Shakespeare... Expectations and Experience

My first experiences with Shakespeare, excepting absurd amounts of SparkNotes in Jr. High and High School (having neither learned to enjoy reading nor to have integrity), were on a train in China.

I moved to China for no particular reason this past summer, and found myself with a lot of time on trains, no Internet connectivity (which consumed 90% of my time normally) and a Kindle in hand. Times that I enjoyed reading were few and far between in my youth, despite the persistent efforts of my mother who happened to be a freelance writer by semi-profession. Even her book about how to raise "first-rate" children had not been of enough interest to me to persuade me to get past the first few pages. Indeed, my mom wrote a book about me and I couldn't be bothered to read it.

My mom had, however, noting my love for lyrics, taken me to Les Miserables every time it came to Salt Lake's Capitol Theatre. Sneakily she began to work in my reading of the classic by Hugo, constantly informing me of her belief that reading did not, in fact, "Suck," as I was prone to say, but insisting that I had just not found the right type of book yet. Much to my chagrin, shortly after returning from my mission, I sat down with the unabridged version of Les Miserables and fell madly in love. My pride assisted me in hiding Les Mis from my mom as if it had been a pornographic magazine, until I eventually found a section that was so amazing I had to share it with her. I now feel as if I understand the emotional turmoil that precedes coming out of the closet.

And now we return to me sitting on a train in China with an electronic version of the complete works of Shakespeare. His writing was brilliant, but it was something much more than that that intrigued me. Like Hugo, Shakespeare has a way of not only making art out of words, but he could convey meaning in doing so. He could take emotion and eternal themes and distill them into a form that I could take with me on the other side of the world. Shakespeare could make you understand, he could make you feel.

My expectations with regard to Shakespeare are to be able to better understand the world around me through his writing, as obscure and/or ambitious as it may seem.