HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! FSC Education Director Ashley Kobza on Her Love of Shakespeare

I didn’t always love Shakespeare. 

At one point, I HATED  it.

Like most American teenagers, I was introduced to Shakespeare in High School behind a desk with my butt in a chair and a dense text in my hands. Reading pages filled with words I didn’t understand, characters I was certain I had nothing in common with, and plots that seemed ancient and otherworldly. Yes, I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and loved it. But because it was so unbelievably cool to a teenage me -- I figured it didn’t count as “real” Shakespeare. And even then, when we watched it in my high school English class, I only understood it because our teacher would intermittently pause the video and explain to us what just happened. I’m very grateful to her for doing that, by the way.

When I moved on to undergrad as a theatre major, we didn’t even scratch the surface with Shakespeare. One time, a sweet and passionate professor from the English department came to talk to our acting class and that was about it for my “classical” training as an undergraduate actor. I found said professor to be interesting, but still, I left feeling like I didn’t get it or couldn’t get it on my own. It seemed the only people that spoke passionately about Shakespeare -- along with iambic pentameter, soliloquy, and verse vs prose -- were book-writing, lecture-giving academics in whom I’d always have to rely on to explain it to me. I decided Shakespeare was for people with Ph.D.s and resigned myself to watching Baz’s R+J once every few years. 

Then came grad school. I had the distinct privilege of earning my MFA in Acting/New Work at Ohio State University. This program was unique in that it was in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company and their “Stand Up For Shakespeare” initiative. “SUFS” -- as it was affectionately nicknamed -- sought to introduce Shakespeare to kids at a younger age, allow them to see Shakespeare live, and to experience it on their feet in their bodies -- not behind a desk via a book. We then spent three years working alongside RSC artists and educators both at home and abroad.  Everyone in my MFA cohort was over the moon excited about this partnership. Me? I didn’t even know what the RSC was! I did know, however, that I loathed Shakespeare and admittedly felt a little left out of the enthusiastic discussion and debates my classmates were having. Even in grad school, Shakespeare didn’t reveal itself to me via my classical acting class whereby we sat and hammered out meter and counted every single syllable. I was so bored and so lost laboring over feminine endings, spondees, and dactyls -- tho in hindsight I’m grateful for this level of technical training.

We went to Stratford upon Avon for a week the summer of 2010. During the day we were engrossed in workshops and at night we saw plays -- King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra to be precise. I was starting to enjoy Shakespeare, but still felt horribly intimidated by it. The switch was flipped when I was charged with the role of Desdemona -- my first ever Shakespearean role -- under the direction of then RSC voice and text coach Alison Bomber. One night in rehearsal, as she saw me struggling under the text of the handkerchief scene she asked us to stop. She said we were going to play a game. A game that involved a stick, two actors, and the simple direction -- pursue or be pursued. Eventually, the stick was taken away and she instructed my scene partner and me to simply play the game. Who is pursuing and who is being pursued? We started the scene again and all at once, the crusty, dusty complete works of Shakespeare tumbled out the windows of ivory towers and into my actor soul. This time it was I who stopped rehearsal. I was crying. Alison anxiously came over to me, worried she had pushed me too far. She asked if I was ok and through tears, I muttered “I got it.” I got Shakespeare. More importantly, I felt it -felt ownership over it. And thus one of the greatest loves of my life began. 

Shakespeare doesn’t belong to the academics. It belongs to Everyone. It’s literally public domain. If it speaks to you while you are sitting at a desk devouring page after page of Hamlet -- right on! If it sings to you while up on your feet playing a simple silly game -- heck yes! If you love Baz Luhrmann's R+J or Joel Coen’s Macbeth -- very cool. 

Verily I say unto you, GET DOWN ON WHAT YOU LOVE. Me? I love to play. I love to connect with people. I love to explore the curse and blessing it is to be human. For those and a million other reasons, I love Shakespeare.