Happy birthday, Will Shakespeare! You’re still at work, spreading fairy dust over our eyes. Your bones may be moldering, but no one who ever walked the earth is more alive.</p>
<p>You have a few detractors. There are the pseudo-scholars who waste time and trees trying to prove someone else wrote those enchanting plays. They can’t stand it that you were an actor and did not attend Oxford or Cambridge.</p>
<p>Then there are the wood-borers who burrow into your plays, dissect motives and do elaborate psychological interpretations of your characters to the point of absurdity, revealing themselves in the process. A few are directors.</p>
<p>You’ve surely cringed at some of their excesses. Did you see the “Hamlet” where he donned his mother’s dress and did (in drag) the great soliloquy, “To be or not to be”? I was under the seat. Weren’t you?..</p>
<p>“Lighting up the stage” is what fine actors can do with your language. Because the plays were written to be acted, the skill of the cast is important. Classroom Shakespeare often falls flat because neither teachers nor pupils have seen the plays, only read them. (Too bad those students did not grow up with the King James Version or the old Episcopal liturgy ringing in their heads. They would have been helped enormously with the blank verse.) But there are always moments, even there.</p>
<p>To have my children see live productions, I have taken them to High Point and Davidson. Mysterious family illnesses (what a coincidence – all sick at once) required absences from school when a play of yours was in the area…</p>
<p>A six-person presentation of “As You Like It” done by the RSC at Davidson was so magical that my family tracked it down for a second performance in South Carolina. We were in the hands of experts, and it was worth every mile.</p>
<p>You undoubtedly loved all those inside jokes of Tom Stoppard’s in “Shakespeare in Love” (the young John Webster tormenting the rat was the best!). And you must have grinned, knowing that Tom Stoppard is really a Czech. There are no boundaries to love of your language. The Germans adore you, too.</p>
<p>My English-major daughter once was seated next to an Australian soldier at a production of “Midsummer.” As the “mechanicals” cavorted about to the audience’s delight – and great peals of laughter – he said to her, “I had no idea Shakespeare could be this funny.” What some have missed!</p>
<p>A prized possession in my dresser drawer is a metal badge, and underneath that one known picture of you on it are the words “Will Power.” Even we groundlings sense it.</p>
<p>To you, Will: “Thank you. I am not of many words, but I thank you.” (That’s your line, too.)