by Joseph Broadworth

Created on: March 11, 2009   Last Updated: July 23, 2009

I believe all of us have had the same experience - sitting, bored silly, with a text of some Shakespeare play perched in restless hands, aware of some classmate trudging through some assigned passage, but not really listening. And then, someone raises their hand and speaks "Mrs._________, why are we reading this? Nobody talks like this! Waste of time, I tell thee!" And, I must admit, I thoroughly agreed. I remember getting into MacBeth one year, but only for about an act or two. No, it is safe to say that I was not a fan of Shakespeare in the beginning.

Years later I went to a bookstore and noticed a large volume on sale. Picking it up, I flipped it over and "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" stared me in the face along with the famous Droeshout engraving of the Bard, showing a balding, timid, somewhat mischievous Bill Shakespeare on the cover. The price was $4.99. I haggled with myself and grudgingly bought it, thinking it would be a good reference book for all the Shakespeare adaptations that come out on film. It lay in the back of my bookshelf for close to a year until one miserable day in university, sick as a dog, I needed something to bore me enough to make me sleepy. I picked up Bill and turned to 'King Lear'. Hours later I was done, and surprised at how much I enjoyed it. As the years went on, I read more and more plays. It wasn't until I started reading some of Shakespeare's buddies and contemporaries - Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe - that I realized how much greater and larger that Shakespeare was...and is.

I am not an English major, nor a literary critic, nor do I profess any heightened talent for writing, reading, and judging literature. Like many others, I have often asked myself why William Shakespeare is still popular. 400 years after his death, aspiring actors dream of playing Hamlet, Lear, Othello or Falstaff. Writers as eminent as John Milton, Sam Johnson, Dostoevsky, Hugo, and many others hold him in very high regard. He is routinely hailed as the greatest playwright in history, certainly the greatest writer in the English language, and by some respected critics such as Harold Bloom he is regarded as the greatest writer in history, period. He actually invented hundreds of words that are still in use today. But is he comprehensible? Does he fit in with these multi-cultural times considering he is (gasp) a white European? The answer is yep.

Shakespeare seems to transcend cultures and nationalities. Bloom recounts how in his

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