Shakespeare makes life better. Sir Patrick Stewart is among the pantheon of modern actors who stand as a walking embodiment of Shakespeare’s work. Ergo, SirPatStew makes life better.

I may have mentioned that I live for my audiobooks. I go into the office two days a week in this modern hybrid world, and my commute is about 90 minutes each way. That’s 6 hours a week of audiobook time. And when you listen on 1.5x speed, it’s really more like 9 hours/week. (I think I did that math right.) So, with a typical audiobook being around 8 to 12 hours, I fly through them as you might imagine.

Enter Making It So, the newly released memoir from Sir Patrick Stewart, thankfully read by the author. I had to make sure about that last part, as this would have been a totally different experience with someone else reading it. We all know that Patrick is as famous for his voice as James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman. It is so worth it.

I love every word of this book. The man’s had a lengthy and illustrious career spanning not just Shakespeare but Star Trek, the X-Men, and classic literature ranging from Charles Dickens to Herman Melville. It’s all here, but really, we’re talking probably 80% of the book is Shakespeare.

Like any memoir, we start with his growing-up years. We learn about his mom and brothers and his distant relationship with his abusive father. Strangely, his brother Geoffrey comes up maybe once in the whole book, while brother Trevor is an important part of the story. Not much is said about that disparity.

But soon we’re into the meat of the book, his time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The stories come fast and furious, from his earliest days of being the new kid getting the non-speaking roles and standing in awe of his own idols, to eventually becoming an idol to the next generation (see what I did there?)

If you’re like me, you’ll already be hanging on his every word at this point, so when he starts dropping names – whether Shakespeare characters or Shakespeare actors – you may find yourself laughing out loud or literally having your breath taken away, as I did.

I’ll tell one quick story to illustrate how much I loved this book. Otherwise, I’ll talk forever. For me, the works of Shakespeare are kind of like a snow globe on the bookshelf. Inside, there’s this fascinating little world that I could stare at for hours, always finding something new, always wondering what that life might be like. But it’s a different world. A bubble. There’s a barrier between my world and that world. A transparent one, but not a permeable one.

Then Stewart talked about his audition for the RSC and said two words – John Barton.

And I was right there on stage with him. Words like breathtaking are rarely used literally, but I can use such a word here. I was transported. (See what I did there? ;))

John Barton did a PBS mini-series some years back called Playing Shakespeare where we got the pleasure of watching a parallel universe where young Shakespearean gods like Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart learned their craft right there on the stage, in plain clothes, taking notes from teacher/director Barton in his comfy cardigan, no doubt channeling no small amount of Mr. Rogers for those of us who grew up on American television. It is the most inside and intimate look at the world of “behind the scenes” Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. It took only two words from Stewart to shatter that barrier between our worlds and make me feel like I was right there with them. I’m still getting goosebumps writing about it.

Enough about Shakespeare, though. I want to tell you all the stories like that, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Let’s talk about the rest of the book.

There’s a lot of Star Trek in here, to be fair. But for a 12-hour audiobook, Star Trek gets mentioned maybe 8 hours in, to give you an idea. He speaks of his Captain Picard role with the same respect that he speaks of Shakespeare. The fact that he got to act in Star Trek opposite some of his Shakespeare heroes (hello, David Warner), makes it all the more special. There are four lights!

Being a brand new book, this is very up-to-date, taking us all the way through the pandemic and three seasons of the Picard show. He tells us all about his social media adventures, from “folding his first New York slice” to reading a sonnet a day on Instagram during lockdown. I was there for all of it, and I loved hearing about all of it again.

There’s one surprise in the book. Sir Ian McKellen is hardly mentioned at all. The Internet wants to think that these two are inseparable BFFs for life, but this memoir does not paint that picture. Patrick loves Ian and they are no doubt now the best of friends, but if you’d gotten the idea that they grew up together on the Shakespeare stage, that is not the case. Apparently, they never even played together at the RSC, and didn’t really start doing projects together until X-men! WHAT?

Ok I’m done. If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, what are you waiting for? You’re on a Shakespeare site, you’re a Shakespeare fan. This book is like distilled essence of Shakespeare, you’ll want to spray it on yourself like cologne and walk around in it all day.

