Much Ado About...

JOEL, SHELBY & CALEB!

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH SHAKESPEARE?

Joel: My first experience with Shakespeare was, like many others, in high school. My English teacher was extremely passionate about the text being read out loud, so fumbling and sweating my way through Romeo and Juliet was my trial by fire. My second exposure was our school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our first rehearsal was spent huddling in a circle around a pair of giant dictionaries; working exhaustively to translate it, line by line, into "English". High school Joel had no idea just how many Complete Works of Shakespeare he would end up owning…

Shelby: The first time I Shakespeare-d was waaaaay back when I was in elementary school. My Grandma took my sister and I to a production of The Taming of the Shrew at Bard on the Beach in Vancouver. I remember seeing this firecracker of a character, Kate, and hearing the actor deliver a powerful, but suuuuper sarcastic rendition of her final monologue, and I was hooked. Hmm...Now that I think of it, that rendition probably still influences a lot of the work I’m drawn to...But anyways, I was so impressed that the show had such a strong female character in it (little did I know that’s not ALWAYS how that monologue is performed). From there, my sister, who was an English major at the time, supplied me with many a Shakespearean play. I’m not gonna lie - I didn’t read them. Well. Not all of them. (I started straying into Arthurian literature instead). But man, did I like having them. Still do!

Caleb: My first introduction to Shakespeare in earnest was in Grade 11, reading Macbeth. We all got copies of the play from the school, but mine included several annotations in the margins from a previous owner, a la Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince. As our teacher asked us questions about the characters and their motivations, I found the answers within my book wowed my teacher, and I was regarded as being particularly insightful into Macbeth's thought process (for better or worse). I now freely admit to all my previous classmates that I was not, in fact, a brainiac -- I was simply incredibly lucky.