Why Shakespeare?

22 years ago, when I finished my undergraduate degree in British literature, my mechanical engineer dad asked me a question I would encounter for the rest of my career: Why Shakespeare?

The question is valid, especially as we seek to diversify our curriculums and decolonize our classrooms. Why are we culturally so obsessed with this writer that some scholars can’t even agree is one man? They are wrong, by the way. Evidence proves he was real and he wrote…a lot.

You will find so many blogs, articles, and scholarly journals trying to pin-point the exact hold Shakspeare has on Western consciousness. However, for me, ironically, I could not answer my father using words and instead, offered him an invitation. I asked him if he wanted to see as many plays as possible with me. We started with one a month and quickly set it as a goal to complete the canon together- to see all 38 plays that are intact enough to be performed. This is harder than you might think as some plays are just not done very often while others are almost criminally overdone. I never need to see another Much Ado About Nothing in my life (unless it’s the next Vistamar play, of course). Theaters are in the business of selling tickets and there aren’t a lot of us begging for more productions of Two Noble Kinsmen. To be clear, if any artistic directors happen upon this, I am begging.

Over twenty years into our father-daughter quest, this July, thanks to the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s commitment to the less famous texts and an LMU production of Troilus and Cressida, we completed the canon! In the meantime, we have seen approximately 300 Shakespeare plays together. And we are by no means done. What a great time to revisit the question and articulate what is, for me, incredibly hard to logically explain. Why Shakespeare? 

Let me start with answers that I think fail to capture the full truth. It isn’t just the tricks with language or that the man could speak fluent iambic pentameter. It isn’t just the plots, most of which he stole and revamped. Students frequently make fun of the pirates in Hamlet. They aren’t wrong to do so and this is coming from someone who has two Hamlet tattoos. It’s not what happens in the plays that makes them eternal. For me, it is the way Shakespeare was able to distill the human spirit into dynamic and real characters that feel possible more than 400 years later. The storylines have aged. The people trapped in these narratives have not. I have nothing in common with Othello, but I do see myself in our shared ability to overthink a small problem into an actual disaster. There are moments in King Lear that perfectly articulate the feelings around my favorite college memories. How is that even possible? What did this one man know about humanity and how did he record it all in a way that truly transcends space and time? I asked my dad what he’s decided about Shakespeare’s canon all these years later and his response was “history, human nature, language. It’s basically a study of all these and comparison between then and now.” Good job, pops.

Shakespeare was aware he was carrying Chaucer’s torch on character formation, and to be fair, was not humble about it. When the conspirators are killing Caesar, one turns to the other and asks: “how many ages hence shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown?” The man knew what he was doing and so did his contemporaries who made sure many of these plays were preserved for us to see, read, and feel. I am so thankful they did as Shakespeare is where I turn when life gets hard. Some people meditate, others exercise. I return to the works of a dead man who could not conceive of our modern world, yet deeply understood the people who would live in it.

For me, the benefits of reading Shakespeare in high school are two fold. Firstly, when kids realize that they can decode this old language, understand it, and even have a reaction to it, they leave feeling empowered and ready to take on any “scary” writer college may throw at them. Secondly, Shakespeare teaches all of us that while we are unique individuals, our struggles are not new. Love, grief, identity, power, gender, faith, prejudice, anxiety, jealousy, legacy, family obligation- Shakespeare has tackled it all. The things that weigh heavily on our souls are questions that humans have confronted for centuries and will continue to wrestle with. And none of the things inside us are so dark or ugly that they don’t have a place in some of the greatest art to ever see the stage. Shakespeare, for me, is that comforting voice of the past that whispers that this turmoil of existence is what makes us human and connects us to all that came before.