Olivia

Here is an interesting bit of timing.  Yesterday while listening to On The Coast on CBC Radio One I was also reading the opening pages of Olivia Chow's autobiography, "My Journey."  I didn't buy or seek out this book, though Jack Layton's widow does interest me.  It was given me on loan on Sunday by a friend I was visiting over a cup of chai.  He said he couldn't get quite into it, that he had won it as a kind of door prize at a writer's festival and suggested that I give it a go since, contrary to the advice of a friend of his, it was not the will of the universe that he read it.  So, just as I was reading the part about Olivia being so named by her father because he was a lover of Shakespeare and wanted to name her after the heroine of the play "Twelfth Night", Stephen Quinn, the host of On The Coast, announced that Wednesday April 23 will be William Shakespeare's four hundred fiftieth birthday and invited listeners to call in about how they are going to celebrate.  On the moment I thought why not try to read Twelfth Night between today and Wednesday, in conjunction with Olivia Chow's book.
     I have the complete plays and sonnets of Shakespeare which I came across in a free box in the east side of Vancouver some ten or eleven years ago.  I was enjoying  a summer or perhaps late spring walk in one of my many favourite Vancouver neighbourhoods: this is a sheltered enclave of quiet leafy streets just east of Victoria Drive between Napier and William Streets, of beautifully unpretentious late Victorian and Edwardian era homes with lush gardens spilling onto the streets and families and households of kind residents who love to throw block parties in the nice weather.  It was on one of these streets where I found Shakespeare.
     I have always had trouble reading Shakespeare, even if I did remarkably well in high school when we were studying Macbeth in grade eleven and Hamlet in grade twelve.  This probably denotes my own intellectual laziness because I know that when I apply myself to Shakespeare, even the words and phrases that mean nothing to Twenty-First Century ears ring pithy and resonant and suddenly I know exactly what the Bard wants to tell us and believe you me not all of it is suitable to young audiences!
     I will probably always struggle with Shakespeare.  He is not meant to be easy.  But like any caper or romp the struggle is always part of the joy, and perhaps is the joy of reading these four hundred year old masterpieces of wit, wisdom and salacious good humour.  And I found his plays in a box, given to me free, a gift from the bard which though hardly read will always enjoy a place of privilege and esteem in my personal library.