Blame it on the Bard

Would you feel favourably disposed towards a writer who can’t even spell his name consistently? You’d better, because that’s exactly what characterised William Shakespeare, unarguably the greatest English writer of all time. Records exist of dozens of variations of his name, including Shakspere, Shacksper, Shaxpere, Shake-spere, and even (remarkably) Shakestaff. Indeed, the one spelling our Bard doesn’t seem to have used in his lifetime was... Shakespeare.

To be fair to him, the Elizabethans weren’t particular about spelling. And not just because they didn’t have Microsoft spellcheck. Which is just as well. If Shakespeare had worked on MS Word and failed to review his output, we might conceivably be puzzling over such oracular pronouncements as “Caesar, beware the idea of math”.

On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, I’m reminded of a time when I aspired to read every single play by him. Yes, all 37 of them. And what prompted this exercise in masochism? Well, immediately after school I had applied to join an undergraduate course in English literature and had been given inside information that the chief interviewer (popularly known as ‘Shakespeare Gopinathan’) was known to favour candidates who showed easy familiarity with the Bard. As the internet was still some years away, cramming was difficult. Sparknotes wouldn’t be born for another decade, and reading the plays in the original was out of the question.

Or was it? After all, I took a rather snobbish pride in my English for having read the complete works of Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins. I also had two months at my disposal, and access to my grandfather’s modest library. I knew he had a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. The first folio. Kidding — it was an ELBS (low-priced) edition that the old man had apparently purloined from the public library, going by the seal on the flyleaf. It didn’t seem to have been read much (or even read at all) but it did have all the plays plus the sonnets. What it didn’t have were annotations or even a glossary. Oh well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Being of an OCD-ish disposition I would have liked to approach the project systematically and breeze through the plays in chronological order. I fondly imagined this would allow me to see how Shakespeare’s literary genius blossomed over the years as he perfected his art. But the anthology categorised the plays in three sections (comedy, tragedy, historical), beginning with The Tempest . So I jumped right in. It was a little slow since I had to pause in the middle of every other sentence to look up an unfamiliar word. What the heck was a ‘sirrah’? Why were the characters so fond of saying ‘marry’ when matrimony clearly wasn’t on their minds? But I persisted. Till page four. That was quite enough for one day.

By the end of the week I was only halfway through The Tempest . At this rate I would still be plodding along by the time the new millennium rolled around. Clearly there had to be a better way. The new plan of action? Dip into various plays at random and hope for the best. Next up, Hamlet , the Great Dane. I jest — I mean the Prince of Denmark. This was not to be missed. Despite never having read the play it sounded familiar. I could identify with the wag who said Shakespeare didn’t write anything original; he merely cobbled together a lot of well-known quotations. Nowhere was this cobbling more evident than in Hamlet .

That was two down: a comedy and a tragedy. Logically, a historical play had to be next. What better choice than King Richard III (of “my kingdom for a horse” fame)? The last English king to be killed in battle, His Majesty was destined to meet his maker in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field. I wish I had a premonition then that the king’s remains would be unearthed more than two decades later from under a parking lot in Leicester. With not a bridle in sight, let alone a horse. It would have spiced up a rather dull play no end.

The random sampling was often entertaining. A Midsummer Night’s Dream elicited a few chuckles, especially the name of the (literally) ass-headed character Nick Bottom. Romeo and Juliet seemed rather hyped. It could have been summarised in four short sentences: ‘Teens fall in love. Families feud. Things don’t go well. Everybody dies.’ The Taming of the Shrew seemed terribly sexist, even to a callow 17-year-old. The Comedy of Errors seemed to recycle the oldest plot device in history — confusions arising as a result of two sets of identical twins.

At the end of the month, the score was 12 down, 25 to go. The remainder included little-known plays such as Titus Andronicus and Pericles , which even Shakespeare might have forgotten about if someone hadn’t brought out an anthology. The final desperate attempt involved what might, strictly speaking, be considered cheating. I discovered on the bookshelf an abridged ‘Easy English’ edition of Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. Imagine — an abridgement of an abridgement. But it was just the thing to sail me through the rest of the plays in record time.

Postscript: the interview began well, with trivial questions about the Romantic poets and the like. Then it was Shakespeare Gopinathan’s turn. “So who was the merchant of Venice?” he casually enquired from behind steel-rimmed glasses. Ah, this was one play I had not only read but understood. “Shylock!” I answered in a heartbeat.

Which, as it happens, was the wrong answer. The merchant of Venice was Antonio. But they must have felt bad on seeing my crestfallen look because they passed me anyway.

Hari Menon is a Mumbai-based independent writer

COMMENT NOW