Why This Shakespeare Course Is Mine

Every semester, Professor Thomas Olsen asks his graduate students to write what their previous experiences with Shakespeare have been, what their interest is in his Shakespeare class are, and what their scholarly goals are regarding his class. Here's what I wrote:

The first play I read by Shakespeare was Romeo and Juliet. I was in ninth grade. I was a solipsistic romantic whose heart was too big for the school. Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-cool adaptation with Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio was just coming out. I saw it with my first girlfriend at a discount cinema. I was developing my poetic skills. And yet, I did not care much for the play. Fixated on the story itself, I did not care for the tragedy, the unstoppable movement by which it reached its conclusion. I found it lamentable that two young people who I did not consider to be really truly in love should have to reach such an end so soon due to the explosive nature of their chemistries, their families, their tempers. One line did stick out, though. Early in the play, one of the characters comments that he has lately seen Romeo, apparently hung up on an unrequited love—my usual status in early high school and the preceding couple years—out walking by himself in the early morning, his tears augmenting the fresh dew. I can remember the exact moment I read it. It was early morning. I was sitting next to a window in an institution dedicated to education, like I am now. My new object of affection was hopeless; she stood before me: the new English teacher who had come in from nowhere to relieve the old teacher who had become terribly ill. The new English teacher was young, had dark red hair, drank tea from a metal portable cup every morning, listened to David Bowie. I was smitten. I longed to perform Romeo’s passionate passages on Juliet’s beauty for her, on bended knee before her and the class. Shakespeare had found his way in to another human. That one line was enough to let Shakespeare into my heart and mind. With that line, he had a foot in the door.
The next year, I read Hamlet. By the time I read it, I had already watched the Branagh version with my next girlfriend, who had me join her in running the school’s arts and literature magazine, which I became the sole leader of in a couple years’ time. I liked Hamlet a lot more. My grandfather had died, I had railed against and forsaken God, I had begun to wear black occasionally. I had had my heart truly broken for the first time. Things had changed, and quick. I had also begun to feel conflicted feelings toward my parents consciously for the first time. Hamlet had come at the perfect moment for me. But to be honest, it was mostly over my head, no matter how well I faked to the contrary. (I had also read Twelfth Night on the beach the summer previous to my sophomore year. I had forgotten this fact until beginning the next page of this reflection.)
By the final two years of high school, I had become a full blown literature fanatic. In eleventh grade, I spent every free period in the library, reading literary criticism on Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had become my obsession. Engrossed in American Literature my junior year, I read no Shakespeare. My final year, I swapped out my obsession with Hawthorne for one with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I also read two Shakespeare plays, one quickly and by myself (a term A.D. Nuttall makes interesting remarks about in his book Shakespeare the Thinker), the other slowly and with other people. The former was King Lear, and it truly was the book that made me a lover of Shakespeare. I would not come out of that book once I went in. For a weekend, all I did was read it, think about it, write about it, and repeat the cycle, absentmindedly shoving some food in my mouth every so often. I wrote an abysmal poem about it, and pondered Nature vs. nature to the extent of my young mind’s ability, which at that time lived on a diet of Stanley Kubrick films and dark music. I even neglected to notice the candle I was reading by had spilled its wax all over the floor. The most touching moment in all the play to me was Edgar’s speech beginning “When we our betters see bearing our woes” (sorry I chastised you for its absence in the recent production on campus). I wrote out the monologue in a card to my step-mother about a year before she died. The latter play was Macbeth; the raw power of its poetics, of its language, of its bleak vision and its bleak characters and its bleak ghosts gripped me and would not let go. I was made to memorize the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliliquy and recite it to the class (I was an actor with lead roles two years in a row at that point). Lines became so deeply woven into my mind I no longer knew the author. Lines from Macbeth spilled out into almost all the poems I was writing at the time, and I was writing a lot. Three years previous, I cordially admired poetry. Now I was dancing in its fire, trying to expiate my every scalding thought. All of my poems were full of sound and fury; all of my poems signified nothing. Lear’s themes obsessed me; Macbeth’s words obsessed me.
But I changed rapidly back then. You could say I still do. By the time I was attending Skidmore less than a year later, my love affair with Shakespeare had quelled. My assigned advisor was the school’s Shakespeare expert, a man by the name of Murray Levith. He even made it a point to look like Shakespeare. I was assigned to read The Tempest as the conclusion of his unsatisfying first half of Skidmore’s classics of Western Literature course, Evolving Canon, and I honestly don’t think I read past the first scene. The next semester I became obsessed with Blake and Milton. And my fantasies gripped me more and more—the ones I was writing (“Heirloom” and “Fragment from the Life of Fyck”) and the ones I was reading (The Lord of the Rings and Gaiman’s works). I never went abroad, as Professor Levith was frequently urging me to do, and I didn’t read another play of Shakespeare’s until finishing my undergraduate degree two years ago here, although I occasionally attended a performance (a good one of The Merchant of Venice at Skidmore comes to mind, one I walked out on, I think of Twelfth Night, at Emerson also comes to mind) and saw film adaptations. Eric Salehi’s class introduced me to Richard II, I Henry IV, and Henry V, had me revisit King Lear, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice, and acquainted me with “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis.” The two plays from the Henriad I found especially interesting, and at moments, resonant. Hal’s stirring soliliquy at the end of I.ii. of how he has thus far not lived up to his potential and has squandered his talent, his name, and his time in bars and with women and with rogues moved me and struck a deep chord, on a personal note. That’s another moment where I remember where I was when I was reading it—it stirred the actor who I killed and buried inside of me after high school. I would like to stand on a stage and deliver those lines to a dark room with a hundred pairs of ears. I felt every one of those words, though Hal’s later actions alienated me. I’d rather continue squandering my time in bars with rogues than threaten to assault, rape, and kill an entire village of people.
Anyone serious about literature, and especially Western Literature, knows that there are a few works with which one must be familiar. The Bible and The Plays of Shakespeare are chief among these, though earlier epics are of course also of paramount importance. It has become a fervent desire of mine to more deeply and comprehensively familiarize myself with these two pillars of Western Literature, but not just to catch allusions in contemporary works. I wish to engage deeply with these works because of what they illuminate about humanity, what they might teach me about myself, what they might do again to the smoldering poetic fire in me, what great unending questions they open and explore or invite the reader to explore, and what they ask of us. I wish also to use this class’s particular angle—how Shakespeare exploited and joined other preexisting works by other hands and minds to create something startlingly new and everlasting—as a learning opportunity for myself as a would-be writer of fiction on how I might compensate for a lack of complete imaginative vision by using twice-told tales in the creation of something new and worth reading. It is the perfect time for me to take this class because I am weary of the modern world and all its vanity and lack of focus, and I wish to dive headlong into the past to feed my ravenous soul. I wish to study and learn as much as I can about the bible and the works of Shakespeare, for reasons both scholarly and spiritual. I am best as a scholar when my spirit is most involved. I am at my worst when I am detached or repulsed by my subject. At SUNY New Paltz, there are teachers who I know by first-hand experience and by reputation to be as wonderful at teaching these two major touchstones of the Western Literary Tradition as they are erudite respecting their areas of specialty. I have been waiting to take this class with you since I began as an undergrad here in 2005. I am focusing on only this one course so I can give it my full attention and get the most out of it in such a small period of time. I consider it an honor to be your student and I appreciate the grace the English Department and the Administration has shown me. My boots are on and I’m ready to roll. 29 January 2009