By Luke Durling
For years, I never really understood why people took Shakespeare so seriously. The questions, monologues and dense language that seemed to amount to a soap opera plot were so absurd and bizarre to my younger self. All these thys and thous just to describe witches and wicked men was so strange. Not only did I not understand the words, heck some I still don’t, I didn’t understand why The Bard was so fond of such things like madness and fever dreams while being taken so damn seriously. If you so much as lifted a finger to question the genius of Shakespeare in high school English, you would be shot down by a thousand reasons that made no sense to the teenage mind, especially one that preferred to watch cartoons than to decipher ancient English language for a few scenes about star crossed lovers or a relentless murder spree. This confession still feels dirty in a way, coming from a Creative Writing Masters student. How could I of all people not understand Shakespeare?
There is no real satisfying story here I can share, no eureka or epiphany, but more of a gradual acceptance of what I found from moments I enjoyed Shakespeare. Sword fighting and wicked curses, looney monologues said with such passion they had no choice but to be true without question. The absolute absurdity of The Bard is perhaps his greatest strength, even in his serious moments. Absurdity is as much in Hamlet’s wafting debate on life as there is in Brutus’ plea to Rome. The absurdity is different from piece to piece. whether it highlights a comic absurdity or a more personal, profound one about greed, love, loss, or life itself.
Shakespeare took the narratives and drama typically reserved to the gods and their realm and placed them rightfully in our human domain. No longer just a fable or morality based story, the entity of Shakespeare placed things like anger, grief and fear into human characters and made the viewer, for the most part, make their own judgements and vindications. In fact. while Shakespeare dabbles in the mythological, the key to every story is always grounded in a humanity, with a witch or fever dream only acting as a means for a deeply human character to exploit and change their fate for the better or worse. Drama will always be inherently absurd, but without the absurdity being held firmly and staunchly in character, the absurdity becomes a simplistic numbing, rather than the art we regale and crave. This is why Shakespeare is so revered, they were absurd in iambic pentameter, a controlled chaos no one had ever seen before or had the bravery to say publicly before. Life may indeed be a stage, but in that case, it is all absurd. That is the fundamental principle of drama itself, one The Bard saw clearer than most anyone else at the time,
This all being said, if you like Shakespeare and are looking for something fun to do next month. Shakespeare in the Park is coming to Trestle Park in Adrian, MI from Friday, August 2nd to Sunday, August 4th with a production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream! Friday and Saturday is at 6:30 PM, Sunday’s is at 3:00 PM and all three are absolutely FREE to the public! Just bring your own chairs and your zeal for the classics! My good friends Nate Adams and Aaron Treadway are in the wonderful production and my lifelong friends Jessica Briggs and Mark DePietro are the choreographers and lighting directors respectively. So, please consider checking it out! A brand new endeavor by the newfound Adrian Shakespeare Company, While the event is free, i would highly suggest you donate to the burgeoning organization. I have no doubt the show will be a resounding success!
Calm and Cultured 