regard for the Bard

Anthony Gregory (4:30:38 PM): I like Shakespeare a lot.

bkmarcus (4:30:44 PM): I can't really like Shakespeare. My father is a Shakespearian scholar. Judging Shakespeare, for me, is like what other people struggle with to judge their religion or their nationality.

Anthony Gregory (4:31:52 PM): I see.

bkmarcus (4:32:25 PM): I graduated from high school never having read Hamlet. I didn't realize I'd be in the minority in Freshman English in college. I graduated from college w/o having read Hamlet. So my friend and I bought a couple of copies of Hamlet, went up to my family's cottage in the Catskill mountains -- smoked cigars, drank cognac, and took turns with the different parts, and read Hamlet to each other. That was a blast. My wife and I are friends with the couple who introduced us (who just had a baby, incidentally)

Anthony Gregory (4:34:17 PM): Good for them!

bkmarcus (4:34:23 PM): and they visited us at that same cottage in winter, so we lit a fire, drank wee drams of single malt whisky all night, and the 4 of us read Macbeth to each other. That was also a blast. My 2 favorite Shakespeare experiences. Much better than seeing performances.

Anthony Gregory (4:35:10 PM): I love a good performance.

bkmarcus (4:35:18 PM): When I was a teenager, my father convinced me to read along with the PBS presentation of Julius Caesar. That was pretty good, too. But I can't seem to get it from the performances alone, or from the text alone. I need them both. My dad and I read Romeo and Juliet to each other. That was good too. Maybe I'll rediscover Shakespeare when we have kids.

Anthony Gregory (4:39:07 PM): I cannot help but be brought back to romantic recollections of sharing his sonnets and some of his comedies, namely Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, with a lover I had in college. I can recall it as though it were yesterday, the scents of the autumn air all around and the grin and glimmering eye of my female companion, even though this never happened. Yet the memories linger.