Title: Meeting Shakes - An Essay
Spoiler
When I first met William Shakespeare, I was 14, surrounded by a bunch of stupid people. This essay is about how I ended up calling him Shakes. It starts when I was in Freshman Language Arts, high school, and rolling my eyes every time someone couldn't explain the plot or grasp what was going on. When reading literature came naturally, I didn't realize that other people just didn't think like that. It didn't seem like a big deal. I remember we read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I hated the book because of how cruel the main characters were, and the challenging language because things were spelled wrong. I never recognized the difficulty of spelling and word choice in "Romeo and Juliet," the two never compared. I had other things on the mind.
My mom was ill, I'd just broken up with my best friend, and I felt absolutely alone. At that time in my life, the last thing I really cared about was why other people couldn't read Shakespeare and understand the language. It just made sense to me. The more I read it, the more it made sense. Yeah, there were words I had to look up, but if I sounded them out, I could usually understand what they meant, and when it came to most of the words that were too old school, the teacher explained them to us. We even had vocabulary lists which showed us what ones they were.
I did know one thing though, I was not good at reading out loud, and no one else wanted to read. Out of everyone, I could get it okay, but I didn't like it, even though I really didn't like the lack of effort everyone else put into it either. The 14 year old me read that play like it was a Chapbook. It was easy to read because the assignments for each day were short, and the language, while somewhat challenging, was engaging. That was all I really knew. I remember thinking that the story was trite and dull too because it just didn't seem like it was a reasonable plot.
When I started college, I danced around Shakespeare like a shamed grandchild avoided their grandparents. I was familiar enough to just, sidestep it, and enjoy that I could do that. When I finally revisited Shakespeare, it was like meeting him for the first time. I had learned so much about analyzing writing, that reading Shakespeare now was like reading a case study of man. It was too much, and at the same time, not enough. It was never enough.
The hunger I got to devour his work was quenched by reading Spenser and Milton, two older writers who were poets instead of play-writes, mostly. Milton did everything and Spenser pretty much did too. I fell in love with the use of language Spenser displayed, and the way they disregarded spelling to finally speak a language that clung to my soul. Visiting Shakespeare again was like stepping into old shoes, and these two were dancing shoes.
After I read Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare to me changed completely. The language and development of character and voice was so profound, that Shakespeare was simpler, and gentle. It was more accessible, and I appreciated that. However, I was beginning to learn that these writers were all in conversation, and that conversation became clear the longer I read.
Milton and Spenser were clearly speaking to one another as Milton wrote about famous tropes that Spenser introduced, and Spenser's conversation was continued through the class as we dove headfirst into the deep end of Milton with "Areopagitica" which was a pamphlet that spoke directly to the United State's current way of government. All of it was so, relevant, that visiting Shakespeare, I naturally was enthused to develop a conversation myself.
Luckily, I could do just that and my class rewrote an old Shakespeare play. This gave me a new relationship to an old classic, providing me with the chance to plot out the important parts of Shakespeare's play for our class, and then develop a new story like so many movies did. It was so invigorating, that I barely realized this was Shakespeare we were butchering and cooking into a brand new meal. I didn't realize this until I revisited the same play, with the same teacher, and some of the same peers, just two semesters later.
When I retouched "King Lear" it was coming home to all of the furniture moved. I was viewing the play through the eyes of analysis rather than writing, and I felt my world flip again, as I developed a new bond to Shakespeare.
This is when he began to be called Shakes in my head. I came home to "King Lear" after visiting all of the country clubs I never knew he had. I read or saw four or five different Shakes plays and I had become so familiar with analyzing his messages, and his relationships in the plays to the bible that it became second nature to shorten his name into a nickname that suited his attitude.
Shakespeare, was a shaker. He wrote for his audience and that audience was growing and changing like it always will and always does. He wrote for every angle of life, and those angles all came together in "King Lear" like a crown on a tower, and I'm sure the more I keep reading his work, the more I'll draw connections between the contradictions in his different plays and develop my understanding of how he saw the world. "King Lear" was just the first place where I really felt I could hear Shakespeare speaking.
That was when I realized all those years ago, reading "Romeo and Juliet" I had been a blind fool, believing that reading Shakespeare was enough. Understanding Shakes isn't about reading the language, it's about understanding the social implications, the audience interactions, and the development of characters, bonds, and the message he shares in that play. For instance "Macbeth" is developing the psychosis of power destroying a good man. If you read "Macbeth" and you don't pick up on these men destroying themselves through power, you haven't read "Macbeth," simple as that. You've understood it, but you haven't read it.
