Guest Post: A Shakespeare Reading Group, by Johnnie Johnson Hafernik

I am pleased that my longtime colleague and friend Johnnie Johnson Hafernik kindly agreed to my request that she write about the Shakespeare Reading Group that she co-founded and organizes. Thank you, Johnnie! Here is her post: Over five years ago a friend and I attended an informative and engaging long-weekend seminar near Yosemite entitled “Shakespeare and Opera.” I was attracted by the “opera” theme but left not only still passionate about opera but reminded of how much I enjoy Shakespeare. That weekend my friend and I decided to form a Shakespeare reading group. We easily convinced two other friends to join us as core members, with a few others who occasionally attended. Today, the group has grown to eight. Sadly, our most passionate and knowledgeable (about Shakespeare and much more) founding member, B., died last year. Early on, B. gave each of us Tina Packer’s "Women of Will: The Remarkable Evolution of Shakespeare’s Female Characters." The book has been invaluable for our discussions. We miss her. At each meeting, we decide by consensus which play to read for the following meeting. In preparation for meetings, our group has evolved from initially each of us choosing a passage to discuss from the selected play and a character we’d like to play to a more free-flowing and wide-ranging discussion. Each of us has our own way of preparing for our discussions, but we’ve found it especially helpful to listen to an audio version of the play and/or to watch one or more versions of the play, many available for streaming. Our go-to versions are the mid-1980s BBC productions of all the plays; adaptations of the play (e.g., "Throne of Blood," the Kurosawa film adaptation of "Macbeth"; operatic or musical versions such as "West Side Story"/"Romeo and Juliet"); podcasts and commentaries; and novels that are modern retellings of Shakespeare plays from The Hogarth Shakespeare Series (e.g., Margaret Atwood’s "Hagseed," a retelling of "The Tempest.") Our enthusiasm for our discussions and appreciation for Shakespeare have only increased over time. We leave each meeting energized, full of questions, and reminded of his greatness. Even plays some of us were initially not interested in reading capture our attention and spark discussion. Each play offers much to appreciate and explore: the beautiful language, the phrasing, the songs, the structure of the play, the humor, the vivid characters who often resemble well-known and not so well-known individuals, the questions and themes presented, and much more. Perhaps most important, we have found “today” in each play — situations, people, circumstances, motivations, questions of right and wrong. Stephen Marche in his book "How Shakespeare Changed Everything" (a book that B. highly recommended) draws attention to these themes, and to the complexities of life, when he writes that “Shakespeare is a messy writer with a complex view of morality whose conception of the universe is a bottomless, shifting ground” (p. 133). Marche goes on to argue that Shakespeare “recognizes the messiness of life as does no other writer, but it comes at a cost of an easy understanding of life’s ultimate purpose” (p. 135).