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When Was William Shakespeare Allowed Analysis

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Three years ago, at one of the lowest moments of my life, I started doing something I never thought I’d do. I’m reading every single play William Shakespeare ever wrote. And I’m reading most of them aloud. From the three dour Henry VIs, through all of your Macbeths and Romeos and Hamlets, all the way to nutty Cymbeline and beyond. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. Or an actor. I read them as part of a Nashville Shakespeare Festival program called “Shakespeare Allowed!” which invites a group of strangers to gather at a giant square table in the downtown library and read one speech or line at a time, round-robin-style, regardless of gender or acting ability. (Others silently read along in the periphery, except during crowd scenes, when everyone …show more content…

It was positively, well, Shakespearean. Finding free entertainment was quite a challenge, and so one day, while flipping through an actual newspaper, I noticed an article about the Shakespeare Allowed! project and decided to go see what it was all about. I showed up at the library the first Saturday of the month and was amazed to see 40 eager people jammed into a tiny conference room, books in hand, ready to read “The Comedy of Errors.” I knew within 10 minutes that I’d be busy the first Saturday of every …show more content…

It took a few months before a freakishly low turnout forced me to sit at the grown-up table and read aloud from “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” At first, it wasn’t exactly a natural feeling, and no matter how many times I peeked ahead to see which line I’d get, the words never quite tripped off my tongue. I mangled a lot of lines. But there was no denying the thrill I felt when I managed to get to the end of a longish speech and realized there was a grin a mile wide on my face. Suddenly I wanted all the long speeches, all the big moments. From that moment on, the library would have to be on fire for me to give up my reading

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