What’s Past Is Prologue: A Year of Shakespeare & the Joy of Reading
- Road Scholar’s first employee, Mike Zoob, has always loved learning through reading.
- Upon receiving a friendly challenge, Mike embarked on a reading journey through Shakespeare’s five-act plays.
- The experience gave Mike a new appreciation for Shakespeare’s works and emboldened his passion for using reading and multimedia art as tools for education.
In fewer than 10 minutes, I can walk from my home to the iconic Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in the Boston Public Garden. I was six at the time Robert McCloskey’s book of the same name was published, and my parents, inveterate readers of the first order, bought me the book, as subsequently millions of parents throughout the world in multiple languages have done for their children. I cannot calculate how many times that book was read to me and by me as I learned to read, nor the number of times I read it to my two daughters when they were young.
Reading books has been a central component of my life, yet today, more and more articles and podcasts bemoan the “death of reading” and the onset in the early ‘90s of the “post-literate society.”
About a year ago, I was privileged to begin a unique reading experience that has enhanced my life considerably that I should like to share with you. I, along with close to a hundred friends and family throughout the world, received an email from the youngest of my lady friend’s three children, inviting us to join in a “year-long celebration” of his recently deceased father, a Shakespeare buff who instilled in his son “an abiding love of Shakespeare’s plays.”
Via YOWSA (Year of William Shakespeare Awesomeness), his weekly newsletter, he would briefly outline each play along with insightful interpretations of word play and references to movies, audio books and podcasts. Through YOWSA, we were invited to read each and every one of Shakespeare’s five-act plays in the order they were written.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon
I accepted the invitation, given the gentle admonition, “This is not supposed to be a chore or burden — it is supposed to be a way of coming together around something my father enjoyed tremendously, loved sharing with others and, I believe, makes life richer and more interesting.”
A new but familiar world opened to me as I read, heard and watched each play, accompanied and thrilled repeatedly by the images, voices and passions of Laurence Olivier, Judy Dench, Ian McKellen, Denzel Washington, Hellen Mirren, Kenneth Branagh, Ralph Fiennes and others. The experience was far removed from my reading of Shakespeare in college, let alone the halting and stumbling manner in which I made my way through Julius Caesar in my first year of junior high school. The ability to go back and forth while reading a play and simultaneously do the same both visually and auditorily gave me new insights and a deeper understanding of the written word.
While we may indeed be entering a post-literate society and the unknown dangers presented by artificial intelligence, I found the blending of the magical Elizabethan late 16th-century literature and modern technology both enlightening and liberating.
Shakespeare’s “What Is Past Is Prologue” is inscribed on The Future, the statue of a young woman holding an open book outside the National Archive Building in Washington, D.C. We, Road Scholar enthusiasts of today’s world, have an obligation to ensure that future generations of older adults can savor the joys of both reading and experiencing Shakespeare’s plays via technologies yet unborn.
Connect with other lovers of Shakespeare like Mike on theater-themed learning adventures!
Mike Zoob was Road Scholar’s first employee and helped shape the organization’s pioneering approach to learning for older adults. Over five decades, he’s championed education, community and curiosity as lifelong pursuits — values that continue to define Road Scholar’s mission and inspire its global network of participants and educators.
