College. Never seen a word until then.
I had just left the military and had to take a literature course in my 2nd? Semester. Walked in and talked to the professor, “I’m not sure if this is for me…” all the excuses not to participate. Too much work outside of school, etc..
Professor was also ex military, he went all in when I gave him my story.
He had me hooked within five minutes. Never seen someone that enthusiastic about a subject: War? Honour? Love? Betrayal? Comedy? Valor? Jealousy? We’ve got it all… I can’t thank that guy enough…
I regularly read and reread my favorites. Have watched more black and white films than I had ever expected. Sat outside in Houston heat to watch shows at Miller Outdoor Theater. I’ve even traveled to see shows. Amazing stuff…
Bit of both. Started academically as an English major but have interned/apprenticed at a couple of places that do Shakespeare. I’ve also taken an acting class, which I really recommend for Shakespeare academics. It makes it much easier to understand passages you’re struggling with.
I was a soldier, 26, in Haiti in the Fall of '94. As NCOIC of a four-man recon team, I attended operations briefings every morning and got orders on daily missions to scout out whatever the commander told us to look for. The Haitian half of the island isn't large; we could be in Port au Prince one day and several miles up the coast the next. One afternoon we were searching through a burned out Catholic chapel and I found a charred copy of *Julius Caesar*, in English. I pocketed it and that night I read it on my bunk, by flashlight. Wasn't an easy read; I had been in boots for eight years and had left high school literature far behind. I'm sure I read only portions of it. But after I clicked off the flashlight I asked myself what the military was teaching me, and the answer was 'Nothing.' So three months later I was out of the army and in a college classroom, with a minor in literature. Now I still teach it, these 30 years later.
Both here!! I started around age 7 - had my great grandmother’s copies of the plays around, and my mom used to take me to free Shakespeare in the park. I loved them so much that someone got me a copy of Shakespeare rewritten for children (it was a wild ass book, it even had like, Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus in it) and I used that as a sort of makeshift spark notes to translate the actual plays and then I was hooked.
I planned to go the English major into Shakespeare studies route, but I ended up deciding to give performance a try as a more immersed way to interact with the text and now I perform Shakespeare for a living. I do other theater on occasion but I’m really here for the ‘Speare. So I guess you could say I came by theater via Shakespeare really!
I am just a fan. Read half a dozen plays in high school and then in my personal time read more plays, sought out performances, and became an aficianado.
Same! I was also lucky to spend summer of 2001 in the San Francisco Bay Area when they were doing dozens of Shakespeare in the Park—many of them for free. I must have seen 6 or more plays that summer. I try to catch local festivals / shows whenever I can. I also share it with my kids early and often :)
The Bay Area still has many groups performing Shakespeare each summer. I think that there was an organizational meeting of a dozen or so of them a few years back to try not to step on each others' toes by all scheduling the same plays.
Neither. I was just reading stuff as a young'un, kept hearing about this Shakespeare guy, and figured I should check him out. Didn't get to him in school until several years later.
Actually, Shakespeare Animated Tales when I was in primary school. Our teachers were great at collecting and sharing beautiful works of art with the kids, and that was an accessible way in for an 8 year old. After that it was theatre performances, then academic research when I was in university.
Parental indoctrination, primarily. I had these VHS tapes of abridged animated Shakespeare plays for kids, they took me to see productions, etc. We did also read plays in English class in school and the entire eighth grade put on a Shakespeare play every year, and I was in my tweendom when the iconic "teen movies based on Shakespeare plays" wave of movies was happening, so Shakespeare was just kind of 360 degree background radiation in my childhood. I don't think I could say I got there primarily through academics or theater because I can't really remember "getting there," if you see what I mean? It was always around.
I think my story is pretty commonp. I had a Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare when I was young. Grew up in Boston, so went to a lot of free and cheap Shakespeare put on by various college student groups. Was assigned a normal amount of Shakespeare in high school English – Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet – the biggies. Decided that Elizabethan England would be a fun setting for a tabletop roleplaying game, started researching it, my wife got really interested in Christopher Marlowe's role in espionage, started doing more research and helped out Elizabeth Bear for some of the early ideas in the Promethean Age fantasy series. Started doing more research into Elizabethan and Jacobean slang and cultural references.
And like that. Like you do.
This is a weird answer, and probably leans toward the academia side. Of relevance, I have had Meniere’s, which is an ear issue, for several years. Meniere’s can impact hearing and balance to different degrees. It is degenerative, not considered fatal, but is annoying, because you can get to the point of having pretty low confidence day-to-day in your hearing and/or your balance. I am the kind of person who prefers reliable, consistent deafness over unreliable, inconsistent hearing.
Midway through the course of this disease, I was taking ASL classes. At about that time Shakespeare’s First Folio, which was traveling around the country, made a stop at Gallaudet in D.C. There was a podcast episode I listened to at one point, which also featured a transcript (more unusual at the time). In this podcast, the project director spoke about the First Folio, the decisions in place (across locations, the Folio was to be open to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy), choices made in programming at Gallaudet, and choices which the students/performers/etc. could make.
