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"A baby needs not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to the world."
- G. K. Chesterton
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TTIR, Part 12: Shakespeare
My mother didn't really approve of Shakespeare, I suspect; Rev. Bowdler's edition was extinct and she was skeptical of anyone who made crude jokes. Or perhaps she simply had never had an enjoyable encounter with him when she was in school herself. Anyway, we never made any effort to study him when I was younger.
There was a fat and dusty Complete Works on the attic shelves, though, tucked in among the old college texts and waiting for the right rainy afternoon to tempt an adventuresome reader who had already thoroughly scoured the Juvenile Fiction section.
My first definite memory of meeting Shakespeare was at a friend's house. Her older sister was studying Romeo and Juliet in her ninth grade literature class, and for some reason she deigned to tell us what was going on and regale us with the resulting quips of her classmates. It struck me at the time that Juliet was a hopeless ninny, an opinion that has never been shaken. My friend and I, secure in our eleven-year-old superiority, scorned the folly of teenagers in love.
Whether it was this or sheer idleness that enticed me into actually opening those Complete Works, I don't know, but at some point I did. I'd never heard a word of Shakespeare read aloud, and it didn't occur to me to try it. I learned later how much I had missed in reading silently, but as far as I knew, that was what books were for. Despite the difficulties of puzzling out what was even going on, I managed to make friends with a few of the plays: The Tempest, Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, the one tragedy I could really enjoy, Macbeth, and forever and always my favorite, Much Ado About Nothing.
Not until I was grown up and living away from home did I get a chance to actually see and hear a performance. Seeing The Tempest at a small but excellent theater was a revelation. Suddenly long passages that I had only guessed at the gist of were crystal clear. The words were not the dusty ones I'd strained over; they were alive. And when I went back to the book, they still held the life breathed into them by the performance.
Since then, I've taken as many chances as I could to see performances, or at least hear them, and then read the words again. On a brief trip to London, my sister and I raced across town the instant our plane arrived to see the only performance of The Merchant of Venice by the Royal Shakespeare Company while we were in town. (The tickets were surprisingly cheap, but then, we had to stand up.) My aunt (who very much approved of Shakespeare) introduced me to her favorite performance of The Taming of the Shrew (a Canadian performance) and even my mother consented to watch the Elizabeth Taylor version.
Going to the far ends of the earth for Shakespeare performances is no longer so possible, but DOB and I bring one home from the library once in awhile. We saw the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing in the sleepless weeks after D2 was born; this summer, a friend of DOB's was in a local production. We saw Henry V a few months ago, and I'm still meaning to actually read that. I never had the nerve to tackle the histories before, but now I think I do.
Despite the effectiveness in my own case, I don't plan to teach Shakespeare by banishing him to the attic. Instead I'm already checking out picture-book versions to lure them in.
Remembering how unwieldy the Complete Shakespeare was, I've been accumulating cheap paperback copies of individual plays whenever I see them at library booksales. In fact, I'm trying to get multiple copies because someday, perhaps, we'll want to put on a performance of our own. Although, in memory of my mother, I may cut some of the jokes. |
Posted: 1:05 PM, Jan. 20, 2007 |
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