Words of so sweet breath composed

 
Today's post is part of a project organised by The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to celebrate the birthday of William Shakespeare, thought to have been born on this day in 1564. No one knows his exact birth date, but he was christened on April 26^th (it was traditional to baptize a child three days after birth). Bloggers from around the world are taking part, blogging on all aspects of Shakespeare and his importance in their lives. You can find out more at Happy Birthday Shakespeare and take part on Twitter using the #hbws hashtag. What follows are my rather clumsy attempts to convey the meaning Shakespeare has in my life.

My interest in Shakespeare began when I was nine. I picked up a copy of The Complete Works I found lying around at home, and marvelled at its size, its promise, its mystery. I wondered what sort of stories Shakespeare told, and why he used such weird-looking language. It was like discovering a treasure map. That summer I dipped, quite blindly, but with much excitement, in and out of The Complete Works, reading snippets at random; a few lines from Romeo and Juliet, a scene from Richard III, speeches from Hamlet. I didn’t understand a word of course, but I was nonetheless drawn to the plays. It was around this time I first saw John Millais' painting of Ophelia. My parents explained who she was, and to me she began to symbolise all that was exciting and romantic about Shakespeare. I bought a poster of the painting from the art gallery shop and stuck it up on my bedroom wall. I'd lie in bed during the summer evenings and gaze at the poster, wondering about Ophelia. Who was she? Why did she drown? She haunted me. (Naturally it didn’t occur to me to read Hamlet. I was only nine).

By the age of ten I'd become hooked on Shakespeare. Someone gave me a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare which I read avidly, and on my eleventh birthday I demanded a birthday cake in the shape of The Complete Works, which my mother laboriously created. I can still recall it now, a big square book-shaped cake, iced in blue, with curly white writing on the front. My mother had even gone so far as to create overlapping edges at the top and bottom, and little grooved lines to suggest pages. It was the most wonderful cake I'd ever seen.

I first read a Shakespeare play in its entirety at school. It was Macbeth. I still have the copy with its adolescent scrawling, battered and worn from being lugged around in my school bag. With the help of my English teacher, who was an enthusiastic advocate of poetry, I made my first tentative steps towards literary criticism. My childish interest in Shakespeare was now becoming concretised into something more tangible. I could understand Shakespeare! Or at least, bits and pieces. His language slowly began to make some sense. I was beyond excited and wrote my very first essay on Shakespeare, ‘Why Macbeth kills Duncan’. During my teens I visited Stratford-Upon-Avon for the first time, courtesy of a school trip.  We wandered around Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Shakespeare's Birthplace, and Holy Trinity Church. We saw Henry V, and Richard III at the RSC, and took a backstage tour of the theatre. I can still remember standing on the stage at the RSC looking out at all the seats, imaging the audience. Whatever my previous interest in Shakespeare had been, I was now officially hooked.

At eighteen I was all set to read English at Oxford. I wanted to immerse myself in Shakespeare and spend the rest of my life understanding his plays. However circumstances intervened and I was spirited away to read Classics. As an undergraduate I pursued studies which had little to do with Shakespeare’s England. I was in the world of Imperial Rome, Classical Greece, Ancient Egypt. I read Roman playwrights like Terence, and the comic plays of Aristophanes, the tragedies of Sophocles, and Egypt’s Book of the Dead. But my interest in Shakespeare remained. I continued to see his plays in the theatre, and picked up a copy of his Sonnets at a university book stall.

Now, years later, I'm completing a PhD which has Shakespeare at its heart. Starting with an MA course in 2004, for the last seven years I've immersed myself in his plays and poetry, and what began as simple curiosity has now become a full-blown love affair. During the course of my research, I've learned about the real world in which Shakespeare lived - what he may have eaten for breakfast, life on Bankside, his family, politics, religion, all of which has served to both deepen my knowledge and sharpen my appetite. Shakespeare’s world was one of growth and expansion. England began widespread global trade. Colonies were established. Politics shifted and turned. Religion was a critically divisive issue. The explosion of an immigrant population, the ever-present threat of the plague, and the growth of the theatres were all part of the world in which Shakespeare found himself. So for me, Shakespeare has become a link to the past. He no longer inhabits a curious literary bubble in my mind. He is now a living breathing playwright working in the sunshine and filth of early modern London. He is part of an historical landscape, and his world view reflects his place in a vibrant culture which helped to shape the one in which I find myself today. His kings and queens, murderers and lovers, are all part of a rich literary tapestry; his characters have become a blueprint, as writers of fiction and drama the world over mine the universal seam which Shakespeare helped to create. Shakespeare and his works are now deeply ingrained in my life. As I contemplate the future, I know there won't be a day goes by without me reaching for a play or a poem, so I can slip, even for a few moments, into the astonishing world of his imagination.

Current copy of The Complete Works

John Millais' Ophelia (1852) 

School copy of Macbeth

 Signed programme from Branagh's Henry V at the RSC

Recently acquired Elizabethan sixpence

Bookshelves 

   

Excerpt from Rupert Goold's Macbeth, my favourite Shakespeare production