After leaving the Wall Street world in the early 1990s, I took some time off. I lived in Portsmouth, NH for a while, then moved to Cambridge, MA. A friend of mine was also going through a life transition at this time and landed a job at Harvard University in the fall of 1993. We decided to share an apartment in Somerville in the summer of 1994 to save money and get things restarted. I guess it was sort of an Odd Couple living situation.
My friend Barry had always had a strong interest in the arts: music, literature and theater. I, on the other hand, had always been strictly a math and science guy. In high school and college, I had taken the absolute minimum number of liberal arts and English courses needed to graduate. One day in the summer of 1995, Barry heard that a Shakespeare course was being taught at the Harvard Extension School. He thought it would be something I might be interested in and encouraged me to enroll in the course. Not having anything better to do, I decided to give it a shot.
I must say I was a little slow to warm up to Shakespeare. My first impression was that it was overly complicated and obscure. If it wasn't for the popularity of Romeo and Juliet, I told friends, nobody would even remember Shakespeare today. Slowly, however, over the course of that year-long class, I transitioned from begrudging respect to outright obsession. Shakespeare seemed to explore the deepest human emotions in a way I had never been exposed to before. He put into words many of the feelings I was having that I didn't think could be explained in any language. He developed a method to describe the complexities of human psychology in a way that was much richer and more nuanced than the religious and moral teachings I had grown up with.
Having recently spent many years in the rarified world of money and power on Wall Street, I could relate to the themes of greed, ambition and power that Shakespeare described in his plays about the Machiavellian machinations taking place in the aristocratic courts of medieval Europe. Also, having grown up in a strict Catholic household, I could also relate to the repressed environment that Shakespeare was living in, where openly expressing "incorrect" religious views could be extremely hazardous, and -- in his time -- literally a matter of life or death.
The following summer, in 1996, I took a Shakespeare acting course offered at the Harvard Summer school. I found the process of actually "speaking" Shakepeare in front of an audience -- and watching others do the same -- incredibly cathartic. Something about the whole experience affected me deeply, but I wasn't quite sure what to do about it. The next year, I took a break from Shakespeare as other activities took over, but my interest rekindled a few years later when I decided to go back to graduate school in the History of Science.
My friend Barry had always had a strong interest in the arts: music, literature and theater. I, on the other hand, had always been strictly a math and science guy. In high school and college, I had taken the absolute minimum number of liberal arts and English courses needed to graduate. One day in the summer of 1995, Barry heard that a Shakespeare course was being taught at the Harvard Extension School. He thought it would be something I might be interested in and encouraged me to enroll in the course. Not having anything better to do, I decided to give it a shot.
I must say I was a little slow to warm up to Shakespeare. My first impression was that it was overly complicated and obscure. If it wasn't for the popularity of Romeo and Juliet, I told friends, nobody would even remember Shakespeare today. Slowly, however, over the course of that year-long class, I transitioned from begrudging respect to outright obsession. Shakespeare seemed to explore the deepest human emotions in a way I had never been exposed to before. He put into words many of the feelings I was having that I didn't think could be explained in any language. He developed a method to describe the complexities of human psychology in a way that was much richer and more nuanced than the religious and moral teachings I had grown up with.
Having recently spent many years in the rarified world of money and power on Wall Street, I could relate to the themes of greed, ambition and power that Shakespeare described in his plays about the Machiavellian machinations taking place in the aristocratic courts of medieval Europe. Also, having grown up in a strict Catholic household, I could also relate to the repressed environment that Shakespeare was living in, where openly expressing "incorrect" religious views could be extremely hazardous, and -- in his time -- literally a matter of life or death.
The following summer, in 1996, I took a Shakespeare acting course offered at the Harvard Summer school. I found the process of actually "speaking" Shakepeare in front of an audience -- and watching others do the same -- incredibly cathartic. Something about the whole experience affected me deeply, but I wasn't quite sure what to do about it. The next year, I took a break from Shakespeare as other activities took over, but my interest rekindled a few years later when I decided to go back to graduate school in the History of Science.
