Shakespeare

It's hard for me to relive the experience of the Globe Theatre, and it's easy to see why. That was an open-air theatre in which William Shakespeare drew huge audiences four hundred years ago.

And I did, pretty much recently, turning page after page of the novel How to Stop Time, following the footsteps of its narrator Tom Hazard who had hardly aged a day. He wasn't allowed to join Facebook because "there isn't the option of putting 1581 for your birthday." Tom brought me (and his lute) back to the noisy stinky theatre when Elizabethans didn't bath very often. I ended up learning a bit of British history.

Yet none of that matters until I joined my daughter's school field trip this morning. That's a workshop to learn the Shakespearean society through language and sonnets.

I liked it.

And I just thought, really, honestly, how remarkably the instructor turned every sentence into teachable moment. The way children learned idioms coined by Shakespeare. The way children made rhythmic sentences out of pentameter pattern. The way my daughter rushed to read Romeo and Juliet after school.

Thy life's a miracle.