Results of Ruminations

The turbulent time of 2006-07 included losing a child to a miscarriage, expecting another child a couple of months later, then learning that the new child had a potentially fatal heart defect. I was in my senior year at college and had too much going on as it was, yet I had to soldier on. January 2007 saw me in the classrooms of my youth, student teaching with two of the people who inspired me to be a teacher in the first place. When I first sat down with Greg Park to take over his sophomore English class, he pointed out the areas that were tied up with his requirements (book reports, standardized testing, and so on), then gestured to one block of time in the middle of the quarter. "You can do whatever you want here," he said. "Writing unit, another book. Whatever you want." "Do you have copies of Shakespeare?" I asked with (probably too much) enthusiasm. "Let's go look." He didn't sound thrilled, but took me anyway to where the bo...

I became significantly more interested in reading Shakespeare during summer 2006. I'm not entirely certain what I was able to read, but I generally would knock out an act or two each Sunday before I would get knocked out myself, snoozing with my head cricked against the wing of my armchair. My biggest difficulty was deciding which text to pursue. The familiar ones I could more easily follow, but I wanted exposure to others that I didn't read as often. With my birthday-given copy numbing my lap, I would take certain steps before starting a play. I would copy down each character from the dramatis personae on a yellow sticky-note and use that as my bookmark. I would try to paint the image of the Cedar City stage in my mind for the characters to enact. I would sleep whenever the need hit me, since pushing through Shakespeare while drowsy never yields beneficial results. The fall of '06 came around and my wife and I decided to take our anniversary in Cedar City and Manti, ...

I was originally leery of going to the Utah Shakespearean Festival (now without the adjectival -an ending for reasons I don't fully understand). Part of me felt obligated in the same way I'd felt obligated to learn about and like Shakespeare in the first place. Part of me was curious, but the idea of a festival--a stereotypical Renaissance Faire--ran through my head and persuaded me not to bother. Still, it was summer time in 2006 and I'd had enough positive experience with Shakespeare that I wanted to try out the USF. We went ahead and bought the cheapest hotel we could find and snagged some tickets for Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet. Money and interest prevented us from picking up the hat trick of Shakespeare plays that the USF does (almost) every summer, leaving The Merry Wives of Windsor unseen, but I was excited to see what it was like to watch professionally made productions in southern Utah. The day or two before we left, I was walking past the discount b...

Attendant to being an English major is the assumption that you have to like William Shakespeare's stuff. It draws an interesting line of conformity: you can be counter-culture conveniently by disliking the Bard or you can be part of the establishment and, like a tool , enjoy his works. (There is a third option, one of liking the works but distrusting the source, but this isn't where antistratfordianism really came into my perception.) I think this assumption is fair, though perhaps over-worked. In my (limited) experience, Shakespeare didn't infuse a lot of my courses, which were, for the most part, concerned with other avenues of literature. I don't remember him creeping into conversations, being used as a comparison to other texts, or passing by, like streak of light, to illuminate other texts. Even my British Lit classes (easily my preferred courses; American literature tends to leave me a little cold) skirted about him. I think this was done as deference to their ...