The year of Shakespeare

I took a Shakespeare class in college where the required text book was a hardcover copy (I'm not sure if it comes any other way) of The Riverside Shakespeare which is the complete works of Shakespeare including a four to six page essay before each play/work, written in what looks like 2-point Times New Roman font (I may be exaggerating here). To make this more impressive, the pages are 8x11 and contains two columns per page on 1927 pages. Are you impressed yet? It was the most expensive text book I had bought at the time (1991) and was also one of the most expensive text books out of every text book at UMD's bookstore. I know this because I looked around at the rest of the books after glancing at the $50 price tag to see if anything compared. Either it didn't or I have conveniently blocked it from my memory in order to make people feel sorry for me.

I was looking forward to this class when I signed up for it but that faded after the first day when I realized I would have to lug around that 5 lb. book every day and it wasn't necessarily the weight, it was the size - aka bulky. I further wasn't looking forward to the class after listening to the professor ask for class opinions on various passages and then proceed to tell them they were wrong. Granted, he was pretty damn old and just may have known Shakespeare personally, but hearing him say that Shakespeare "definitely didn't intend that" made me want to come up with the worst possible answer and yell it out...in my head. I never spoke up.

Just when I was hoping that the entire class was with me and against him, a fellow female student spoke up about the last speech that Katherina delivers in "The Taming of the Shrew" (5.2.136-179). She felt is was incredibly chauvinistic, was highly insulted by it, and oh my gosh, aren't we all glad we don't live in those times anymore.

This woman was (and probably still is) a complete moron. To not be able to read it over and over again while imagining life's hardships of the times and see that it's really a plea for couples to have a little respect for each other uniquely qualifies her for being a complete moron. How could she have not gotten how Katherina was illustrating that, out of the two, men are better suited for protecting, fighting, "to watch the night in storms, the day in cold", they're built for it; and out of the two, women are better suited for the whole being soft and looking pretty thing, again, being built for it, and if two people are going to be in a relationship, why should they not try to do the best of that which they are most qualified for?

The moron had a real problem with the phrase "true obedience". How is it she couldn't stop dwelling on two words and instead imagine what Katherina may have been saying but just not in words....that it's the whole point of doing as much as you can for the other, not giving yourself up or over to someone who clearly doesn't have your best interests at heart?

I started to understand how the professor turned into who he turned into. After only half of a trimester, I was incredibly agitated with one student to the point of considering her to be a moron until the end of time. Imagine if I had to do this three times per year (they had trimesters back then instead of semesters) and maybe more in the summer for countless years? Yeah, teachers should be paid a lot for putting up with us.

I am now committed...wait, let's not use that word, let's say I intend to read every piece of work in that book this year. I started with Twelfth Night on Sunday and was dismayed to see that it had nothing to do with the holiday season, but there was a clown in it so that kind of made things a bit better. I'm going to move on to The Merry Wives of Windsor next to keep in the whole "confusion by letter" theme.

"God give you good night!"