Shakespeare

I remember when I first studied Shakespeare in 9th grade English. Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar were the customary plays for freshman to read. It was not long into the study of Romeo and Juliet that I knew I loved Shakespeare. 


This love continued through high school and college where I referred to his work in most of mine. I could not get away from the way his understanding of the world and people and love and hate resonated with my own. My favorite, and I know I am not alone in this, has to be Hamlet. The thief uncle king so liberal with his false smiles and his stolen bride queen, Hamlet's moody stalking around and his generous friends, the pain and grief in both love and death, the drama of it!


When I found a very nicely written book of Shakespeare summarized for children, I scooped it right up. I was not sure how this would go over with a fourth grader, but  have learned that there is difficulty in predicting what Gray will take to and reject. 


He immediately began reading and narrowed in fairly quickly on A Midsummer's Night Dream. He has hardly stopped talking about it for weeks, reading and rereading. He took out the original text and used his summary to help him read and understand. He has begun to use the play to interpret and understand his own life and relationship better. I have heard him start sentences, "...like Bottom when he..." and "...that's how Oberon is acting when he wants to raise Titania's Indian baby for himself!"


We were working on a written summary of the play as one of Grayson's finished writing samples for this grade, when the idea of writing a paper based on a single theme of the play emerged.
He kept reciting Lysander's famous line, "The course of true love never did run smooth;" and I suggested he write an outline showing how the play unfolds to support the idea.


He set his mind to this task with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. He quickly jotted the themes of "rocky love". Love unreturned, impossible marriages, "loving and unloving in the same, like, second". I drank my coffee and turned my attention elsewhere. Then he says, "Was Shakespeare a Christian?" I figure that this is something I have never thought about most likely because there is not much record of such a thing. I have to tell him so - deferring to the real truth. Who can say such a thing about anyone for certain? That is a nice general answer. He says, "Well it feels like it. It seems that mortal love doesn't run smooth, but to think so you would have to know immortal love, which must be smooth."