hagmania said:
The genius of Shakespeare really shines in the words and phrases he coined that are still commonplace today. He took verbs and made them nouns, nouns and made them verbs, two nouns and made another noun, etc. There's just a creative practicality, I guess you'd call it resourcefulness, in using what is given to you to create something more. I've always felt inspired by it.
This is what i love about Shakespeare - the furies of invention in his words.
I stopped paying attention in school when i was 11 and, while i am a ravenous learner when my imagination is captured, i am very uncomfortable when i have to slow myself down to understand something. As a result, i have blind spots and Shakespeare was one of them.
But, when i moved to Reno in the 80s, there was a wonderful outdoor theater @ Sand Harbor on Lake Tahoe and they'd stage 2-3 Shakespeare plays each summer. With a babe & a blanket & a basket of picnicables & a bottle or two of wine under god's canopy, even an illiterate iijitt t could enjoy the largely unintelligible poesy of the Bard. But the distractions, combined with the semipro performances, did not improve my comprehension, much as the odd turn of phrase would slap my face with their originality, even hundreds of years later.
Then, one of my earliest projects when i used trying to write something important to make it through my new widowerhood 20 yrs ago required that i appropriate some scenes from The Tempest and that was the first time i read a Shakespeare play. Even then i needed help getting the rhythm of it.
Fortunately, the late 90s were filled with movies - McKellen's
Richard III, Branagh's
Hamlet, Pacino's
Looking for Richard, Trevor Nunn's
Twelfth Night, even Luhrmann's
Romeo & Juliet that sought to democratize the Bard, mostly by naturalizing the delivery of the words.
Then, the best book on the written word i ever read,
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom came out and finally got me to see what the fuss was all about. Unfortunately, by the time i'd reached some understanding of the whole thing, i lived in Albuquerque and found that those movies had spoiled me for amateur productions ("As You Like It, Homes"?) as much as the wine & hormones had at Lake Tahoe. I've watched all the old Olivier and Welles movies (Orson's patching of the Falstaff story from the history plays, Chimes at Midnight is my favorite) and will be anxious to see a definitive King Lear on film (maybe if the theater in Rutland that shows all those "live" broadcasts of operas & plays & Monty Python reunions shows it, i'll do it in style). But I have yet to see a live Bard play in earnest at a decent venue with the new standing to comprehend it i now have as an old man. It's high on my bucket list, though traveling is difficult these days.
And now it's even in the family. My movie-director cousin's baby sister Kathleen, a 3-time Tony winner as a director/choreographer herself, can't get a theater to book any of her shows (a musicalization of the movie
Diner with songs by Sheryl Crow, a historically-accurate revival of Meredith Wilson's of
Unsinkable Molly Brown, etc) because jukebox musicals are crowding everything out, so she has taken her act on the road. Now that her kids are old enough to travel, she books guest-emeritus directing gigs wherever they want to summer. Though her dad was an English Lit professor, we didn't know she had it in her but, in 2016, she directed "Love's Labour Lost" at the Globe Theater in San Diego (probably the best theater west of the Great White Way) and "Much Ado About Nothing" this summer just ended. She's gotten great notices for each, so maybe she can get back to Broadway that way.
That's my goal now - for my first real, live Shakespeare to be seeing one staged by my cousin PeeWee (i still call her that, even tho she's in her 50s now). That play will be the thing, playahs!