I like Shakespeare. Okay, I know. Who doesn’t? That’s on up there with “Pain hurts” for non-controversial statements. I’ll see a performance whenever I get the chance. I do watch the movies, but I like it better when I can actually see a play.\n<\/p>\n
Up until I was in my early twenties, though, I read<\/em> the plays, and while I enjoyed them okay, it wasn’t that<\/em> big a thing. Read ’em in school. Sure, sure, the teachers were competent. They got the students to read them aloud, at least.\n<\/p>\n I read Romeo and Juliet<\/em> as a freshman in High School, same as about 90% of people educated in America.1<\/sup> But when we read Romeo and Juliet<\/em>; we read an expurgated version with the (mildly) dirty bits taken out. Nope, I’m serious, we did. Go Stafford School board\u2026 I didn’t learn Shakespeare was often rather saucy until much later. Yeah, I thought Romeo and Juliet was kind of a cool story. Wasn’t as cool as The Illustrated Man<\/em> by Ray Bradbury, which we read after that, but it wasn’t as mind-bogglingly dull a Great<\/em> I didn’t wind up touching Shakespeare again until I was a senior. We read Macbeth<\/em>. I was in love. I even put aside some new Heinlein stuff I was reading to finish it, then re-read it. Loved, loved, loved it.3<\/sup>\n\t<\/p>\n But that was the sum total of any Shakespeare I experienced until I was in my early twenties. I got a volume of the Bard’s plays for my 20th<\/sup> birthday and read a few. But I admit I didn’t get much into them.\n<\/p>\n Then, when I was twenty-two or so, my in-laws invited my husband and me to a Shakespeare in the Park event in DC at the Folger outdoor theater to see The Merry Wives of Windsor<\/em>. My husband and I wanted to see it at least in part because an actor who’d appeared in a Star Trek movie was playing Sir John Falstaff.\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\tExpectations<\/em>, either.2<\/sup>\n\t<\/p>\n