Happy Bardsday!
Today, I celebrate Shakespeare’s 447th birthday, along with the good people at happybirthdayshakespeare.com. Check it out for a collaborative reading of the St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V and other happy birthday Shakespeare posts.
You, Shakespeare, are an old man. Over the hill and under the ground, but dead as you are, you’re not gone. In fact, you’re about as not gone as any of us could hope to be after we die.
I’ve got a lot to thank you for:
First off, I should thank you for my community. In ninth grade, we read R&J aloud in English class. I had so much fun reading Mercutio that I changed my required art class from pottery to drama. I’m not sure where pottery would have lead me (and now that I think about it, I’m shocked NAHS even had a pottery class), but drama lead me to art school and some of my best friends.
Second, Billy Shakes taught me not to be afraid of dead authors. Yes, it’s (usually) harder to read the work of a dead author than a contemporary bestseller, but dead authors aren’t ghosts or zombies, there’s no reason to fear them. So for Emerson, Dickens, Tolstoy, Shaw, Wilde, and everyone else you introduced me to, thank you.
I also want to take a moment to talk about Shakespeare as a role model. He was an incredibly prolific and creative human being. A genius:
“Someone embodying exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of unprecedented insight.”
He gave us an abundance of beautiful gifts: 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and over 1700 new words and phrases. He wrote in prose, blank verse (that’s unrhymed iambic pentameter, yo), and poetry. He created words we take for granted like “eyeball,” “obscene,” and “advertising.”
Not only did he invent “advertising,” he married Anne Hathaway (ok, it was this Anne Hathaway).
He got more done in his 52 years on this planet than most of us can hope to accomplish in 80. Hell, it would probably take me 447 years to do what he did in 52.
How’s that for a good day at the office?
And that’s just what got published or produced. You know he wrote more, lots more, just to learn his craft. How many hours must he have put in? How much must he have wanted it? And how can I be more like him?
Shakespeare, you’re a god among men and you’ve changed my life for the better. Thank you, and happy birthday!
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