Coping with Shakespeare: Why Writing Hurts
Written by Ian Atherton
About a year ago, I walked into the office of one of my English professors, sat down, and struck up a conversation. Purportedly—as far as he was concerned, and, even as far as I had convinced myself—I was there to talk about graduate school. And we did, for quite a while.
But what I’ve realized in retrospect is that I did not, in fact, walk into that office to talk about graduate school. Like some kind of sinner, bearing on his chest a deep-rooted shame years in the making, I went to give a confession.
To that point, my time at Hillsdale had looked like this: one month, cocky and confident; two months despairing, drowning in red ink, shocked to know I wasn’t as brilliant as I’d thought; six months humble, tracking back to where I’d gone wrong; queue summer, then six months eager, learning how to learn; summer again, and eight months learning—really learning—drinking up Emerson, Coleridge, and King Lear like a dry sponge.
So there I sat in present day, February of my junior year—across a desk from the professor who’d marked up my first papers at Hillsdale. I had a few papers under my belt that I could be proud of, that might even hold their own if developed further at a post-grad level. Literature, meanwhile, proved more accessible and enjoyable than ever before. By all means, the scene should have looked at least a little triumphant.
Somehow, though, it wasn’t. You would think that, there, in the waning hours of a college career, parts of my education would start to come easily to me. But more than ever before, writing—the crux of my education—felt like an impossible task. I spent hours of every day reading through the best writing in our language, and somehow it was syntax, something so apparently simple and utterly secondary to image, plot, character, or argument—the very thing we’d imagine comes first to a writer—that escaped me.
I told this professor as much, about how papers were long and laborious because of it, and how my own style drove me mad, and how language itself seemed entirely beyond control. And when I’d finished, the room hung still for an awkward few moments, and he leaned his head forward, his eyes rolling out to their peripheries and focusing back on me, as if he expected either for me to continue, or for a bell to ring and confetti to fall from the ceiling as if a hoax were being revealed. And when nothing happened, he finally said, “well, yes,” and nodded.
This, what I’m about to say, is absurd; it’s silly—overwrought and overthought. And yet, the phrase “well, yes” is why I am at Hillsdale. Consider what preceded it, and what exactly was wrapped up within it. Prompting the phrase was my own confession of inadequacy; implied within it was neither absolution nor even acknowledgement of the need to confess. Rather, I encountered in “well, yes” the indifferent acceptance of one who had heard what I had to say and then responded to it as if I had just stated one of the more obvious truths he knew.
The lesson at play, I think, is one that many of us learn for the first time while playing sports. Usain Bolt comes to mind. Certainly every high school sprinter would like to run like him, but they all know that the man wasn’t born with the accelerative capacity of a horse; he worked for years for that. Fathers seem brimming with this kind of wisdom: “Practice makes perfect; do you know how many hours a day Tiger Woods spends on the golf course?” We can even veer back to the academic, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Any way we care to phrase it, sayings such as these demonstrate a healthy conception of not only greatness, but of every step in its direction. Bolt earned his 9.58 seconds, and Shakespeare earned his King Lear.
The first known poem in Anglo-Saxon Literature is a short piece called “Caedmon’s Hymn.” A legend accompanies it: Caedmon, an illiterate cow-herd, embarrassed at his inability to compose verse, encounters an angel. The angel blesses him and requests a song, at which point the famous Hymn flows effortlessly from his mouth. Studying Shakespeare and Homer, we all begin to wonder if they, too, composed effortlessly, in the method of Caedmon. And we begin to doubt ourselves when our verse, or prose, or speech flows with anything less than perfection. But the truth is that the great works of our literary heritage were not conceived in spontaneous bursts of inspiration. They were carved and sweated out against brutal odds and, likely, frustration and doubt. William Wordsworth, one of England’s finest poets, claims that he composed his poem “Tintern Abbey” in a matter of hours, as he stood looking over the landscape that inspired it. But Wordsworth betrays himself; the poem is largely about how one who has grown old might reflect on his more spontaneous youth. We find masked in the work’s subject a testament to the years of contemplative practice that have informed and enabled the perspective Wordsworth takes.
Confessing my frustration with writing to Shakespeare, Homer, Wordsworth, and even Caedmon, I can only imagine that they, too, would reply “well, yes”—they, perhaps more than any, should understand that a triumphant work is, in fact, a triumph over immense difficulty. As students and scholars at Hillsdale College, we partake in this tradition of struggle and triumph. Understanding the humanity and fallibility of our most eminent writers gives us an appreciation for what they’ve overcome as well as the hope that we might do the same.
Ian Atherton is a senior English major from Denver, Colorado. He is a member of the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity and an officer of the local Interfraternity Council. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a graduate education in literature and a career in teaching.