Unsurprisingly, I am on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s email list. (I am a fan of their productions and like to know what else they have going on.) This week I got an email asking people to share their Shakespeare stories with the hashtag #mySHX400. It’s supposed to be via video. I’m not really a video kind of person but I wanted to write a post about it. The question that inspired me was thinking about the first time I was introduced to Shakespeare.

The actual first time that I ever was introduced to Shakespeare was a local production of Julius Caesar that I saw with me elementary school class in about third grade or so. More on that in my Julius Caesar post which is coming up (when else?) when we approach the Ides of March.

But I feel that my real introduction to Shakespeare was the shortened and simplified production of Macbeth that my sixth grade class performed, in which I played First Witch. It’s the only play I’ve ever been in and, for all intents and purposes, I don’t know that it even really counts, but the point is I had so much fun. The language was fascinating to me, and so were the characters and the story. I remember going outside to practice my lines and just thinking how fun they were.  There was something about the rhythm and the sheer…creepiness of them. I mean, how fun is “Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble”? (So fun that the Harry Potter films borrowed it, is the answer.) And I was positively delighted that I got to open the play with the delicious lines, “When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

I think this was truly the beginning of my lifelong obsession love affair fascination with the Bard. I read one Shakespeare play in English class each year after that (mostly), and they were always among my favorite things I ever read for school. My parents had a very old, very battered and yellowed copy of Taming of the Shrew in our family library, which I read several times over the next few years. And one summer (I think I was between 13-15), I brought my old copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works with me as my reading material for our family vacation. (My grandma had given it to me not long before, I believe.) I didn’t get through much of it, but I did read The Tempest and Two Gentlemen of Verona on the trip and enjoyed them. I even managed to convince one of my two little brothers to let me direct him in preparing a monologue. I had him act out and memorize some lines from Two Gentlemen of Verona that I thought were funny. (I don’t remember anything about the monologue now other than that it had something to do with a dog…?)

All of this, in other words, is to say that one can hardly be surprised that I am the kind of person who would then decide to start a project like Finding the Bard. 🙂