On the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, New Yorker writers share their experiences of reading, watching, studying, performing, memorizing, and falling in love with the work of the Bard.
One of my most memorable encounters with Shakespeare took place in the Taurus Mountains, in 2012, where I was reporting a story about the Arslanköy Women’s Theatre Group, a rural Turkish theatre company, founded in 2000 by Ümmiye Koçak, a forty-four-year-old farmworker with a primary-school education. Koçak wrote most of the group’s plays herself—they were about village life—but she was also really proud of having once played the title role in her own adaptation of “Hamlet,” titled “Hamit,” in 2009. Hugely popular in the village of Arslanköy, “Hamit” went on to tour several Turkish cities. They staged the graveyard scene using pumpkins for skulls. The women still talked about “Hamlet” all the time—about what Hamlet’s problem had been.
Anyway, one night, after I had been hanging out with Koçak and the village women, who were shooting their first feature-length movie (based on a script by Koçak), I drove back to the hotel where I was staying, in the nearby city of Mersin. It was a weirdly fancy hotel, with a glass globe on the ceiling that could light up in all different colors—you controlled it with a remote control. It could change to something like thirty-six different colors, and there was a strobe function. I remember lying on the bed under pulsing disco lights, eating a fruit basket that someone had sent to my room by mistake, and buying “Hamlet” on my Kindle, just to see what in there had been so captivating to the village women.
To be honest, a tiny part of me had worried that they were only (“only”) excited about “Hamlet” because it was famous, and Western, and the very opposite of what people in their village thought that they, Turkish peasant women, were capable of. But when I reread “Hamlet” after spending a few days with the women, and read some of the other plays that Koçak had written, it was immediately clear what had resonated for them. Koçak’s own plays are on the melodramatic side; they’re about the terrible plights of village women, about kidnappings and forced marriages and repeated pregnancies and bad harvests, about hunger and abusive husbands and suicide, and about the village school as somewhere that can protect you or maybe save you—to an extent. When I read “Hamlet” that night, it seemed to me to be all about the question of whether it’s worth it to be alive, when life means a tangled, intractable, inherited morass of painful family stories and family responsibilities, about whether education can really pull you out or whether you have to leave the university and go back to Elsinore. What struck me most of all was a small thing: the number of metaphors related to farming and the agricultural life style. Carrying firewood, in particular, is a big theme in Koçak’s work—the women carry the wood, on their backs, in the snow. And then there it was, in “To be, or not to be”: “Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life?” And I thought, Well of course. Life for the village women is a process of wringing a living out of the earth—that’s a metaphor for me, today, with my fruit basket, but for hundreds of years it was real, for everyone—that’s what life was.
Sometimes I get annoyed when people talk about the universality of great literary geniuses, for reasons I won’t go into, and yet there truly are some works of literature that have come down to us, works that tell rich and highly specific stories, in ways that somehow, magically, resonate in equally specific ways with people from the most different circumstances. If Shakespeare could have seen the Arslanköy production of “Hamit”—and who knows? Maybe he did, out there in the “undiscovered country,” among the pumpkins and the skulls—he would have understood it, and felt proud.
—Elif Batuman
A jobless summer back home from college, only slightly filled by an English class at a local college. The professor: no famous scholar, talks literature in crunchy Brooklynese. Shakespeare, to me: a trove of big ideas and grand passions that die in performance but that I liked to read—both outwardly and inwardly silent, parsing the text to myself as if it were Latin. The homework assignment: “Hamlet.” The classroom discussion: the professor posed a question. Not “Was the ghost real?” Not “Is Hamlet crazy?” He went straight to the play’s Top-Forty hit, the “to be or not to be” business, and didn’t ask about meaning, symbol, theme—he gave us six words and asked how we’d say them in real life: “To die: to sleep; no more.”
He called on everyone, about a dozen students in all; we tried it gamely but they always came out like a foreign phrase learned from a textbook. Then he did it—inflected like one Brooklynite in an Elsinore barroom telling another—and it made perfect sense. Instantly, I spoke Shakespearean, or, rather, knew Shakespearean as a spoken language. From that moment on, when I read the plays, the lines come aloud in my mind and the action, the characters, come alive with them. His way with the phrase was not Olivier’s or Burton’s (I checked years later) but it gave me the ears to hear their performances and a lifetime of others.
