because it teaches us what language is and is capable of.

Make no mistake: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster were poets as well as dramatists. Seeing the play is but one part of the experience. The language is symphonic; listening to a recording is yet another experience. Reading the plays is perhaps the richest way of all to experience them: In the mind, which is both stage for the action and resonating chamber for the poetry. Its wide spotlight can tighten to a penlight's beam trained on each metaphor or epithet -- trained like an appraiser's loupe on a phrase like a perfectly cut jewel.