Captured Thought: Shakespeare Not Serious?

It's like a headline in a bad British tabloid.

SHAKESPEARE INTERESTING

MILLIONS OF TEENS ENTHRALLED

Never in a million years would anyone believe it. And yet it's possible.

I regret to say I don't have a particularly long relationship with Shakespeare's works. I'd obviously heard of him and knew a moderate amount, but until middle school I'd never read any of his plays or poems.

I tried reading Romeo and Juliet in seventh grade and failed miserably. I think I got about a quarter of the way through Act II and had to stop because it was so boring I was dying. Teachers had always told me that Shakespeare was one of the greatest writer of all time, if not the greatest, but I couldn't see it. There was nothing interesting about a centuries-old romance, especially not when the idea had been copied by so many more works. My chances with Shakespeare weren't looking good.

My eighth grade English teacher had other plans. We spent about two months doing a unit on a much more lightweight work - The Comedy of Errors. I initially found it hard to believe that anything as old as Shakespeare could qualify as a comedy, but I gave in.

Boy, am I glad I did.

The Comedy of Errors took me totally by surprise. It had the all characters of a Monty Python skit, the one-liners of a Fast and Furious movie, and the slapstick humor of an episode of the Three Stooges. It was unbelievable. Not only that, it didn't ever get old. We watched two performances of it and did our own during class, but our teacher still didn't think we'd gotten enough out of it.

So we did our own filmed version. I was cameraman, director of photography, and special effects designer. The combination of these three tasks allowed me to shape the story hundreds of different ways, and the true quality of Shakespeare's work was made known to me. I will never forget that class.

The biggest lesson I learned form that project was that old didn't mean serious. I'd seen a lot of "archaic" literature, and due to both my own bias and the subpar teaching of some of my elementary English teachers, I was unable to see any humor or lightness in anything, only fancy words for things that were boring regardless of how they were put. For me, Shakespeare changed this unbreakable stigma. The Comedy of Errors remains to this day one of the funniest pieces of literature I've ever read — amazing considering that hundreds of years of humor have gone by.