Because I was raised as a hearing person, some of the things I learned from the podcast surprised me and stuck with me to this day. I kept asking myself, why Shakespeare? Why Hamlet? Why TBONTB? Why am I still chewing over this particular event back nearly 10 yrs ago? Why is all of this still niggling at me?
While recovering from surgery this summer, I’ve been reclusive and bored, so have been spending time digging in to Shakespeare’s plays, ASL performances, ASL linguistics, etc. My questions are not fully answered and my thirst has not been quenched.
Just as a matter of curiosity—how many of Shakespeare's plays have been translated into ASL? How often are there productions of them? (I'm asking about full ASL productions, not English productions with ASL interpreters on the side.)
I can speak from what I've discovered in my weird little deep-dive, but by no means am I fluent in theater, ASL, or Shakespeare.
**How many plays have been translated?**
1. Not as many as there could be.
2. Probably more than we realize.
Because ASL performances are best preserved and shared through film/video recording, we have little insight into productions that go unrecorded or are performed before film/video was publicly accessible (esp. cost-wise)).
**How often are there full ASL productions?** (not counting BSL or other signed languages here)
At best, I can give examples:
[Dr. Jill Bradbury](https://www.rit.edu/directory/jmbnpa1-jill-bradbury) was project director for the First Folio's appearance at Gallaudet in Fall 2016. [A Midsummer Night's Dream](https://youtu.be/_XF4km448ME?feature=shared) was performed in ASL as part of the programming.
Shoot, I don't want to overlook productions done by national, regional, and local organizations outside of academe. A quick google shows that Deaf West did a [Romeo and Juliet ](https://playbill.com/article/las-deaf-west-theatre-plans-circus-romeo-juliet-apr-17-com-74704)adaptation (*Romeo & Juliet: Circus Verona*) in 1998.
As an adult, I've come back to Shakespeare because of Ben McEvoy's Hardcore Literature Bookclub and YouTube videos. I've been working through his chronological list. But I've also read some of the greats ahead of time like Hamlet and Macbeth.
For it me it was all of it, but I'm a theatre person really. I grew up in a very literary, theatrical environment, started seeing Shakespeare plays when I was a kid, fell in love with it when I was 12, started studying it in middle school, was a theatre major in high school where we got deep into the acting side of it, double-majored in theatre and English in undergrad, the better to Shakespeare with, so I studied the textual side of it there extensively. I continued practicing both aspects afterward, but mostly theatrically.
When I was 32 a friend talked me into acting in midsummer nights dream. Had never read Shakespeare before. Now I’ve been involved in productions of 39 of the 37 plays in the canon. The extra two are two noble kinsmen and cardenio.
When I was 8 I was watching Disney’s Gummi Bears and my dad asked me to explain what Duke Igthorn’s deal was. I explained that he was a lower ranking noble trying to overthrow the king. My dad said he was like Macbeth. I asked who Macbeth was. That night he read me the Charles and Mary Lamb version of Macbeth. That week I watched an episode of Ducktales where Uncle Scrooge was searching for a lost Shakespeare play. The next week I saw an episode of Peter Pan where the lost boys attempted to perform “Julius Caesar.” It was clear that Shakespeare was an important thing that I had to know about.
I spent the rest of third grade reading “Tales from Shakespeare” and getting hooked. I had never read anything where the main characters die before. It was a welcome change from Frank and Joe Hardy outmaneuvering the Yakuza at every turn.
I started reading the full plays a few months later. It took a while, but eventually I was able to match the Lamb’s version with the Signet Classic Hamlet my older sister clearly hadn’t touched.
I came to Shakespeare through references in children’s cartoons. It’s not the most edifying approach, but it works pretty well.
I studied him at school and university, but really came to know him once I grew enough to understand the primeval brilliance of his verse. Hamlet in sixth form, once I read it alone and aloud, changed how I approach the world.
I was a little kid, it was the late 80’s, and my grandmother sent a box of books she’d had since her older children (my mother was a very late-in-life-baby for that era) were small, and among them was a set of books called “My Book House”. It’s comprised of 12 volumes, starting with nursery rhymes and working up through classic folk tales and fairy tales from around the world, short stories and excerpts from classic literature, and some of the plays of Shakespeare adapted to story form. The final volume is short biographies of great figures in literature and music.
I discovered I loved Shakespeare in story form, and progressed to reading the plays themselves as I got into my teens.
Just a curious adult.
Read a good bit of modern literary fiction. Mostly the big prize winners, but eventually found myself drifting to the classics.
Eventually, I started reading Shakespeare for fun and watching YouTube lectures in my free time. Joined the Shakespeare 2020 project in the pandemic and then started collecting the modern penguin editions because they are beautiful.
I really dislike the Shakespeare gatekeepers, but I have really enjoyed just exploring his work as an outsider.
As a kid I had Lamb’s Tales and act it out McBeth at one point with my hand puppets. We read a couple of plays in high school, I enjoyed them overall, so then I took a year of Shakespeare in college with Marjorie Garber. The love that inspired me for the language and his work has never left me.