—Richard Brody
When I was eighteen, I was on a summer program at Oxford University and saw a flyer for an open-air production of “Macbeth” in one of the quads. I dragged along a classmate, and we sat in folding chairs. As soon as the play started (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”), the sky darkened. During the dagger speech—as if on cue—a light rain began to fall. By the time Banquo’s ghost arrived, it was a downpour. An upstage tree shook furiously in the wind, as if itching to blow off to Dunsinane. My friend left at intermission, along with half the audience. Those of us who stayed were given a tarp to hold over our heads and plastic cups of mulled wine. I remember the incredible actress who played Lady Macbeth—her name was Georgina Roberts—and the uncanny way that the weather seemed to respond to the play, like a mood ring. When I got back to my dorm, soaked and elated, I wrote in my journal, “This is proof that God watches Shakespeare.” The next night, I went back to see the same company perform “As You Like It.” Clear skies.
—Michael Schulman
I grew up with Shakespeare all around me: hearing my mother read me sonnets and bits of plays as a kid; seeing an interminable production of “Twelfth Night” when I was too young to sit still; learning about “Romeo and Juliet” via legend and “West Side Story”; reading the real “Romeo and Juliet” in middle school; sitting among rowdy classmates who howled with laughter during the nude scene in the Zeffirelli movie, and getting yelled at by our English teacher; being moved and thrilled by “Macbeth” and memorizing the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” bit, and, for some reason, the “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone” bit; doing the “Alas, poor Yorick” pose in a ninth-grade yearbook photo; being thrilled by “Hamlet,” and memorizing the “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh” bit; making mix tapes with snippets of my mom’s R.S.C. recordings between songs (“Awake, awake! Ring the alarum bell!” into Fugazi’s “Repeater,” say); being dazzled by “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in high school, and playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, in spiderweb tights and with a sheet over my head, in “Dogg’s Hamlet”; and on and on, sublime and ridiculous. But Shakespeare, beyond enhancing my life and my intellect and my love of language, also played a direct role in my life’s plot, in the style of Iago, or, perhaps, Falstaff. It involved arts camp, a shirtless Othello, and a reckless decision that I didn’t regret for an instant—and which Falstaff would have understood. Here’s to Shakespeare, transformer of worlds.
—Sarah Larson
When I was a kid I got the idea, I’m not sure from whom, that it was not unlikely that I’d end up someday either in prison or marooned on an uninhabited island; and so, while I was still at large, it would be prudent to memorize some poems, so I could later recite them and prevent myself from going mad. I memorized lots of poetry—I might be gone for years—but I discovered that Shakespeare was the easiest to remember and the hardest to forget. (I’d been told that once you memorized any poem it stayed with you forever, but this turned out to be untrue—so many poems just slid right out of me like egg out of a shell.) It wasn’t so much the beauty as the inevitability of Shakespeare: when you first read a line the images were often thrillingly surprising, but as you read it again and again it came to seem as though no other words could possibly fit. The monologues I memorized have stayed in my head as a kind of ideal of speech—compared to which real speech sounds all the stranger and messier, less coherent and more unpredictable, but exhilarating in its own way for just that reason.
—Larissa MacFarquhar
From all my hours of reading at university, I have an oddly clear memory of the last scene of “The Winter’s Tale,” where King Leontes is shown an incredibly lifelike statue of his wife, Hermione, who died sixteen years earlier, after he unfairly accused her of unfaithfulness. But, of course, she’s not really dead, and the statue comes to life and the lovers are reunited. This had always seemed too gimmicky to be moving, but I suddenly found it deeply stirring. The bottom drops out from Leontes’ language. Earlier, he blustered over objections to his cruelty; now his lines and syllables shorten and he’s left silent and simple, undone by regret, “content to look on” and “content to hear.” Even when Hermione comes to life, as though by sorcery, his reaction is short, plain and earthy: “O, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating.” The play meditates on the passage of time “that makes and unfolds error.” And, though it has a happy ending, many of the errors stick—some characters wrongfully dead are still dead. The lost years are still lost. I read the scene at a moment when, for the first time in a fairly easy life, errors were beginning to look permanent, remorse was starting to seem imminent, and it seemed like I might be able to put it all right through a vigorous assertion of ego. The scene had a sober moral stillness that made quietness and humility and acceptance seem very important.