It’s rare that I pick up a book the day it comes out. But when somebody tells me that we’re doing a science-fiction locked-room murder mystery version of Hamlet where Horatio is an AI, I’m getting in line. So it is with The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu. Was it worth the effort? Read on!

I always appreciate a good Hamlet modernization/novelization. There’s so much room to work with. How close will they stick to the original, and where will they go off on their own? After all, the original’s got ghosts and poison and all sorts of murder, intentional and accidental. How do you compose a believable story that doesn’t take place in the Danish royal court?

This one’s pretty good, all things considered. We’re in a super secret lab where they’re experimenting with the kind of thing that will revolutionize everything … so, of course, people will kill for it. You’ve got the father, chief scientist, already dead when we start. So we go into lockdown. Did the son do it? Or the uncle? What about the trusted advisor, who is also the father of the young intern who used to date the son? The characters are all there. And the plot does hit most of the necessary beats, I’m happy to say.  They handle the ghost thing in an original and, for the purpose of this story, believable way.

In the end, though, it started to lose me – and I blame the narration. If you know Hamlet, you know that there’s really only one character who can be the one to tell the story. But is that true here? The author opts to go for this sort of “I’ll justify an omniscient narrator through various excuses” approach where sometimes it’s in first person; sometimes it’s transcripts from other people’s diaries, sometimes it’s log files from the computer or security tapes … basically, especially in audiobook, when you heard “I felt this and saw this so I did this” you typically have no idea who I is. Whenever you think you know, suddenly that character’s being referred to in the third person again, so now you have to figure it out all over again.

There’s one thing I hated about the book, though, and I’ve debated just saying it since it would be a total spoiler (that has nothing to do with the plot resolution), I’ll just say it like this. Do you know how sometimes people get overly obsessed with how the Hamlet/Horatio relationship could have gone? Yeah, this is one of those books. I thought you said Horatio was an AI? I did. You’ve been warned.

My wife and I have reached that age where quality time together means binge-watching the latest show that all our friends are discussing. This explains how I ended up on Firefly Lane, a very, *very* girly story that tells us the life story of two best friends. It stars Katherine Heigl of “I remember her from Grey’s Anatomy” fame, and Sarah Chalke, who will forever be Elliot from Scrubs to me. It’s a very well-acted show (especially Elliot), but it is also one of the most cliche-ridden, predictable things I’ve ever seen, which is what probably made it tolerably entertaining for me. Scene after scene, I’d do some of the dialogue, only for that exact dialogue to come out of the screen 10 seconds later. (And I’m sure my wife found it equally entertaining, right? 🙂 )

So it was in this context that we find Kate (Chalke) and Tully (Heigl) in a flashback to their high school days, sitting in English class and debating whether “fake stories about fake people” are as interesting as “real stories with real people.” In the background, we see a chalkboard with “But soft what light through” marked out in iambic pentameter, and I note, “….and, there’s the obligatory Shakespeare. I wonder if there’ll be any more.”

But indeed, there is! We quickly learn that the English teacher – the young, hot English teacher – is going to have the class do Romeo and Juliet because, of course they are.

I’m not going to spoil a bunch, but I’ll post some funny observations. There turns out to be a good amount of Shakespeare content covering multiple episodes, including a play performance (though not much of one), There are people hurling quotes at each other outside play rehearsals, and there are callback quotes when they’re adults. There’s the obligatory “will the real-life romances in the story map to the Romeo and Juliet casting” story arc that ends up resolving in what I thought was a pleasantly surprising way.

You probably already know much of the story, anyway, just from my description. One friend is the nerd, who of course knows all the words and longs to be Juliet, while the other is the popular girl who could care less. Guess who gets to be Juliet? And did I mention that the English teacher is handsome? Start writing your own script, and you’ll probably be pretty close.

Anyway, it’s a good show, and if you’re looking for something to binge-watch, you might want to consider it. If the story of two women’s decades-long friendship (including all the ups, downs and dirty details) is something you or someone you love can get into.

Random Thoughts

Most of the budget seems to have gone into costumes. Lots of kids roaming around in nice costumes, but the actual stage we get is pretty bare (and we don’t get much time for them to actually use it).