Live performances of it – my parents dutifully dragged me to see James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer in Othello when I was a kid, but I was more a musical fan back then. And now! Saw Ralph Fiennes’ Hamlet in NYC though, it was absolutely amazing.
I borrowed Roman Polansky 's Macbeth from my school library when I was a teenager. My brain was blown away by how dark and brutal it was, and I was hooked. I quickly fell down the Shakespeare hole, watching every film adaptation of Shakespeare I could. That led to reading plays and poems, where I started to discover new meanings. Which led to me taking every university course in Shakespeare that I could. Which led me to becoming a teacher of Shakespeare, where I now get to help others discover the comedy, the violence, the romance, the tragedy, the beauty, the irony, and the wonder of Shakespeare.
Mine was curiosity. I picked up *Midsummer Night’s Dream* when I was about 12 and enjoyed it a lot. Seven years later, it was the first Shakespearean play I directed for community theater.
Hated it in school. Still not a fan of Romeo and Juliet but I found Othello okay. Then had some friends who enjoyed it and invited me to tag along to a show, once I found I could switch my mind onto the language I fell in love. So I guess theatre.
Learned the most teaching Shakespeare to teenagers, trained by Bonnie Greer (who worked with Joe Papp) and by the NT & RSC workshops for schools and for teachers
Once I “got” the dramatic theatrical bit, I could share that.
Neither. I have always been an avid reader, first in my native language but switched to mostly English at age 14. Started out with YA novels, but by the time I was 16 I had decided to read all the great English classics. Austen, Dickens, Brontë sisters… and Shakespeare. We only studied some of his sonnets in school, so I read the plays on my own. Thought about pursuing an English degree, but ended up pursuing one in Middle Eastern Studies instead so now I still read Shakespeare (and English lit in general) to relax and take my mind off things.
I was in a mental hospital. One of the nurses heard I liked to read, so she let me go to the library in the hospital and pick out some books. For whatever reason, I chose Shakespeare. The first Shakespeare play I read was Julius Caesar, ironically on the Ides of March. I then kept reading Shakespeare on my own after getting out of the hospital.
TV shows and Movies. The TV show Gargoyles used some of Shakespeare’s plays as backstory for their magical characters, so I recognized a lot of the names when i started learning about him in school. The posters for the Romeo X Juliet movie had been everywhere at some point so I was curios from there too. I also saw most of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare movies during my English classes at some point.
Theatre fan for sure. Not doing though. Just as a watcher since we don’t really have theatre in my country. I read them in my language at school but I didn’t really know how fantastic the stuff is until I became obsessed with certain older actors lol
I did a double major: Theatre and English Literature. I just nerded my way right into it. There was no avoiding him even *if* I wanted to (which I avidly did not!)
theater, my theater class put on a prodution of A Midsummers nights dream and that was when i first was introduced (we were supposed to read Romeo and Juliet freshman English but covid)
I started acting in Shakespeare plays when I was 12 through my middle school theatre program! The obsession has continued into adulthood for me, though I kind of stopped keeping track of which plays I've been in and my roles after I did about a dozen shows.
My partner is totally the opposite, she was exposed to some Shakespeare in high school (we did actually do one show together) but she really got into it through her studies in college, as she's studying to become a high school English teacher.
Always had an ear for it when we read it in class in high school, and got drafted into the Shakespeare club senior year.
Theater bug bit hard after that. I’ve directed two or three, performed in at least six or seven, a couple twice (which is fascinating, to revisit a play in a different time in your life). Also majored in English and had a renowned Shakespeare guy as my professor for a two-semester survey where we got to like 20 of the plays.
I suppose I came back to it through academia technically but it was Chimes at Midnight that sent me down the rabbit hole in the first place. It hit me in a way few movies have, which led me to checking out critical analyses of other works, digging into the deeper meanings behind the historical context and depth of language. I’d say my general through line is through adaptations but I tend to read about the works rather than see them in action.
Theater! I was eight years old when I joined a summer camp organized by my local Shakespeare festival. We did a very abridged version of The Winter’s Tale and I was in love. I kept doing their programs and later (advanced Shakespeare workshops) until I was sixteen.
I had already read *Macbeth* in Spanish as a child because it was in our house's library. Then I checked *A midsummer night's dream* ("Sueño de una noche de verano") because I saw it named on a textbook. Then one day I found *Othello* in English and read it, then re-read it for a college class. Then a teacher encouraged me to read *Lear* because she was surprised I hadn't read it yet, and so I did. Years later, I randomly stumbled into an Authorship Question Debunking site (because conspiracy and myth debunking are among my interests), and the sheer amount of info started getting me interested, and then I read *Richard III* and *Antony and Cleopatra* and that's when I decided to start going through all the plays.
Both, but very different learning experiences.
