First Night, second take

Finally getting around to reading A Winter's Tale after seeing it performed during Boston's First Night.

 

I haven't seriously read Shakespeare since high school, but I'm already in love (my love interest rekindled just hearing it read New Year's Eve, though my being gross with the flu kept me from appreciating it as much as I might have otherwise.).

These are probably really odd comparisons, but in Shakepeare I hear the same beauty that I do in Dickens, but also in a lot of Stephen King's work - the saying of something so simple, but so profoundly true, and in words that no one else would have dared to pick to describe what's being said, so that the simple statement is now a work of art.

Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, hath been royally attorney'd with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies; they they have seem'd to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposite winds. The heavens continue their loves!

I really, really hope Shakespeare actually existed and wrote. Either way, I'll be absorbed.