I always loved to read, but I was not so open-minded about it. I insisted that the value of reading was for the story, and all of this �what�s the theme?� crap that my teachers were always making me look for was a waste of time. The first book I read that was really written for adults was �A Bell for Adano� by John Hersey, and I totally loved it. But everything was right there in the story; you didn�t have to dig deep at all to understand what the author wanted you to get out of it. I liked that.I had an amazing English teacher in 8th grade who made me start to see that I might not be so totally right about this whole thing. What stuck with me most from that class was �The Lord of the Flies� and the play �Inherit the Wind�, which is probably the source of a lot of my beliefs about religion and the meaning of the world.
I had an amazingly awful English teacher in 9th grade who thought that Charles Dickens was da bomb, and that the best way to drill �Romeo and Juliet� into our worthless little heads was to read it to us, the whole play, in her monotone Scottish drone. It wasn�t even a cute Scottish accent, and it wasn�t even �Macbeth.� Then she told us to go home and read a Shakespeare play on our own. (Good assignment, huh. Another weekend, she told us to go home and write an epic poem. I kid you not.)
My parents had a little four-volume collected works with no annotations, and I asked them what would be the easiest play to read. At that point they did not choose to tell me that a) she had never read any Shakespeare, although she had seen some on the stage, and b) he had always hated reading as a kid, and had only read whatever he had been forced to that his sisters weren�t willing to summarize for him. They told me to read �A Comedy of Errors.�
I didn�t get most of it, but I got that it was like a Marx Brothers movie about two sets of separated twins, and that it was funny. Maybe Shakespeare would be okay.
And in 10th grade, an English teacher from Mars has us read �Julius Caesar.� It was a painful, dare I say degrading, experience. I vowed that I would never read any of that Shakespeare garbage again. What was so great about it � or him � anyway?
A most remarkable 12th grade English teacher sent me off to college, ultimately to become an English major. Looking for all those underlying themes in literature � now I get it! And it�s fun, too! But Shakespeare � I managed to avoid any course with a hint of Shakespeare until the end of my junior year, when I could no longer pass on the required-for-English-majors Introduction to Shakespeare.
I shook, I quivered. The textbook weighed twenty pounds. I couldn�t read any of it; it didn�t make sense at all. What would I do?
I sat and listened and tried. I tried more, and then I gave those annotations a shot, annoying as they were, maybe they would give me some clue as to what was going on. I went back to �A Comedy of Errors,� the shortest play, which I already knew was funny.
It was. It was very funny, and very clever. I began to see some light here. (�It is the east, and �� okay, you know.)
As I read each of the assigned plays, I went through them faster and faster; either I was getting better at working with the annotations or I wasn�t needing them as much. We read �The Taming of the Shrew� and I was delighted. We read �The Merchant of Venice� and I was infuriated. I wrote a paper on the role of women in Shakespeare�s plays (they were his only noble characters.)
Then I read �The Tempest.�
...to be continued...