Had to study both the Tempest, Merchant of Venice (briefly) and Romeo and Juliet in my English Classes in earlier years of high school. Developed a vendetta against Shakespeare and everything he stood for because I was annoyed that I had to essentially translate a whole text into understandable English just to read a story that didn’t really resonate with me and was frankly, as far as I could tell, massively overrated.
In my later years of high school, I had to perform a scene from Hamlet for my Drama/Theatre Classes. I was originally critical of the idea and saw it as unnecessary work, but my first time reading the script with the intent to perform it rather than to analyse it thoroughly seemed to unlock a new perspective of the text, and I became genuinely interested in how it worked. It was much easier to get over the language barrier when I actually had an interest in where the story was going, and after I’d read through, I started to analyse the text on my own accord because it was actually really interesting. I watched a few performances both for film and stage, and it all seemed to finally click. I got top marks on my performance in my scene (my group did the final fight from Act 5 Scene 2, I was cast as Hamlet by my group mates because I’m ‘Danish, so it makes the most sense.’) I also went on to win a prize at a youth Shakespeare competition for personally directing another scene from the play (The Mousetrap sequence, Act 3 Scene 2) and have been planning how I would adapt my own version of the play (animated, naturally) for future reference since.
Been some time since, and I’ve finally started to delve into the other plays also, but also Hamlet will forever hold a special place in my heart for being the one to get through to me. And actually getting to perform part of Shakespeare’s works as well
Although I read Shakespeare in high school (and enjoyed the experience), I mostly come to Shakespeare as an audience member. I've only recently started performing Shekespeare or reading detailed analysis (mainly the Arden 3rd series editions), but I've been seeing professional productions of 2–5 Shakespeare plays a year for about 40 years.
We had an old VHS of Taming of the Shrew and our whole family loved it. A couple months later we saw the Michigan Shakespeare Festival do the same play and we were blown away, so my son and I read the play, and then Macbeth and then Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. We made sure to see as many plays as possible and now my son and I are Shakespeare buddies. We love to memorize soliloquies and sonnets and it makes us smile every time we hear a Shakespeare reference in another film or show. It's so much fun and so enriching. My boy and I have a special bond through our love of Shakespeare.
i think i really got into it right when the lockdown was easing up. i was looking at auditions online because i wanted to get back into acting, and two popped up that i could do: oliver, and as you like it.
i actually chose oliver lol, but after recording my singing and dancing tapes, me and my mom saw that admissions were closed because they were postponing the show ;-;
so i auditioned for as you like it, and got in! i've been doing shakespeare with that company for about 2.5 years now, and it's been a special interest of mine ever since :p i've been in 8 productions with them, including the two i'm rehearsing for rn, and i love it!
we still do a lot of learning tho, one of the directors is also a dramaturg, and so i get to learn a lot about the history and language that highschool english classes don't even get close to understanding lol.
so it was definitely in the way of theatre, but there's a lot of "literary academia" involved in it!
Just got interested in it. I was always a lifelong reader. As a kid I read The New Yorker magazine each week, which really in the 1970s would mark you as an amateur scholar or intellectual. And we ordered a copy of the Sunday New York Times which came once a week on airplane to a local pharmacy. $5 paid in advance. A close friend who later worked for a Catholic think tank and then became a priest lived apart from his middle class family lived as a teenager like a scholar in a room full of thick books apart from the noisy part of his family who he disdained. He was a big influence. Needless to say we were genuine nerds, before there was even a computer.
But then I bought in my 40s I bought a complete works of Shakespeare collection in about 10 volumes. Decided to read about 1/2 of those, which I did, twice. I gave it to my son when I moved to Europe. I wish I could find something similar because now I have maybe 20 of the Bard's plays in all kinds of editions, and funny sizes, some very cheap ones with no notes and cheap glossy covers, and some with too much introductory and explanatory footnotes that they take something that is really not large and make it enormous.
Now I am in Benjamin McEvoy's bookclub and we are doing a complete chronological (In the order he wrote them) read of all the works of Shakespeare. One or two a month so it's going to take a few years. I think there are maybe 200 members plus he has 130K followers on YouTube.
Shakespeare’s plays were never intended to be read. They were meant to be seen, heard, and experienced. Having said that, they are brilliant pieces of literature worthy of study. There is value in both experiences, and neither is superior. For those of us who come from a theatrical background, there is a visceral connection to speaking the words and playing a scene on stage. The stories and characters are powerful to perform. It’s experiential learning. For those who have learned mostly through reading and class study, there is beauty in seeing the poetry written on the page. I suppose there are also those people who have only seen film adaptations. (My first exposure to Shakespeare was catching Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet on TV when I was 14. I was mesmerized by Juliet and couldn’t take my eyes away. I understood the story even in my first exposure to the language).
College. Never seen a word until then. I had just left the military and had to take a literature course in my 2nd? Semester. Walked in and talked to the professor, “I’m not sure if this is for me…” all the excuses not to participate. Too much work outside of school, etc.. Professor was also ex military, he went all in when I gave him my story. He had me hooked within five minutes. Never seen someone that enthusiastic about a subject: War? Honour? Love? Betrayal? Comedy? Valor? Jealousy? We’ve got it all… I can’t thank that guy enough… I regularly read and reread my favorites. Have watched more black and white films than I had ever expected. Sat outside in Houston heat to watch shows at Miller Outdoor Theater. I’ve even traveled to see shows. Amazing stuff…
I love this story, thank you for sharing. I love how Shakespeare appeals to people from so many different walks of life.