—Andrea DenHoed
There’s a moment from Act III of “King Lear” that helps me understand what it is that a tragedy should do. Lear, on the heath, stands next to the Fool—the latter cracking wise, as ever—as the wind whips up nightmares. The King is spiralling through mental states, from sorrow to insanity through a tunnel of rage, inviting nature to do its worst, and in so doing, undo itself: “And thou, all-shaking thunder,” he thunders, “Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!” Soon, the Earl of Kent rushes onstage, meeting the storm more humanly than either of his scene mates: with open fear. Still more interestingly, he places his terror on a perfectly even plane with the physical and actual ravages of the moment. “Man’s nature cannot carry / The affliction nor the fear,” he says. One strange fact about life, at least for those of us who are lucky, is that it contains much more fear—more bated anticipation—than affliction. Terrible occurrences come in specks—sometimes clustered, more often mercifully spread out. What remains is memory—its own pain—and, with memory, apprehension. In our flinching, we sometimes resemble Lear, later on in the Act: “O, that way madness lies; let me shun that.” But the best tragedy says, No, don’t shun. Here it is: some trouble, but not yours. We unscrew our eyes for long enough to learn that Kent is wrong, that the amazing and awful thing is not what our natures cannot carry, but what they can.
—Vinson Cunningham
In the summer of 1985, “Richard III” was the “Hamilton” of London, at least as far as the availability of tickets went. The production, by the R.S.C., starred Antony Sher, who played the malevolent king as an arachnoid monster, scuttling around the stage on a pair of crutches. It was impossible to see unless you knew the right people—I didn’t—or you had the time and stamina to wait overnight for standby seats. That, at the age of eighteen, I had, and so I spent a mostly sleepless night in a concrete corridor of the Barbican, with nothing to sustain me beyond an inadequate blanket, a bottle of whiskey, and the company of someone I’d have spent the night with under any circumstances. We got the tickets, spent a blurry afternoon dozing in the sun in Hyde Park, and then returned to the theatre to see Sher’s thrilling performance. I can see it still.
—Rebecca Mead
The one writer ever to unleash the language and lash us with it and lash us to its mast at Shakespeare’s level was Herman Melville, and he was not shy about his inspiration by the Bard and aspiration to sing alongside him—not as a writer but as an Olympian force of creation. “Moby-Dick” began with jottings in the margins of Melville’s volume of the tragedies, and, as the poet Charles Olson wrote, “Madness, villainy and evil are called up out of the plays as though Melville’s pencil were a wand out of black magic.” Melville did not worship Shakespeare, but loved him as a mate, his only peer, and it is the lack of worship, the understanding that even Shakespeare had untapped promise—if only we could have known it—that makes this note of Melville’s one of the most perceptive, not only about Shakespeare but about what politics can allow the English language:
—Philip Gourevitch
“Bitches!” reads my eleventh-grade handwriting in my Arden Shakespeare edition of “King Lear,” next to Regan and Goneril’s cool dismissal of their sister Cordelia. A true enough assessment, if not the most sophisticated marginalia to show for one of the most profound reading experiences of my life. Most pages are covered frantically with notes and vigorous underlining, evidence that my reaction to the play was as ecstatic as I remember it to have been. My English class read “King Lear” twice that year, first as a single night’s homework assignment and then in a languorous progression over the course of three or so months, guided by a brilliant teacher who showed us how to analyze the text together scene by scene, line by line. I hardly understood the basic plot after the first reading; by the time we finished the second, I had forgotten that “Lear” was a play meant to be performed in a single evening, and thought of it as an entire world and moral system, one that I didn’t want to leave. When our school took us to see a production with Christopher Plummer, known to us up to that point only as Captain von Trapp, I was astonished by how quickly it rushed by.
—Alexandra Schwartz
In the plays, when Shakespeare’s characters think through a problem, they do so aloud, for the benefit of the audience. Once in a while, as in the Olivier film version of “Hamlet,” a soliloquy is presented as silent thought and delivered via voice-over. This innovation has not been widely adopted.
Shakespeare’s sonnets present the opposite problem. They are occasionally performed by actors, almost always with horrible results. They work better on the page; or, even better, in memory, where their cognitive fluctuations, their reversals and counter-reversals, interact with our own. This is as close as you can come to thinking along with Shakespeare, weighing one word against the other, grasping for a rhyme or phrase in a way that suggests Shakespeare’s own way of composing.
