The Bard and I

“Here, you will like this” and my father held out a nondescript sort of a book towards me. It had no colored pictures, and rather badly made sketches inside, but it had stories. - With strange sounding characters, and exercises at the back- it was supposed to be a text book for English- though not in my school. “Great Stories in Easy English”, said the cover-it was an abridged adaptation of the adaptation of the Shakespeare’s plays by Charles and Mary Lamb. And so I met the Bard. And fell in love.

“A pound of flesh” I would intone holding up a pencil, trying to look sufficiently cruel, and then would counter with the “Not one drop of blood” as I tried to look sagacious enough as Portia as Dr Balthazar. I grieved with King Lear at his daughter’s perfidy and giggled through The Taming of the Shrew (though now I do not quite enjoy it as much in a feminist light). Hamlet was depressing, Macbeth sad, but gripping, but of course The Tempest had the right tenor of an adventure – high seas, drama, fairies and what have you.

These were just the stories, not the plays- and yet they were so rich- so alive, with such real characters peopling them- the good had their flaws the evil ones their redeeming qualities and there was such a sense of delightful adventure- minus the excessive moralizing that stories seemed to have. I moved on to the Tales by Charles and Mary lamb and discovered the Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. I thrilled through Othello and realized that maybe soppy love stories were not as much the pits as they seemed. Adolescence had something to do with this realization, but so did the Bard’s “As a rich Jewel on an Ethiop’s ear” (the Charles and Mary lamb adaptation had some quotes from the original). And even though my friends mocked the “women dressing as men and no one noticing”, I did not like that attitude- it was just such a perfect set up if young boys had to play the female roles.

Then in Class 9, I finally got to feel what a real Shakespeare play read like. We had to study Julius Caesar for English Literature. I stumbled on the “being mechanical you ought not walk the streets” reading through my Coles Notes to understand it- but by “all that I live by is with the awl”, I was rekindling my love- not for the plot as much, but the variety, the vividness, the life. And I was old enough to see just how difficult it was to create a Roman marketplace on an Elizabethan stage with very few props. For my board exams I memorized the entire play- even the unimportant scenes with the Exeunts and stage directions. It just sounded so wonderful to speak out aloud with proper expressions. And of course even more wonderful was watching the film, with the Greek-Godly Charlton Heston as Mark Antony.

I discovered among my father’s books that classic spoof “Twisted Tales from Shakespeare”, by Richard Armor and read it, laughing at passages like “only in a Shakespeare play can a young man and a young woman who are in love spend a night alone in the forest without wanting to take advantage of the fact”, but with a feeling of committing sacrilege. “I will read these plays in the original” I wowed, looking at the thick red hard bound collection of plays in the library at home. And I did try , a few, after passing out of school, with a not as interesting as Julius Caesar Twelfth Night for ISC. The comedies were not as lofty as the tragedies, I discovered.

Then life and career stepped in and for a few years Shakespeare had to retreat to a back shelf of memory, retrieved sometimes when I found particular parallels to plots in popular films- or read something. I discovered entire plays online recently with notes- and am now going back (dissertation permitting) to read Macbeth. 

NOTE: April 23 is the Birth and Death Anniversary of the Bard of Avon