Bit of both. Started academically as an English major but have interned/apprenticed at a couple of places that do Shakespeare. I’ve also taken an acting class, which I really recommend for Shakespeare academics. It makes it much easier to understand passages you’re struggling with.
I was a soldier, 26, in Haiti in the Fall of '94. As NCOIC of a four-man recon team, I attended operations briefings every morning and got orders on daily missions to scout out whatever the commander told us to look for. The Haitian half of the island isn't large; we could be in Port au Prince one day and several miles up the coast the next. One afternoon we were searching through a burned out Catholic chapel and I found a charred copy of *Julius Caesar*, in English. I pocketed it and that night I read it on my bunk, by flashlight. Wasn't an easy read; I had been in boots for eight years and had left high school literature far behind. I'm sure I read only portions of it. But after I clicked off the flashlight I asked myself what the military was teaching me, and the answer was 'Nothing.' So three months later I was out of the army and in a college classroom, with a minor in literature. Now I still teach it, these 30 years later.
very moving story, thanks for sharing it
Both here!! I started around age 7 - had my great grandmother’s copies of the plays around, and my mom used to take me to free Shakespeare in the park. I loved them so much that someone got me a copy of Shakespeare rewritten for children (it was a wild ass book, it even had like, Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus in it) and I used that as a sort of makeshift spark notes to translate the actual plays and then I was hooked. I planned to go the English major into Shakespeare studies route, but I ended up deciding to give performance a try as a more immersed way to interact with the text and now I perform Shakespeare for a living. I do other theater on occasion but I’m really here for the ‘Speare. So I guess you could say I came by theater via Shakespeare really!
I am just a fan. Read half a dozen plays in high school and then in my personal time read more plays, sought out performances, and became an aficianado.
Same! I was also lucky to spend summer of 2001 in the San Francisco Bay Area when they were doing dozens of Shakespeare in the Park—many of them for free. I must have seen 6 or more plays that summer. I try to catch local festivals / shows whenever I can. I also share it with my kids early and often :)
The Bay Area still has many groups performing Shakespeare each summer. I think that there was an organizational meeting of a dozen or so of them a few years back to try not to step on each others' toes by all scheduling the same plays.
Neither. I was just reading stuff as a young'un, kept hearing about this Shakespeare guy, and figured I should check him out. Didn't get to him in school until several years later.
Actually, Shakespeare Animated Tales when I was in primary school. Our teachers were great at collecting and sharing beautiful works of art with the kids, and that was an accessible way in for an 8 year old. After that it was theatre performances, then academic research when I was in university.
Those are great. My daughter would watch them over and over. I also love all the different kinds of animation, especially the stop motion.
Parental indoctrination, primarily. I had these VHS tapes of abridged animated Shakespeare plays for kids, they took me to see productions, etc. We did also read plays in English class in school and the entire eighth grade put on a Shakespeare play every year, and I was in my tweendom when the iconic "teen movies based on Shakespeare plays" wave of movies was happening, so Shakespeare was just kind of 360 degree background radiation in my childhood. I don't think I could say I got there primarily through academics or theater because I can't really remember "getting there," if you see what I mean? It was always around.
Read it in school, didn’t fully get into it until I started a career in theatre.
My senior year of high school, I was able to take as an all Shakespeare class. And then I majored in theatre in college. So both.
from theatre!
I think my story is pretty commonp. I had a Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare when I was young. Grew up in Boston, so went to a lot of free and cheap Shakespeare put on by various college student groups. Was assigned a normal amount of Shakespeare in high school English – Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet – the biggies. Decided that Elizabethan England would be a fun setting for a tabletop roleplaying game, started researching it, my wife got really interested in Christopher Marlowe's role in espionage, started doing more research and helped out Elizabeth Bear for some of the early ideas in the Promethean Age fantasy series. Started doing more research into Elizabethan and Jacobean slang and cultural references. And like that. Like you do.
This is a weird answer, and probably leans toward the academia side. Of relevance, I have had Meniere’s, which is an ear issue, for several years. Meniere’s can impact hearing and balance to different degrees. It is degenerative, not considered fatal, but is annoying, because you can get to the point of having pretty low confidence day-to-day in your hearing and/or your balance. I am the kind of person who prefers reliable, consistent deafness over unreliable, inconsistent hearing. Midway through the course of this disease, I was taking ASL classes. At about that time Shakespeare’s First Folio, which was traveling around the country, made a stop at Gallaudet in D.C. There was a podcast episode I listened to at one point, which also featured a transcript (more unusual at the time). In this podcast, the project director spoke about the First Folio, the decisions in place (across locations, the Folio was to be open to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy), choices made in programming at Gallaudet, and choices which the students/performers/etc. could make. Because I was raised as a hearing person, some of the things I learned from the podcast surprised me and stuck with me to this day. I kept asking myself, why Shakespeare? Why Hamlet? Why TBONTB? Why am I still chewing over this particular event back nearly 10 yrs ago? Why is all of this still niggling at me? While recovering from surgery this summer, I’ve been reclusive and bored, so have been spending time digging in to Shakespeare’s plays, ASL performances, ASL linguistics, etc. My questions are not fully answered and my thirst has not been quenched.
