Hear a Play

I first encountered Shakespeare on my mother’s bookshelves when I was a little girl, around 8.  She had a great book that told the plays as stories and not as Elizabethan Drama.  So, when I reached high school and my English teacher ruined Hamlet by making the lessons so boring, I wasn’t turned off to his plays - I knew there was good stuff there.  When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare class in London.  We took a tour of The Globe, and the Globe educator told us in Shakespeare’s day, the audiences said they would “hear” a play instead of “see” a play.  For some reason, that comment resonated with me, and I became a devoted fan of the language of his plays- not just the stories of his plays. 

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