This change in thought spurred me to re-read poetry I hadn't touched in years, and redevelop my relationships with the writers of those poems too. I was back to square one in a world where I thought I was near the finish line. I was re-growing my understanding and belief away from analysis of the style, into the development of personal experience. For that, I will always have a special place for Shakespeare, and since he's not here to hate me for being so informal, I'll keep my endearment of Shakes.
My mom was ill, I'd just broken up with my best friend, and I felt absolutely alone. At that time in my life, the last thing I really cared about was why other people couldn't read Shakespeare and understand the language. It just made sense to me. The more I read it, the more it made sense. Yeah, there were words I had to look up, but if I sounded them out, I could usually understand what they meant, and when it came to most of the words that were too old school, the teacher explained them to us. We even had vocabulary lists which showed us what ones they were.
I did know one thing though, I was not good at reading out loud, and no one else wanted to read. Out of everyone, I could get it okay, but I didn't like it, even though I really didn't like the lack of effort everyone else put into it either. The 14 year old me read that play like it was a Chapbook. It was easy to read because the assignments for each day were short, and the language, while somewhat challenging, was engaging. That was all I really knew. I remember thinking that the story was trite and dull too because it just didn't seem like it was a reasonable plot.
When I started college, I danced around Shakespeare like a shamed grandchild avoided their grandparents. I was familiar enough to just, sidestep it, and enjoy that I could do that. When I finally revisited Shakespeare, it was like meeting him for the first time. I had learned so much about analyzing writing, that reading Shakespeare now was like reading a case study of man. It was too much, and at the same time, not enough. It was never enough.
The hunger I got to devour his work was quenched by reading Spenser and Milton, two older writers who were poets instead of play-writes, mostly. Milton did everything and Spenser pretty much did too. I fell in love with the use of language Spenser displayed, and the way they disregarded spelling to finally speak a language that clung to my soul. Visiting Shakespeare again was like stepping into old shoes, and these two were dancing shoes.
After I read Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare to me changed completely. The language and development of character and voice was so profound, that Shakespeare was simpler, and gentle. It was more accessible, and I appreciated that. However, I was beginning to learn that these writers were all in conversation, and that conversation became clear the longer I read.
Milton and Spenser were clearly speaking to one another as Milton wrote about famous tropes that Spenser introduced, and Spenser's conversation was continued through the class as we dove headfirst into the deep end of Milton with "Areopagitica" which was a pamphlet that spoke directly to the United State's current way of government. All of it was so, relevant, that visiting Shakespeare, I naturally was enthused to develop a conversation myself.
Luckily, I could do just that and my class rewrote an old Shakespeare play. This gave me a new relationship to an old classic, providing me with the chance to plot out the important parts of Shakespeare's play for our class, and then develop a new story like so many movies did. It was so invigorating, that I barely realized this was Shakespeare we were butchering and cooking into a brand new meal. I didn't realize this until I revisited the same play, with the same teacher, and some of the same peers, just two semesters later.
When I retouched "King Lear" it was coming home to all of the furniture moved. I was viewing the play through the eyes of analysis rather than writing, and I felt my world flip again, as I developed a new bond to Shakespeare.
This is when he began to be called Shakes in my head. I came home to "King Lear" after visiting all of the country clubs I never knew he had. I read or saw four or five different Shakes plays and I had become so familiar with analyzing his messages, and his relationships in the plays to the bible that it became second nature to shorten his name into a nickname that suited his attitude.
Shakespeare, was a shaker. He wrote for his audience and that audience was growing and changing like it always will and always does. He wrote for every angle of life, and those angles all came together in "King Lear" like a crown on a tower, and I'm sure the more I keep reading his work, the more I'll draw connections between the contradictions in his different plays and develop my understanding of how he saw the world. "King Lear" was just the first place where I really felt I could hear Shakespeare speaking.
That was when I realized all those years ago, reading "Romeo and Juliet" I had been a blind fool, believing that reading Shakespeare was enough. Understanding Shakes isn't about reading the language, it's about understanding the social implications, the audience interactions, and the development of characters, bonds, and the message he shares in that play. For instance "Macbeth" is developing the psychosis of power destroying a good man. If you read "Macbeth" and you don't pick up on these men destroying themselves through power, you haven't read "Macbeth," simple as that. You've understood it, but you haven't read it.
This change in thought spurred me to re-read poetry I hadn't touched in years, and redevelop my relationships with the writers of those poems too. I was back to square one in a world where I thought I was near the finish line. I was re-growing my understanding and belief away from analysis of the style, into the development of personal experience. For that, I will always have a special place for Shakespeare, and since he's not here to hate me for being so informal, I'll keep my endearment of Shakes.