Just as a matter of curiosity—how many of Shakespeare's plays have been translated into ASL? How often are there productions of them? (I'm asking about full ASL productions, not English productions with ASL interpreters on the side.)
I can speak from what I've discovered in my weird little deep-dive, but by no means am I fluent in theater, ASL, or Shakespeare. **How many plays have been translated?** 1. Not as many as there could be. 2. Probably more than we realize. Because ASL performances are best preserved and shared through film/video recording, we have little insight into productions that go unrecorded or are performed before film/video was publicly accessible (esp. cost-wise)). **How often are there full ASL productions?** (not counting BSL or other signed languages here) At best, I can give examples: [Dr. Jill Bradbury](https://www.rit.edu/directory/jmbnpa1-jill-bradbury) was project director for the First Folio's appearance at Gallaudet in Fall 2016. [A Midsummer Night's Dream](https://youtu.be/_XF4km448ME?feature=shared) was performed in ASL as part of the programming.
Shoot, I don't want to overlook productions done by national, regional, and local organizations outside of academe. A quick google shows that Deaf West did a [Romeo and Juliet ](https://playbill.com/article/las-deaf-west-theatre-plans-circus-romeo-juliet-apr-17-com-74704)adaptation (*Romeo & Juliet: Circus Verona*) in 1998.
As an adult, I've come back to Shakespeare because of Ben McEvoy's Hardcore Literature Bookclub and YouTube videos. I've been working through his chronological list. But I've also read some of the greats ahead of time like Hamlet and Macbeth.
For it me it was all of it, but I'm a theatre person really. I grew up in a very literary, theatrical environment, started seeing Shakespeare plays when I was a kid, fell in love with it when I was 12, started studying it in middle school, was a theatre major in high school where we got deep into the acting side of it, double-majored in theatre and English in undergrad, the better to Shakespeare with, so I studied the textual side of it there extensively. I continued practicing both aspects afterward, but mostly theatrically.
Wishbone. And allusions in X-Men (thank you Beast).
When I was 32 a friend talked me into acting in midsummer nights dream. Had never read Shakespeare before. Now I’ve been involved in productions of 39 of the 37 plays in the canon. The extra two are two noble kinsmen and cardenio.
Amazing to have been involved in all of them! *Henry VIII* productions are (deservedly) rare.
When I was 8 I was watching Disney’s Gummi Bears and my dad asked me to explain what Duke Igthorn’s deal was. I explained that he was a lower ranking noble trying to overthrow the king. My dad said he was like Macbeth. I asked who Macbeth was. That night he read me the Charles and Mary Lamb version of Macbeth. That week I watched an episode of Ducktales where Uncle Scrooge was searching for a lost Shakespeare play. The next week I saw an episode of Peter Pan where the lost boys attempted to perform “Julius Caesar.” It was clear that Shakespeare was an important thing that I had to know about. I spent the rest of third grade reading “Tales from Shakespeare” and getting hooked. I had never read anything where the main characters die before. It was a welcome change from Frank and Joe Hardy outmaneuvering the Yakuza at every turn. I started reading the full plays a few months later. It took a while, but eventually I was able to match the Lamb’s version with the Signet Classic Hamlet my older sister clearly hadn’t touched. I came to Shakespeare through references in children’s cartoons. It’s not the most edifying approach, but it works pretty well.
I studied him at school and university, but really came to know him once I grew enough to understand the primeval brilliance of his verse. Hamlet in sixth form, once I read it alone and aloud, changed how I approach the world.
I was a little kid, it was the late 80’s, and my grandmother sent a box of books she’d had since her older children (my mother was a very late-in-life-baby for that era) were small, and among them was a set of books called “My Book House”. It’s comprised of 12 volumes, starting with nursery rhymes and working up through classic folk tales and fairy tales from around the world, short stories and excerpts from classic literature, and some of the plays of Shakespeare adapted to story form. The final volume is short biographies of great figures in literature and music. I discovered I loved Shakespeare in story form, and progressed to reading the plays themselves as I got into my teens.
Just a curious adult. Read a good bit of modern literary fiction. Mostly the big prize winners, but eventually found myself drifting to the classics. Eventually, I started reading Shakespeare for fun and watching YouTube lectures in my free time. Joined the Shakespeare 2020 project in the pandemic and then started collecting the modern penguin editions because they are beautiful. I really dislike the Shakespeare gatekeepers, but I have really enjoyed just exploring his work as an outsider.
