I probably do not have as much experience with Shakespeare as I should, being an English major. Usually, one would expect a person in my field of education to be someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes such a distinguished literary figure as The Man himself. After all, his work has influenced countless people, authors, and works for centuries. However, that has not been my experience. I will be the first to admit that the works of Shakespeare are not my favorite, although the fact that I am taking this class proves that I am willing to give the man a chance to impress me now that I'm a little (a very little) more mature than I was in high school.
My high school in general was, shall we say, less than high quality, so anything remotely culturally enriching was pretty much taboo to anyone who didn't want to get shoved into a locker. We despised literature--works like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odyssey, Tom Sawyer, and of course the entire works of Shakespeare--purely on principle (we didn't know what exactly that principle was, but we respected it like nothing else). I may sound like I'm exaggerating the extent to which I and my fellow high-schoolers hated great literature. I can assure you that I am not. This is what I had to deal with. The only things "Shakespeare" I liked were the movies based on his plays, like 10 Things I Hate About You and Romeo and Juliet.
Considering the awful literary poverty I grew up in, it's a wonder that my love of literature was able to flourish in my senior year without being mercilessly squashed by my peers. The first time I had even any idea that I could like Shakespeare was when my band teacher volunteered me to play in the pit orchestra for A Midsummer Night's Eve. Naturally, I was not pleased that I would be forced to endure several rehearsals and performances of a play that my close friends deemed "lame." To my great surprise, however, once I understood what the characters were talking about (which took several days of listening to the same lines over and over again), I was hit by an sudden realization: Shakespeare could be funny! Who would have thought? (Yes, I was so ignorant about his works that this was a huge surprise to me). Despite having to see the play more than a dozen times, I enjoyed being involved in the production. After graduating high school, I watched one of my friends perform in a community college version of Much Ado About Nothing, which I found was also very entertaining. This led me to consider something I had previously believed to be an impossibility--that maybe Shakespeare, maybe even all literature, was actually enjoyable.
I discovered in college that I was not terrible at English, that in fact I liked it a lot, and so I chose to major in it. I was, and still am, a little less experienced than my peers where literature was concerned, but I worked hard to catch up. This Shakespeare class is the next step I'm taking to learn about and appreciate literature in all its forms.
To discover the joys of Shakespeare will be an awfully big adventure.
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