The quotes they use randomly are not what you normally see. There are the typical highlights, but then random stuff that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in this context before. I don’t remember Marcia Brady talking about sharp sauce and sweet goose. The kicker is that they then give that line to the wrong person 🙂

None of it is particularly well acted, except perhaps for the obligatory scene where the hot teacher demonstrates how to do it and all the girls swoon.

Teacher: Come up on stage, show us how Juliet’s supposed to be done right.

Juliet <enters>

Me from couch: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo…

Juliet: O Romeo, Romeo, where the f%^& are you, Romeo?

Me: THAT’S NOT WHAT IT MEANS!

Kid hoping he’ll be cast as Romeo, talking to his friends in the hall: And at the end I get to stab my own guts out!

Me from the couch: NO YOU F*()&$ING DON’T!

I have a tendency to talk to the screen when I get passionate about things.

Juliet, rehearsing: Oh happy dagger, here is thy drops dagger

Dead Romeo: Ow.

I don’t know why I found that so funny, but I laughed myself silly.

I’ve been doing this for a long, long time. I often tell the story of how The Tempest was my children’s first Shakespeare experience in August 2008. Technically, that was their first full performance. I’d completely forgotten that their first experience with Shakespeare was earlier that summer.

But there’s something that happened that day that I realize I didn’t write about in that post. Picture it, if you will. With my youngest still in a stroller, I’m pretty much still a new dad. I’ve also been running the blog for about three years at the time, so I’ve been anticipating this moment all that time. I grew up a computer nerd, and everybody told me that my children would grow up to be nerds, but it’ll be a long while before we get to that. But there’s never been an obstacle to introducing them to Shakespeare, and this was my chance.

What I walked into that day was magical. I knew that I could read Shakespeare to them. But here were children, some not that much older than my oldest, on stage and in costume, actually performing. Something else happened that day that I think back on often, though it’s hard to put into words. It was more an emotional experience than anything else. I caught up with one of the organizers of that day recently to reminisce, and I’ll borrow her words:

The audience would gather, we’d introduce the show. The kids would be out of sight range and would get into a gratitude circle, manifest the energy and magic they wanted to bring to the performance. I believe they’d always be holding hands, and then at the end of it they’d raise their held hands up over their heads and yell “THANK YOU, SHAKESPEARE” so he could hear them.

That still sends lightning bolts down my spine, both the description of it and the memory of being there. This was an island, and their energy echoed out into the expanse around them. It doesn’t do the moment justice to just say, “Thank you, Shakespeare.” These were children screaming it into the universe. Let me tell you something: if you perform Shakespeare when you’re still in elementary school, there is no challenge too great for life to throw at you. You can do anything. That’s a tremendous gift, and it merits thanks.

And I thought in that moment, “Yup. My kids may not end up as performers, but however much Shakespeare I can bring into their lives, so that they can bring it into the universe around them, then that’s what we’re gonna do.” That is the motivation and energy I brought into their classrooms, telling these (eventually) 8-year-olds exactly that, that there was no reason they couldn’t understand Shakespeare or anything else they put their minds to. It’s one of the reasons the mission statement for this site is, “Shakespeare makes life better.”

Thank You, Shakespeare

The reason I bring this up is that I finally connected enough dots to help return the favor those kids did for me (and my kids) at that moment. I honestly don’t know why I never thought of this before. I finally put together a line of merchandise with precisely that sentiment — Thank you, Shakespeare.

When I first started making merchandise like this, I said it was a way for kindred spirits to recognize each other in the wild. I never wanted to just stick Shakespeare’s face on stuff and call it a day. I want all my creations to have a message. I want people to see it and get it, you know? If it’s true that Shakespeare makes life better, it’s only fair that we thank him for it, don’t you think?

This design is available on Amazon in all the usual styles – men’s, ladies’, and children’s tees, v-necks, tanks, and hoodies. Also, in this case, I did phone cases, pillows, and tote bags. It’s available with and without the exclamation point, depending on personal preference. I’m more understated about it, but friend Christine said oh no, one must exuberantly proclaim it. Dealer’s choice!

Shop Now On Amazon!

Thank you, loyal readers, for nearly twenty years of shouting Shakespeare into the universe in our own way. And thank you, Shakespeare!