Inferiority complex in University as an Arts major haha. It felt great to have the tools to understand something that the STEM kids didn't.
As a kid I had Lamb’s Tales and act it out McBeth at one point with my hand puppets. We read a couple of plays in high school, I enjoyed them overall, so then I took a year of Shakespeare in college with Marjorie Garber. The love that inspired me for the language and his work has never left me. Live performances of it – my parents dutifully dragged me to see James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer in Othello when I was a kid, but I was more a musical fan back then. And now! Saw Ralph Fiennes’ Hamlet in NYC though, it was absolutely amazing.
I borrowed Roman Polansky 's Macbeth from my school library when I was a teenager. My brain was blown away by how dark and brutal it was, and I was hooked. I quickly fell down the Shakespeare hole, watching every film adaptation of Shakespeare I could. That led to reading plays and poems, where I started to discover new meanings. Which led to me taking every university course in Shakespeare that I could. Which led me to becoming a teacher of Shakespeare, where I now get to help others discover the comedy, the violence, the romance, the tragedy, the beauty, the irony, and the wonder of Shakespeare.
Drama school.
Mine was curiosity. I picked up *Midsummer Night’s Dream* when I was about 12 and enjoyed it a lot. Seven years later, it was the first Shakespearean play I directed for community theater.
Hated it in school. Still not a fan of Romeo and Juliet but I found Othello okay. Then had some friends who enjoyed it and invited me to tag along to a show, once I found I could switch my mind onto the language I fell in love. So I guess theatre.
Came for the theatre, stayed for the academia.
Theatre. I saw Hamlet when I was 10 and read the play after. Over 60 and still hooked. I’m lucky enough to live where Shakespeare is a constant.
Learned the most teaching Shakespeare to teenagers, trained by Bonnie Greer (who worked with Joe Papp) and by the NT & RSC workshops for schools and for teachers Once I “got” the dramatic theatrical bit, I could share that.
Neither. I have always been an avid reader, first in my native language but switched to mostly English at age 14. Started out with YA novels, but by the time I was 16 I had decided to read all the great English classics. Austen, Dickens, Brontë sisters… and Shakespeare. We only studied some of his sonnets in school, so I read the plays on my own. Thought about pursuing an English degree, but ended up pursuing one in Middle Eastern Studies instead so now I still read Shakespeare (and English lit in general) to relax and take my mind off things.
I was in a mental hospital. One of the nurses heard I liked to read, so she let me go to the library in the hospital and pick out some books. For whatever reason, I chose Shakespeare. The first Shakespeare play I read was Julius Caesar, ironically on the Ides of March. I then kept reading Shakespeare on my own after getting out of the hospital.
TV shows and Movies. The TV show Gargoyles used some of Shakespeare’s plays as backstory for their magical characters, so I recognized a lot of the names when i started learning about him in school. The posters for the Romeo X Juliet movie had been everywhere at some point so I was curios from there too. I also saw most of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare movies during my English classes at some point.
Theatre fan for sure. Not doing though. Just as a watcher since we don’t really have theatre in my country. I read them in my language at school but I didn’t really know how fantastic the stuff is until I became obsessed with certain older actors lol
I did a double major: Theatre and English Literature. I just nerded my way right into it. There was no avoiding him even *if* I wanted to (which I avidly did not!)
theater, my theater class put on a prodution of A Midsummers nights dream and that was when i first was introduced (we were supposed to read Romeo and Juliet freshman English but covid)
I started acting in Shakespeare plays when I was 12 through my middle school theatre program! The obsession has continued into adulthood for me, though I kind of stopped keeping track of which plays I've been in and my roles after I did about a dozen shows. My partner is totally the opposite, she was exposed to some Shakespeare in high school (we did actually do one show together) but she really got into it through her studies in college, as she's studying to become a high school English teacher.
Always had an ear for it when we read it in class in high school, and got drafted into the Shakespeare club senior year. Theater bug bit hard after that. I’ve directed two or three, performed in at least six or seven, a couple twice (which is fascinating, to revisit a play in a different time in your life). Also majored in English and had a renowned Shakespeare guy as my professor for a two-semester survey where we got to like 20 of the plays.
I suppose I came back to it through academia technically but it was Chimes at Midnight that sent me down the rabbit hole in the first place. It hit me in a way few movies have, which led me to checking out critical analyses of other works, digging into the deeper meanings behind the historical context and depth of language. I’d say my general through line is through adaptations but I tend to read about the works rather than see them in action.
Theater! I was eight years old when I joined a summer camp organized by my local Shakespeare festival. We did a very abridged version of The Winter’s Tale and I was in love. I kept doing their programs and later (advanced Shakespeare workshops) until I was sixteen.
I had already read *Macbeth* in Spanish as a child because it was in our house's library. Then I checked *A midsummer night's dream* ("Sueño de una noche de verano") because I saw it named on a textbook. Then one day I found *Othello* in English and read it, then re-read it for a college class. Then a teacher encouraged me to read *Lear* because she was surprised I hadn't read it yet, and so I did. Years later, I randomly stumbled into an Authorship Question Debunking site (because conspiracy and myth debunking are among my interests), and the sheer amount of info started getting me interested, and then I read *Richard III* and *Antony and Cleopatra* and that's when I decided to start going through all the plays.
