Tax Lawyer's Blog

There is nothing in the world more inapposite to the study of great literature than the study of the Internal Revenue Code. So I assume readers of this blog will be at least a little curious as to how a number-crunching tax attorney learned to love the greatest word-cruncher of all time.

So here it is - the simple story of how one man became a Shakespeare worshipper. 

No More Excuses

It was the ides of January, 1990.

I had just moved from Miami to Orlando to accept a position as a tax attorney with an Orlando law firm.

I delayed my start date one week so I could get myself situated.

I found a small furnished studio apartment in Winter Park, signed a one year lease and carried everything I owned  (a T.V., a few suits, my law books and one of those lumbering old Compaq computers with the 8 inch screens) up three flights of stairs.

On my first day I had gotten all of my errands done: I set up a bank account, renewed my driver’s license and had my cable TV and telephone lines installed.

With nothing left to do I began roaming the corridors of the Lincoln Apartments.

There was a tall bookshelf at the opposite end of one of the floors and I sauntered over to peruse the titles.

In less than a minute, my eyes had stopped on an old and dusty two volume set of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

I lugged it back to the neighbor room.

I had read Hamlet in high school and having been intrigued by it had vowed to someday read all of Shakespeare’s plays. But I always had some excuse or other not to undertake what at the time seemed like a daunting task.

But now I was in a new town with seven long days to fill and no excuse not to fill them with the words of the greatest author in human history.

Return to Hamlet

So I turned to the Melancholy Dane for a second time.

In the next six days I read the remaining of the four great Tragedies, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear as well as two of the Histories, Richard III and Julius Caesar.

A Bardolater was born that week.

I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the language, the intensity of the action, and especially the spot on portrayal of the human condition. What I felt in reading those six plays is best described by Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare:

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion.

In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.

The Obsession

I had read about the Orlando Shakespeare Festival  (now part of the Orlando Shakespeare Theater) in the newspaper and immediately called and purchased a season pass.

Since then I have read the 37 plays several times enhancing those readings by attending more than 20 live performances and watching more than 100 film versions of the plays. 

I have also read hundreds of scholarly works, articles and essays about the plays, ranging from Samuel Johnson’s critical Preface to Shakespeare and Notes on Specific Plays to Harold Bloom’s tribute to genius Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Shakespeare is inexhaustible – each new reading of a play, poem or sonnet reveals some new insight into the human soul or some previously unnoticed miraculous use of language – and nobody, not even Johnson and Bloom, has ever achieved a mastery of him.

Harold Bloom says, “Shakespeare is always ahead of us.”

That fact doesn’t stop us from making an attempt to catch up to him. And, I suspect, the fact that we never do is what makes studying him so much fun.

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