Shakespeare, he is good.

There is a reason we still, after 400 years, read Shakespeare. And it's not because he's a dead, white male. He is, but that isn't why we read him. The man had a gift. I hesitate to say "genius," if only because that is a word charged with so much angst and excuse, but Shakespeare, he is good.

Some of Shakespeare, of course, is not good. Some of it is downright terrible (and yes, I still think the terrible bits are Shakespeare, too, despite what certain *ahem* editors out there tend to argue). But that does not change the fact that the man was an intellectual giant.

What I perhaps love the most about Shakespeare is the fact that he became what he became simply because he was so damn good at what he did. Not because he was highly trained (he wasn't) or educated (he wasn't that either) or born into the right family (nope, still not).1 He was just plain and simple good at what he did. It didn't matter that his spelling was terrible or that he made up new words (we like that about him). He wrote what he saw, and when he saw, he understood. He recognized the patterns and the passions in the world and put them into a language that translates into performance as well as writing. He saw the intrinsically human, the universally recognized, the basest and greatest drives we possess, and he translated them into something that survived for centuries.

All this is, of course, instigated by my dissertation, about which I will not write. But suffice it to say that today I found yet another pattern, a perfect circularity, a flawless symmetry that made me recognize that what so many critics view as a "flaw" is, in fact, no such thing. It is deliberate and elegant. And it works. It reaches out off the stage and grabs us by the ruff and shakes us, it makes us feel something we should not feel, forces us to recognize in the most pathetic of figures the beautiful contradiction that is the human condition. It causes in us the same epiphany we have just witnessed - and the most glorious part is that we are not told what to think. We are shown. The scene is played out before us and it is up to us to recognize what we have seen, to bear witness to the passing of a man who has only just learned how to become great. To mourn his death, but to revel in it, because it is only through this single scene that he could become what he has just become. And it is great, and it is terrible.

And it is what makes us question whether we, too, can be both saint and sinner. Whether we, like this figure before us, have the capacity to be at once so mighty and so fallen. We are, it tells us, flawed. But we are also great.



1.[This is supposing, of course, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the playwright rather than the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or Elizabeth I or Christopher Marlowe or whatever-other-monkey-they've-come-up-with-this-week. Not to say that some of those figures don't have a case... Oxford in particular is an intriguing suggestion, though I do have to note that both Elizabeth and Marlowe died before Shakespeare stopped writing. And don't give me crap about "they found it later," because those later plays were referring to contemporary historical events.]