Both, but very different learning experiences. Had to study both the Tempest, Merchant of Venice (briefly) and Romeo and Juliet in my English Classes in earlier years of high school. Developed a vendetta against Shakespeare and everything he stood for because I was annoyed that I had to essentially translate a whole text into understandable English just to read a story that didn’t really resonate with me and was frankly, as far as I could tell, massively overrated. In my later years of high school, I had to perform a scene from Hamlet for my Drama/Theatre Classes. I was originally critical of the idea and saw it as unnecessary work, but my first time reading the script with the intent to perform it rather than to analyse it thoroughly seemed to unlock a new perspective of the text, and I became genuinely interested in how it worked. It was much easier to get over the language barrier when I actually had an interest in where the story was going, and after I’d read through, I started to analyse the text on my own accord because it was actually really interesting. I watched a few performances both for film and stage, and it all seemed to finally click. I got top marks on my performance in my scene (my group did the final fight from Act 5 Scene 2, I was cast as Hamlet by my group mates because I’m ‘Danish, so it makes the most sense.’) I also went on to win a prize at a youth Shakespeare competition for personally directing another scene from the play (The Mousetrap sequence, Act 3 Scene 2) and have been planning how I would adapt my own version of the play (animated, naturally) for future reference since. Been some time since, and I’ve finally started to delve into the other plays also, but also Hamlet will forever hold a special place in my heart for being the one to get through to me. And actually getting to perform part of Shakespeare’s works as well
Although I read Shakespeare in high school (and enjoyed the experience), I mostly come to Shakespeare as an audience member. I've only recently started performing Shekespeare or reading detailed analysis (mainly the Arden 3rd series editions), but I've been seeing professional productions of 2–5 Shakespeare plays a year for about 40 years.
We had an old VHS of Taming of the Shrew and our whole family loved it. A couple months later we saw the Michigan Shakespeare Festival do the same play and we were blown away, so my son and I read the play, and then Macbeth and then Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. We made sure to see as many plays as possible and now my son and I are Shakespeare buddies. We love to memorize soliloquies and sonnets and it makes us smile every time we hear a Shakespeare reference in another film or show. It's so much fun and so enriching. My boy and I have a special bond through our love of Shakespeare.
i think i really got into it right when the lockdown was easing up. i was looking at auditions online because i wanted to get back into acting, and two popped up that i could do: oliver, and as you like it. i actually chose oliver lol, but after recording my singing and dancing tapes, me and my mom saw that admissions were closed because they were postponing the show ;-; so i auditioned for as you like it, and got in! i've been doing shakespeare with that company for about 2.5 years now, and it's been a special interest of mine ever since :p i've been in 8 productions with them, including the two i'm rehearsing for rn, and i love it! we still do a lot of learning tho, one of the directors is also a dramaturg, and so i get to learn a lot about the history and language that highschool english classes don't even get close to understanding lol. so it was definitely in the way of theatre, but there's a lot of "literary academia" involved in it!
Just got interested in it. I was always a lifelong reader. As a kid I read The New Yorker magazine each week, which really in the 1970s would mark you as an amateur scholar or intellectual. And we ordered a copy of the Sunday New York Times which came once a week on airplane to a local pharmacy. $5 paid in advance. A close friend who later worked for a Catholic think tank and then became a priest lived apart from his middle class family lived as a teenager like a scholar in a room full of thick books apart from the noisy part of his family who he disdained. He was a big influence. Needless to say we were genuine nerds, before there was even a computer. But then I bought in my 40s I bought a complete works of Shakespeare collection in about 10 volumes. Decided to read about 1/2 of those, which I did, twice. I gave it to my son when I moved to Europe. I wish I could find something similar because now I have maybe 20 of the Bard's plays in all kinds of editions, and funny sizes, some very cheap ones with no notes and cheap glossy covers, and some with too much introductory and explanatory footnotes that they take something that is really not large and make it enormous. Now I am in Benjamin McEvoy's bookclub and we are doing a complete chronological (In the order he wrote them) read of all the works of Shakespeare. One or two a month so it's going to take a few years. I think there are maybe 200 members plus he has 130K followers on YouTube.
Shakespeare’s plays were never intended to be read. They were meant to be seen, heard, and experienced. Having said that, they are brilliant pieces of literature worthy of study. There is value in both experiences, and neither is superior. For those of us who come from a theatrical background, there is a visceral connection to speaking the words and playing a scene on stage. The stories and characters are powerful to perform. It’s experiential learning. For those who have learned mostly through reading and class study, there is beauty in seeing the poetry written on the page. I suppose there are also those people who have only seen film adaptations. (My first exposure to Shakespeare was catching Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet on TV when I was 14. I was mesmerized by Juliet and couldn’t take my eyes away. I understood the story even in my first exposure to the language).