I’ve committed many of Shakespeare’s sonnets to memory, where I can change them if I wish: there is no text, just a sequence of words not entirely cordoned off from my own words, the two word-groups occasionally cross-pollinating. When you return to the text and compare your own remembered version with Shakespeare’s original, you learn a lot about his genius. In Sonnet 30, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” a poem partly about the actions of memory that the poem’s continued existence requires, I consistently replace the word “hid” with my own paler version, “lost.” The mistake matters a lot. Here are the lines:
This is a famous one, of course: from it we get the common English title of Proust’s masterpiece. We talk about losing our loved ones when they die. We say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” We don’t imagine them as “hid,” as in a sinister game of hide-and-seek gone wrong. One measure of Shakespeare’s brilliance is the difference between “lost” and “hid,” the latter requiring a much deeper reckoning with the death of “precious friends,” who have been secreted away, like treasure—unless they’re hiding themselves, hiding on us, like playful children.
Sometimes it’s a sequence of words I get wrong. In Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayest in me behold,” there is a cognitive rumple as eventful as any I know in poetry. Here is the first quatrain of that poem:
It’s practically human nature to get the second line wrong: we expect an orderly and gradual subtraction: first leaves, then only a few leaves, then no leaves. Shakespeare upsets the order—Why? I think it’s because this is a map of thought rather than perception. We can refoliate a tree in our minds, or turn inwardly to a branch with a few clinging leaves. In nature, you can’t glue the leaves back on once they’ve fallen. I think Shakespeare knew that we’d forget that little fissure when we memorized the poem; getting it wrong and then reversing the error is what the line itself does.
Plays are performed, and, when they are performed, changed. Poems don’t usually enjoy this dynamic, eternally unfinished status. But the sonnets are so precise and so surprising, at once so easy and so difficult to remember, that we’re never finished with them, nor they with us.
—Dan Chiasson
There is no reason I should be moved by the affairs of a king in a castle in antiquity, but as many times as I have seen Othello, and I saw it last with John Douglas Thompson, I want to yell out, “Don’t do it.” Othello’s suffering is real to me in a way sometimes that even real people’s suffering is not real to me. I hope always that he will come to his senses. Thompson once told me that even as the play unfolds he isn’t sure he will kill his wife until he does.
Leaving aside the Bible—partly because its intimacy, the feeling that it was written by people with minds like ours, is largely a matter of translation—no other purely literary world, not even Tolstoy’s, is as enveloping for me. That it should be so remote and still captivate so thoroughly seems a matter of astonishment.
—Alec Wilkinson
When I was fifteen, my family moved from our house near Boston to an apartment in the south of France, overlooking the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, a favorite subject of Cézanne’s. We arrived in January, by which point the warm Provençal brushwork of lavender and limestone had given way to a piercing wind. The mistral brings clear skies with it, but my adolescent brain was in a muddle. In my first weeks, I often stayed up until two or three in the morning, talking online with people back home after they finished dinner, cursing my French keyboard (not QWERTY but AZERTY). We had been reading “Macbeth” in English class before I left, and a friend and I had taken to calling each other Paddock and Graymalkin, after the spritely forms—toad and cat—that two of the Weird Sisters assume. On my first day of English class in France, where should we start but on the blasted heath?
A few lonely months in, my first package arrived from home. “Dear Paddock,” the note inside began. Graymalkin had sent me a box of Peeps. I hate Peeps, but they proved the perfect way of getting back at my surly new hosts. “Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge,” Malcolm, the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland, says. I went to the school lunchroom, stuck the Peeps in the microwave, and walked out the door.
—Anthony Lydgate
I saw Peter Brook’s famous production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1971 or 1972—one of the most memorable theatrical experiences ever. The stage was a minimal, brightly lit, white box; props were trapezes and plates twirled on sticks. What I remember most vividly was the two drummers, with complete drum kits, perched above the stage to the right and left. They played during the scene breaks. The fourth wall was never manipulated so subtly, and Puck’s epilogue—“If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber’d here / While these visions did appear”—never spoken to such effect.
—Louis Menand
“Hamlet” was responsible for my first up-close encounter with a naked man. It took place at the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead, a small venue in leafy Surrey where big productions often warmed up for their West End runs. I was fifteen, and attending a four-hour production of Shakespeare with my grandmother out of politeness rather than enthusiasm. Peter Hall was directing Stephen Dillane as Hamlet. Today, Dillane is perhaps better known as the grizzled Stannis Baratheon in “Game of Thrones,” but, twenty years ago, he was a dark-haired and brooding hottie. He was also brilliant: sardonic, whip-smart, and taut with nervous energy. And then, after killing Polonius, he took off his clothes, folded them, and put them in a laundry bag. I was in love.
—Nicola Twilley
