If you’re like me, whenever my class was told that we were going to read Shakespeare in high school, it was always followed by a collective groan. The first things my classmates criticized about “The Bard’s” plays were the relevance and the language. Dramatic plots and schemes of murderous vengeance didn’t matter. To them, any the characters that spoke in “Old English tongues” and were not worthy of their attention.
The opposite could not be truer of the plays put on at the Nashville Shakespeare Festival. A friend and I went to see Antony and Cleopatra last weekend, and while we were walking back from Centennial to Highland, we could not stop talking about it. The play chronicles the demise of Antony, a roman general, and Cleopatra, the pharaoh of Egypt, and their love affair which leads them both to ruin.
My friend and I were blown away by the actors, the styling of the costumes, and the moments of visually engaging choreography. As this play come to life, I realized that what often gets lost in the pages of many of Shakespeare’s plays is the depth of emotion that characters feel during the trials they encounter.
Reading Cleopatra’s monologue about losing the love of her life, compared to watching her actress cradle Antony with tears in her eyes resonated so powerfully with me and the audience. Immediately, I began to wonder how many other moving moments I had read over the years that had only fallen flat because they were not performed, but left constrained to written words and pages.
This is all to say that perhaps the reason there is so much reluctance about reading Shakespeare is the because many of us are exposed to it through the wrong medium. If you love Shakespeare’s work, if you hate it, if you’re ambivalent, or curious if you had missed out as I had, go to a play in the park.
Seeing Shakespeare’s work, as it were meant to be seen, only makes me wish I had experienced one of his plays like way a long, long time ago.
Performances of A Winter’s Tale are September 16-17. For information click here.