Me and Shakespeare
Life-Changing Adventures with the Bard
1.
Somewhat past the middle of the journey, my life had taken an unexpected turn. On a golden day in October 1997, I found myself driving to Caldwell College, a small Catholic school in New Jersey operated by Dominican nuns, where I would be teaching an eight-week, two-hours-per-week course on Shakespeare to adults over fifty.
This would be my first experience as a teacher. I was not a Shakespeare scholar. At the age of sixty-seven, I was embarking on what might turn out to be a new career, a reinvention of myself.
The thrills and chills accompanying a journey into the unpredictable were escalating into the queasiness and near-panic of that primal terror, stage fright. I felt I had to bedazzle the audience that awaited me; I needed to prove myself as someone capable of bringing the work of Shakespeare dramatically alive for mature students, filling his plays with an immediacy that would make them resonate in the hearts and minds of the class as it had in mine during a recent period of obsessive self-instruction. Moreover, I wanted these people to adore me.
I'd been rehearsing ...
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