Carry It Forward: Shakespeare

William Shakespeare. I had to Google the name to get the spelling right, I always feel that it should end in -sphere, it'd make everything simpler. He's always seemed so mysterious, like something you'd need to Google to truly understand. That's what the world has made him out to be, a genius that only a select few can understand. Now, I hadn't had any experience with his writing prior to this springs' Romeo and Juliet, only short references here and there, such as Julius Caesar in the iconic movie Mean Girls. His works had never interested me, and I remotely looked forward to the play because I'm a sucker for a love story.

Immediately, I was thrust into a brand new experience. I could follow along with the action, as long as I read each line two or three times, and read the annotations on the other page. That was fine for me, I enjoyed the story and that was that. Then, we spent a class analyzing about a paragraph of text- maybe half a page of text. Inside he began to point out layers upon layers of meticulousness. Everything was intentional, everything had meaning from the rhyming pattern, to sentence structure, to word choice, to even how syllables sounded. It was beyond overwhelming, and made me feel this small. I had always wanted to be a writer, and thought that I was decent at it. The writing of Shakespeare was on a whole different level, one that I didn't know where I would begin if I tried to write something like him.

To put it plainly, Shakespeare scared me. It set a bar I would never be able to hit, yet alone surpass. As the class dug deeper and deeper into the book, all of my 'surface level' comprehension never seemed adequate. I'm too literal of a person to have things like how the syllables affect the meaning' stand out to me at first, second, or third glance. Reading R&J became a chore, and I felt that if I focused on the writing, it would trade off with my understanding of the story, and vice versa: I couldn't find a balance.
I began to focus on what I could understand easily, like identifying figurative language, while still understanding the gist of Romeo and Juliet's antics. By easing myself into the insanity, it became easier to handle. I plan to carry this plan into King Lear, by understanding the plot first, then what I can easily understand about the language, and finally work into harder, more complex ideas that have disappeared between Elizabethan time and now.
I also hope to use this in my writing - laying out a plan, and then making lots of revisions to add little quirks for further generations, or future teachers, to discover. All in all, my singular experience with Shakespeare with Romeo and Juliet was one of learning! I liked discovering all of the patterns and things that can be done with language, it just took some getting used too. It's a break from the status quo, but in the blur of high school, sometimes that's whats needed.