Today, April 23, is the feast day of Saint George, slayer of dragons and patron saint of both England and the Boy Scouts. It is also the day on which William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. Although the date is uncertain, many scholars believe that April 23 was also the date of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s contemporary Miguel Cervantes, who is generally regarded as the greatest of Spanish writers, died on the vigil of this feast, also four hundred years ago.
There are celebrations around the world commemorating this anniversary. In Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown, a parade of celebrities and others, including a New Orleans Jazz funeral band, will march to the church in which Shakespeare is buried. In London President Obama will visit the Globe Theater, the reconstructed copy of Shakespeare’s theater on the banks of the Thames, where he will watch actors performing scenes from Hamlet.
Though I have not read Cervantes since graduate school, I yearly teach Shakespeare to my students. Henry V, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night: these are the plays that have come into my classroom, edifying and entertaining some of my young people, doubtless torturing others. Some students—the younger writing class, the juniors and seniors in Advanced Placement Literature—also peruse a few of the sonnets, learning iambic pentameter and the difference between the Italian and English sonnet.
Usually we embark on our study of one of these plays by summing up the plot and looking at the major characters before reading the play itself. Over the years, I have used short video cartoons to introduce Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; Andy Griffith’s hilarious recounting of Romeo and Juliet always entertains students (“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” “Ah’m right cheer.”); we have read from the Charles and Mary Lamb’s book of Shakespearean tales; I have sent students to Sparknotes or Wikipedia for an outline of a play.
My own early encounters with Shakespeare were through Classics Illustrated, a comic book series that I used to read, and occasionally purchase, seated on the floor of the Weatherwax Drugstore in Boonville, NC, population 600. To this day certain panels from Romeo and Juliet are vivid in my memory. Later in high school, we watched a film of Julius Caesar starring, of all people, Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Our teacher required us to memorize Mark Antony’s funeral speech, fragments of which have remained lodged within me.
Over the years, mostly through my own teaching, I have come to know the plays mentioned above. I am no Shakespeare scholar—I have not seen performed all of the plays, nor read all the sonnets—but I have turned the pages of a number of books about Shakespeare, most memorably Anthony Burgessess’s novel Nothing Like The Sun, Claire Asquith’s fascinating Shadowplay, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
The plots of Shakespeare’s plays, the characters, the seemingly infinite excursions into what it means to be human: these all attract me to Shakespeare.
But what I love most is the language. Reading the plays and sonnets leaves me electrified with words and images, as if some mysterious coil of wires had attached themselves to my brain. The words fill me with delight and make me happy to be a part of the human pageant.
Shakespeare certainly knew the power and endurance of words. Here for your pleasure is his Sonnet 55.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Though I have not read Cervantes since graduate school, I yearly teach Shakespeare to my students. Henry V, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night: these are the plays that have come into my classroom, edifying and entertaining some of my young people, doubtless torturing others. Some students—the younger writing class, the juniors and seniors in Advanced Placement Literature—also peruse a few of the sonnets, learning iambic pentameter and the difference between the Italian and English sonnet.
Usually we embark on our study of one of these plays by summing up the plot and looking at the major characters before reading the play itself. Over the years, I have used short video cartoons to introduce Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; Andy Griffith’s hilarious recounting of Romeo and Juliet always entertains students (“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” “Ah’m right cheer.”); we have read from the Charles and Mary Lamb’s book of Shakespearean tales; I have sent students to Sparknotes or Wikipedia for an outline of a play.
My own early encounters with Shakespeare were through Classics Illustrated, a comic book series that I used to read, and occasionally purchase, seated on the floor of the Weatherwax Drugstore in Boonville, NC, population 600. To this day certain panels from Romeo and Juliet are vivid in my memory. Later in high school, we watched a film of Julius Caesar starring, of all people, Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Our teacher required us to memorize Mark Antony’s funeral speech, fragments of which have remained lodged within me.
Over the years, mostly through my own teaching, I have come to know the plays mentioned above. I am no Shakespeare scholar—I have not seen performed all of the plays, nor read all the sonnets—but I have turned the pages of a number of books about Shakespeare, most memorably Anthony Burgessess’s novel Nothing Like The Sun, Claire Asquith’s fascinating Shadowplay, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
The plots of Shakespeare’s plays, the characters, the seemingly infinite excursions into what it means to be human: these all attract me to Shakespeare.
But what I love most is the language. Reading the plays and sonnets leaves me electrified with words and images, as if some mysterious coil of wires had attached themselves to my brain. The words fill me with delight and make me happy to be a part of the human pageant.
Shakespeare certainly knew the power and endurance of words. Here for your pleasure is his Sonnet 55.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
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