023: Shakespeare for the Brokenhearted

Temporality in Maggie O'Farrell's "Hamnet"

Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.

—William Shakespeare, from “Troilus and Cressida”

The last time I read Shakespeare with anything like the attention that it requires was in the waning days of my second marriage. Just about everything that can be broken was, and I was sick at heart and in body, doing everything I could just to hang on to my job and avoid being a burden to my kids and friends. In the midst of this, my husband and I decided to read all of the plays of Shakespeare, together. It was a desperate act, a last substantiation of the gossamer filament that still tethered us to our candescent beginnings.

It was a plan doomed to fail, but not before I got my head into a handful of plays in an altogether new way. I was reading as a woman and a soul instead of as a student or a teacher, and with my intellectual capacities diminished by fear and despair, I read with my heart instead of my head. I didn’t notice iambs or couplets or any other metrical forms, I didn’t ca…