I HAVE A HUNDRED favorite books. At different times in my life I would have said my favorite book was Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay or Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner or the collected works of J. D. Salinger or Ernest Hemingway, to name a few.
But if the world as I know it was coming to an end and I had to grab one book to save to help rebuild that world it would be my Riverside Shakespeare, although the Arden Shakespeare would do, or anything that contained all the plays.
Thirty-eight plays. I would need them all in case a new world happened that contained people who wanted to be writers. They would need to read all thirty-eight to learn that even the greatest writer who ever lived was a novice to begin with, and then got better, and better, and better and better, until he became the best, past, present, and forevermore.
All writers know that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived. We write in his shadow and most of us are happy to be there. “There are some guys nobody could ever beat, like Mr. Shakespeare,” Hemingway wrote, and I knew that quotation and believed it long before I knew why it was true.
I was fifty-two years old before I began to really know the works of William Shakespeare. Now I am sixty-six and I have been reading the plays out loud nearly every Sunday afternoon for fourteen years and I’m beginning to feel I almost know these plays. I don’t have to worry that this love affair will end. It will take many more years to really sound the magnificence of them. No one could tire of them. They are not only plays. They are great poetry and they contain novels, essays, stand-up comedy routines, satire, metaphor raised to the tenth power.
The political insights are so apt that every Sunday I think I’m reading satires on the latest news from Washington, D.C. “Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown” is a recurrent theme. Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton would have been solaced by the plays. I keep hoping Laura Bush is reading them to our president now.
Here is what happened that brought Shakespeare into my life so deeply. You could do this too. I am going to tell you how.
In June of 1987 I went over to my friend Margaret Salassi’s house to sit on the porch and watch the afternoon turn into evening. She is a graduate of the writing program here and had been with me in poetry workshops when I was there. She is small and pretty and always ready for a challenge.
We were joined by Patti Hayes, whose husband is a writer and another friend of mine.
We were sitting on the swings on a screened-in porch and I said, “I wish we could go to Stratford in England and see some of Shakespeare’s plays.” I had seen plays there the year before and been dazzled by them although I only half understood what I was seeing. I had studied Shakespeare at Vanderbilt and seen the movies made from the plays. WHAT I HAD NOT DONE WAS READ THEM OUT LOUD, WHICH IS THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE.
“We could get the plays and read them,” Patti said. “We would read them right here in Fayetteville.”
“We could read King Lear!” I shouted. “Of course we could.”
“Let’s do it,” Margaret said. “Let’s do it tonight.”
We got on the phone and started calling people and asking them if they wanted to join us. A poet named David Saunders said he would come. So did a beautiful woman named Kathleen who had studied acting when she was a girl.
The head of the writing program laughed when I asked him to come. “You must be crazy,” he said. “It takes four and a half hours to read King Lear.”
“We don’t have anything else to do all summer,” I answered, and wrote him off as a spoilsport.
At seven that night we met at my house on Mount Sequoyah. We sat around an oblong dining room table and opened our various editions of King Lear and began to read. Seven people were there. Most of us could not pronounce all the words, especially the names of the characters, but we were all educated people who loved literature and between us we figured it out, not being afraid to ask for help or stumble bravely on when we made mistakes.
It was a Tuesday night. The next Tuesday we were back at our places at the table reading Hamlet. By the second Tuesday we had already begun to have special seats which we keep to this day. Because it was my house I fell into the role of assigning the parts. No one fussed or objected. I would say who would read what and we would press on.
We read on Tuesday nights for several years and then somehow we changed to Sunday afternoons and we have stayed there ever since. We have read every play at least three times. Last year we read them in the order in which they were written.
Reading Shakespeare is a humbling experience for a writer. Here is what could be achieved. Reading them in the order in which they were written is especially inspiring. The early plays aren’t very good. They have all the amateur mistakes all writers make. They are derivative and overwritten. But within these plays is the genius that will become Hamlet and Macbeth and Henry IV, parts I and II, and Romeo and Juliet and King Lear and The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Just to type the names of the great plays makes me shiver. Every Sunday afternoon when Paul and Henry and Carolyn and Margaret and Patti and Enid and Molly and Kathleen and I gather around my table to begin reading, a hush falls on the room. This is greatness and when we open the books and begin to read we are part of that greatness and partake of it.
If you want an entry into this treasure it would be good to read a book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom. Or just call up some friends and sit down and open a play and begin to read. It’s magic. You will not be sorry that you tried it.
MARCH 2001