Opinion

Long-term resident

Matthew tree

All shook up

But all in all, I was not William Shakespeare's biggest devotee, almost certainly because, as an English school student, I wasn't allowed to decide for myself whether I wanted to read him or not.

The au­thor of 'Clock­work Or­ange', An­thony Burgess, fa­mously de­scribed Shake­speare on live TV as 'some­thing of a bore'. And the au­thor of 'Tropic of Can­cer', Henry Miller, wrote in a let­ter to his friend Lawrence Dur­rell that Shake­speare 'was just the kind of flat­u­lent ge­nius you could ex­pect the Eng­lish to pro­duce'. I was 15 when I was first obliged to read Shake­speare (for Eng­lish O level). I was as­ton­ished to find that to un­der­stand the text, I needed to read oo­dles of foot­notes, given that much of the vo­cab­u­lary was ob­so­lete and not a few of the word games, ex­cru­ci­at­ingly ab­struse. This was frus­trat­ing and at times down­right ex­as­per­at­ing. His 16th cen­tury jokes fell flat on me, and the se­ri­ous parts of the text struck me as being lit­tle more than that: se­ri­ous. Later, for Eng­lish A level, I had to plough through most of the com­plete works and found my­self in the un­set­tling sit­u­a­tion of being fully aware that I was read­ing works of un­doubted ge­nius, with­out lik­ing them very much. There were ex­cep­tions, of course, plays with whose main char­ac­ters I – and many oth­ers - could iden­tify ('Ham­let', 'Oth­ello') or which con­jured up an imag­i­nary world at­trac­tive enough to bask in ('Love's Labour's Lost', 'The Win­ter's Tale'...). But all in all, I was not William Shake­speare's biggest devo­tee, al­most cer­tainly be­cause, as an Eng­lish school stu­dent, I wasn't al­lowed to de­cide for my­self whether I wanted to read him or not. On the 23rd of this month, Cat­alo­nia's Book Day (aka Sant Jordi's Day) will mark the 400th an­niver­sary of the deaths of both Shake­speare and Cer­vantes. Like many Eng­lish peo­ple, I read 'Don Quixote' vol­un­tar­ily and en­joyed it more than very much, but peo­ple here, on the whole, have am­bigu­ous feel­ings to­wards it that are sim­i­lar to those I (and many Eng­lish peo­ple) have with re­gard to Shake­speare's plays and poems. In a nut­shell, it's hard to savour some­thing that had once been shoved down your throat. And never mind throats: through­out 2016 we're going to have Shake­speare and Cer­vantes up what Amer­i­cans have long taken to call­ing the wazoo. It could be painful. It could even be like going back to school.

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