Note: the following piece originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on Feb. 23, 2026
Like many
people, it was during my high school years that I first encountered the plays
of William Shakespeare, though obviously I had heard of his name before that
point. But that’s just what he had been for me . . . a name, albeit a famous
one. It was in a 10th grade English class at Woonsocket High School that I first
engaged with his work for real, in 1995-1996. We read two Shakespeare plays
that Sophomore year: Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew.
I wasn’t super-crazy about the latter, but really enjoyed Romeo and Juliet,
which is still one of the GOAT “tragic doomed young lovers” tales. One thing I
remember about reading Shakespeare plays in high school was that we typically
read them out loud in class, with each student taking on a part. I forget most
of the parts I read for, aside from the fact that I read the lines for the role
of Casca in Julius Caesar in the 11th grade.
The 10th grade, by the
by, was also the period of time when I started to become very interested in the
Middle Ages and medievalism as a whole, thanks to the History class I had that
year. In the 9th grade for History, we mainly covered the Ancient and Classical
world, but by the 10th grade, we focused on Medieval Europe, and I think reading about
that time period in History, while at the same time discovering the writing of
Shakespeare, really influenced my fascination with that era of human history,
for in many ways, though a product of the Renaissance, Shakespeare could be at
times a very medieval writer (those interested in exploring this topic in
greater detail should check out Helen Cooper’s intriguing book Shakespeare
and the Medieval World for more information on this subject).
Keeping to the
school’s seeming dictum that one should read two Shakespeare plays a year, in
my 11th grade English
class we read Julius Caesar and Macbeth (which remains one of my
favorite Shakespeare plays), and in my Senior year at high school we read Othello
and the immortal Hamlet. While on the subject, one of the best
things about reading Shakespeare plays in high school was that we students
knew, in the back of our minds, that inevitably after the class had finished
discussing the play, as a treat the teacher would let us watch a filmic
adaptation of the play in question, which could only be a good thing because
there have been some very, very fine movies based on Shakespeare’s plays. As a
result, in the 10th grade we got to watch the Franco Zeffirelli adaptations of The
Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet (the latter being one of my
all-time faves), in the 11th grade we saw the Joseph L. Mankiewicz version of Julius
Caesar and the Roman Polanski version of Macbeth (another great
film, though I can’t believe they let us watch it in high school), and in 12th grade we got
to see Oliver Parker’s Othello and yet another Zeffirelli adaptation,
the Mel Gibson Hamlet (another great movie).
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| First page of a notebook I kept for my college's course on Shakespeare's Histories & Comedies |
My exposure to
Shakespeare and his work, of course, extended into my college years, which is
hardly surprising seeing as my major was English. In my first semester Freshman
year, during the Fall of 1998, I read Hamlet a second time for an Intro
to Western Literature course, and in Spring of 1999, in yet another Lit course,
read Macbeth again (we also got to watch Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood film,
which was very cool). In my third year at Rhode Island College, I took two
courses entirely devoted to Shakespeare, one covering the Tragedies (which
mainly had me rereading works such as Macbeth, Othello, and yet
again, Hamlet, though there was at least one new one: King Lear),
the other being one devoted to some of his Histories and Comedies. The book we
used in both cases was the 1997 Norton Shakespeare edited by Stephen
Greenblatt, which used for its cover art the striking Fool’s Cap World Map (c.
1580, artist unknown). At over 3,400 pages, this beast of a book was a pain to
lug around, but I loved it all the same: each of the plays within were preceded
by fascinating introductions written by various Shakespeare scholars, and I
recall many a lunch hour at the campus dining center where, while eating, I
would pick a play at random and read the introduction for it, even for plays we
hadn’t been assigned to read. Sadly, I no longer have my copy of this book, but
one of my younger brothers still does, and sometimes when I’m on the exercise
bike in the basement of my parent’s house I’ll flip through that while working out
(again, not the easiest thing to do as it weighs like 5 pounds).
Around this
same period of time in college I had also been reading Neil Gaiman’s The
Sandman comic book in graphic novel format, and of course, not only did
Shakespeare himself appear in a few issues of that work, but there were also
issues memorably inspired by his plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The
Tempest (two Shakespeare plays, incidentally, that I would finally get
around to reading in 2024). I know it’s bad form to even mention Gaiman’s name
these days, but there’s no covering up the fact that The Sandman was an
enormous influence on me in college, and served as a gateway to discovering other,
better comic book writers (like Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, and Warren Ellis).
