Glenn Arbery
The first spark of genuine engagement with great writers most often comes from a teacher, and the ever-fresh immortality of the great work has its ironic contrast in the aging and death of those who made the introduction. So it is for me with Shakespeare, who was first truly impressed upon my imagination during my freshman year of college.[1] I must have read several Shakespeare plays in high school—Romeo and Juliet, definitely. (Franco Zeffirelli’s version with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting was a revelation when it came out in 1968.) Julius Caesar? Probably. The sophomore class in which I must have read it is most memorable, however, not for the play, but for the teacher’s temper. She was so furious at us one day that she asserted, naming herself in the third person, that she was going to explode. One of my classmates, schooled like all my generation in the preferred technique for avoiding personal injury during nuclear attacks, promptly got under his desk. We were brought up on the language of megatons, alas. Had the teacher not been quite so large, it would not have been quite so funny.
In any case, my love for Shakespeare began in freshman year at the University of Georgia, when I had the wonderful Marion Montgomery as my teacher, a man whose vast accomplishments were completely unknown to me at the time and whose literary stature was belied by his simple workaday clothes and his unassuming air of country irony. We were reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, and during that discussion, the conscious possibilities and complexities of art first broke in upon me. I thought of this poem yesterday on my afternoon walk, when I passed a tree full of birds and stopped for a moment to record them.[2] The recollection sent me back to the poem itself:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves,  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/04/homage-william-shakespeare-glenn-arbery.html