Here's To New Beginnings

Whilst I had been introduced—rather pathetically, I might add—to Shakespeare in grammar school, I hadn’t been properly immersed into the plethora of Shakespearian literature until last year. It was precisely this lack of experience that prompted me to write off Shakespeare until that point as an esoteric anachronism, someone who’s work became as much of an antiquity as the outdoor theatres which promulgated his plays among the proletariat class in Victorian England. Ironically, we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my 8th grade English class, but the uninspiring environment made the play yet another stochastic lull in my grammar school experience. The only recollection that I have of reading the play during that year was taking a pedantic and petty exam wherein I was required to identify the characters associated with well over 30 quotes from the play. Needless to say, it wasn’t a fun time: from that point on, I heuristically associated Shakespeare with that very exam. Largely because of this entirely unintellectual introduction, my false preconceptions of Shakespeare were bolstered unimaginably.

Luckily, this would all change. My ignorance quickly disintegrated while reading and analyzing Othello and the sonnets during my Junior year. Notably, my most momentous change in attitude came when our class listened the musician Rufus Wainwright’s breathtaking performance of Sonnet 29. In addition to the novelty of listening to the sonnet performed as a musical arrangement, Wainwright’s personalization of the sonnet brought it to an entirely new dimension. What was an anachronism incarnated in front of us: the prose of an Englishman from the 16th and 17th centuries suddenly took the form of the raw emotion of a 21st century opera performer. To me, that reverberation through time was living proof of the timelessness of Shakespeare’s literature. Upon further investigation, it turns out that Wainwright isn’t the only one to deliver a modern interpretation. For instance, yearly Shakespeare "Sonnet Slams" in Central Park—not quite like a rap battle—offer a venue for performers to give their own interpretations of various sonnets in public. While I don’t envision any heavy metal bands performing Sonnet 29 anytime soon, such contemporary reverberations of Shakespeare’s literature show that it is very much alive. It took some time, but I’m ebullient that my sour heuristics have been shattered.