What I think about Shakespeare? "What do I think about?" is a better
question, while "Do I think at all?" is probably more to the point. When
class started I could give a simple answer, but now --after all of our class
discussions-- there are too many questions for me to give a straight
answer. I entered this clas with several preconceived thoughts about
Shakespeare. There probably is no one in the English-speaking world
who has not heard about Shakespeare. That he is the best ever, a demi-
god in the metaphysical world of books. In High School, I thought he was
probably an old man who deliberately wrote obscurely just to frustrate me.
Since I am more able to explain what I used to think about Shakespeare, I
will talk about how my view of him has changed.

Possibly the first change was that my vision of him acquired new life. I
thought that Richard III was thrilling. It had lots of action, lots of violence.
There was no way a stale old man could have written it. Also, the
language was exciting, for example in The Taming of a Shrew. He must
have been a colorful person. Perhaps he wore a trench coat and smoked
a cigar. I pictured Shakespeare as Peter Falk as Columbo walking his
dog on the beach while smoking his cigar: "To be or not to be? that is the
question, isn't it sir?[sic]... [takes a puff on his cigar] ...Whether to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..."

But as I kept reading play after play, the immensity of his work
overwhelmed me. I had trouble imagining a single person who could write
all of those excellent plays in a single life time. It became more and more
obvious that class discussions would not exhaust any of the pays even if
we talked for a hundred years. Every question led to new questions.
Consequently, I began to consider unorthodox answers to the question,
"Who was Shakespeare?"

My firs thought was that he had a partner. But this partner could not
have been the average Elizabethan. He --or rather it-- was a space alien
from the future. I reasoned that since the plays are so good even by
modern standards that he must have had access to modern criticisms of
his plays. After Shakespeare would write the first draft, his partner would
go to 1989 to learn about what Shakespeare did "wrong". Also, he picked
up copies of the "modern revisions". He brought all this back to
Shakespeare who used them to perfect his plays. They probably repeated
this process until the plays were most excellent. in order to make it
realistic so that people would ot catch on, he put in spelling errors. But
everyone knows that time travel was invented November 15, 1955 (in
Back to the Future (I)) so i had to think of something else.

During class we started talking about some of the analysis done on
Shakespeare by big time literature professors. I thought it was interesting
that there are some scenes in which even they do not fully understand
what Shakespeare is doing. It sort of made me feel better: ignorance is
bliss (sometimes). But still I figured that if anyone could understand
Shakespeare it would be those literature professors. Then I came to the
logical conclusion: Shakespeare was just a pen name for a group of
literature professors. They got together to write the most excellent plays
they could imagine. Considering the quantity of material on Shakespeare,
there must have been hundreds, thousands, millions of lieterature
professors working on the project. Like the Egyptian pyramids,
Shakespeare's plays would be one of the grear wonders of the world. But
where would they have all lived? There probably was not enough room in
Elizabethan England to house all of the hypothetical literature professors.

So I became rather confused. I decided to ask my friend what he thought
of when someone talks about Shakespeare. "A fellow," he said. Then I
realized what I think. A groovy dude from that mystical place,
Schaeffer city. To me, he is not a literature demi-god. By reading his
plays and listening to class discussions, I have come further away from
any concrete understanding of Shakespeare or his plays. Instead, my
understanding is more ambivalent and my enjoyment is greater than
before.