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| Shakespeare as he appeared in THE SANDMAN, as illustrated by Charles Vess |
Finally, in my
very last semester at RIC, in 2003, I took only one course, the most advanced
Creative Writing course available at the college. We met weekly in a special
conference room called “The William Shakespeare Room.” It was mainly a room for
meetings with a big conference table, but the room was decorated with some
Shakespearean touches, like a framed portrait of the Bard himself (plus other
related historical figures like Queen Elizabeth I), and in one corner of the
room there was a model replica of the Globe Theatre. Of all the courses I took
at Rhode Island College, this last one was by far my favorite, and that it took
place in a room devoted to the life of Shakespeare only sweetens the memories.
(The photograph above is The William
Shakespeare Room at Rhode Island College, as it looked in 2013 (picture taken
by myself, during a visit to the campus). I sat on the chair at the bottom
center of this photograph during the aforementioned Advanced Creative Writing
course)
Following my
graduation from college, my interest in Shakespeare declined a bit, as I began
to investigate other areas of interest (though I did reread Macbeth in
2013). But I began to gravitate towards his orbit again in 2022, when I read
the delightfully illustrated A Shakespeare Motley: An Illustrated Compendium
(published by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). And then in 2023, feeling
nostalgic, I rewatched some of the Shakespeare adaptations I remembered
enjoying so greatly back in high school, mainly the Zeffirelli Romeo &
Juliet and Hamlet and the Polanski Macbeth. This in turn led
to a fascination with the language of Shakespeare’s era, commonly known as
Early Modern English (but also sometimes called King James’ English and
Shakespearean English), with all of those “thous” and “thees” and “hithers” and
what have you. This all led me to the book Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary
and Language Companion, by David Crystal and Ben Crystal, which I think is
one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever encountered, I can waste many a
happy hour just cheerfully flipping through its pages and taking in its
voluminous content.
Finally, in
late 2024, I began delving into Shakespeare’s work again, both rereading many
of his plays while reading some others for the very first time. I began with a
small paperback collection of Shakespeare’s Comedies published by Washington
square Press, which boasted A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It,
Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, all of which were new to me.
Then, in 2025, I acquired two lavish hardcover editions of Shakespeare’s works
put out by the Franklin Library, the first themed around his Histories (King
John, Richard II, King Henry IV Pts. 1 & 2, Henry V,
and Richard III, most of which were new to me, aside from the first and
second parts of Henry IV, which I had read in college), the second the
famous Tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and
Juliet, King Lear, Julius Caesar; all rereads, for me).
Through an Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Second Edition, I
also read Antony and Cleopatra + The Merchant of Venice for the
first time, along with rereading All’s Well That Ends Well. More
recently, this year I also read his complete Sonnets for the first time.
All told, of
the 38-39 plays Shakespeare either wrote (or co-wrote), I’ve read (and, in some
cases, reread) 20 of them. I’m unsure if I’ll ever get around to reading all of
them (an impossibility in any event, as some of Shakespeare’s plays, like Love’s
Labour Won and Cardenio, are lost to time), but there are at least a
few remaining well-known ones I’d like to get to at some point, like Much
Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. I’ve also recently begun
reading books in general about the Elizabethan Era, which has become one of my
favorite time periods, a region of time not only fascinating for historical and
artistic reasons, but also metaphysical ones.
What do I like
about Shakespeare so much? How to best explain the allure of this dramatist,
playwright, tragedian and poet, born on the feast day of Saint George? I have
trouble expressing it in words. It’s a combination of a lot of things, really: his
sometimes quite convoluted storylines (many of which are deeply steeped in
medieval symbolism and iconography), his memorable cast of characters
(populated with a grand assembly of kings, queens, princes, lords and ladies,
nobles and servants, heralds and messengers, attendants, fools and clowns and
jesters, gravediggers, musicians, sailors, ghosts and witches and fairies,
friars, soldiers, and so many more), his turn of phrase and use of language,
the extraordinary stylistic and thematic range of his plays (which ran the
entire dramatic gamut from comedy to tragedy), and the manner in which his art
has transcended all sorts of barriers (be they cultural/geographical, time, and
space), to the general annoyance of the tedious anti-Stratfordians1. But I
suppose in some ways it’s because he kind of reminds me of myself a little, in
that he wasn’t really a super-original writer. So many of his plays were built
from the foundations of other sources, be it history or the popular tales of
his time, that he then elevated and improved upon. Really, the case could be
made that he’s essentially the most famous fanfiction writer in the history of
English letters, and as someone who can claim that the majority of his own
books are essentially spins on “things I like that I feel I could do a better
job with,” I can appreciate this aspect of the Bard of Avon’s character. Or
maybe, in the end, what it all boils down to is that reading his work brings me
back to my high school and college days, when my future seemed more wide-open
and full of promise.
As Ben Jonson
memorably said about Shakespeare, he was “not of an age, but for all time”
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