The Music Next Door

Abstract

Ninety-five-year-old Doris Held, a great niece of Sigmund Freud, has been convening the Shakespeare Reading Group in Northampton, Massachusetts, my hometown, since she moved here in 2016. In the following essay, which is a personal response to my experience of this group of Shakespearean readers, to Doris Held, and to the work of Shakespeare in general, I attempt to chart the full impact of the Bard’s work on my life and on the world around me. I am neither a scholar nor a historian. In a true sense, I am a bystander Shakespearean, who has received deep reward and benefit from the experience, but it is Doris Held and her group who opened my eyes to the precise nature of this unexamined reward. Doris brought the spirit of the group from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had been a dues-paying member for decades of something called the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association, which itself dates to 1880. My wife Debra and I attended the first meeting in Northampton more than a decade ago, and we have been receiving emails from Doris four times a year ever since. While these communications often induce guilt, they invariably lead to pleasures that I would never want to relinquish. That is a complicated dynamic in my routine, and I try to grapple with its ebb and flow in the pages that follow. Each time I get one, I have a version of the same conversation in my head. Is Doris still doing this? Haven’t they done all the plays by now? All things considered, wouldn’t they—and I—rather be home watching a true crime documentary about Gaby Petito on Netflix? What the hell is William Shakespeare to me anyway? At this point, if I’m honest, Shakespeare is Doris. The experience with this group led me in two directions. One took me back to my now long-ago history with Shakespeare’s work as an actor in college. The other took me via historical research into the prehistory of Doris Held’s previous Shakespeare group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two paths gave me a deeper grasp of the influence of his work across the world and on my own life.

In early 2025, in a raw season of sleepless nights, with no sense of where the country would be in a year, I received the following email:

Dear Shakespeareans,

We will meet again to read the second third of Julius Caesar--Act II, Scene 2 through the entirety of Act III--on Sunday, March 16 (a day after the “Ides”).

Please let us know by this Friday—if you are able—or not able—to come so that we can do the casting.

Looking forward to seeing and hearing you.

Doris

Doris is 95-year-old Doris Held, a great niece of Sigmund Freud, who has been convening the Shakespeare Reading Group in Northampton, Massachusetts, my hometown, since she moved here in 2016. She brought the spirit of the group from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had been a dues-paying member for decades of something called the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association, which itself dates back to 1880 (Held and Marks 2025).

My wife, Debra, and I attended the first meeting in Northampton more than a decade ago, and we have been receiving emails from Doris four times a year ever since.

These communications often induce guilt. Each time I get one, I have a version of the same conversation in my head.

Is Doris still doing this? Haven’t they done all the plays by now? All things considered, wouldn’t they—and I—rather be home watching a true crime documentary about Gaby Petito on Netflix? What the hell is William Shakespeare to me anyway?

Work, laziness, winter weather, general inertia, you name it, I have used every excuse to decline over the years. Occasionally, though, I attend—if I had to estimate, I’d guess eight times in nine years.

This time, on an impulse, I decide to accept. Doris and the others had read the first third of Julius Caesar in the previous meeting, which I, of course, had missed. For this next one, the group would be taking on the second third of the play, which includes the slaughter of Caesar.

It should be easy to walk away from this group and never look back. During my college years, when I felt that my Christian evangelical faith had collapsed under the weight of too many inconvenient questions about human suffering, I ended my leadership of Wednesday night Bible study with no regrets. Renouncing my allegiance to this Shakespeare reading group would leave me far more conflicted, as if I were trying to end a love affair that hadn’t yet run its course.

What is Shakespeare to me that he should require such loyalty? This is the question I ask myself.

At this point, if I’m honest, the answer is extremely local.

Shakespeare is Doris.

                                  *

Doris never does an entire play in one sitting, not even a short one like Macbeth, which was our first undertaking way back in 2016. On that occasion, I learned about the hoary theatrical tradition that a curse lies upon whoever speaks the original name of that play aloud in a theatre. We were sitting in her home, far from the boards and danger, but in a spirit of caution, we called Macbeth “the Scottish Play” instead. There was a shiver of thrill in that gesture.

No session lasts much longer than an hour. No dues are collected, as they were in her Cambridge Group. No one notes down your street address, social standing, Ivy League pedigree or pocketbook, all of which once played a role in our predecessor’s group.

The one constant is Doris. She is our “conductor,” as she calls it. Her friend Monica Straus helps her to pick the play and sometimes hosts, but Doris is the soul of the enterprise and sets the tone.

None of us are actors by trade. We are teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, academics, graphic designers, musicians, documentarians, various kinds of retirees; we are parents and grandparents, natives, transplants, male and female, though mostly the latter. We are predominantly white, though not by design.

No one is required to act, which makes the ascent into Elizabethan English easier. There is no need to memorize. Doris doesn’t have to direct or choreograph. Forget auditions. Still, getting normies like us to read the lines in such a way that they cohere takes a certain amount of concentration and effort from everyone in the room.

We sit in a circle, and she conducts the orchestra of our voices through the recitation of stage directions. We venture into the terrain of his language, often haltingly. Each line is an act of exploration. That may sound overly dramatic, an inflated sense of the exercise, but I believe that we arrive somewhere new in our chairs. We discover Shakespeare together.

One benefit of reading parts of a play over multiple meetings is a sense of opportunity. Every time we meet, Doris changes the cast, giving the same role to different readers. No one who starts as Lear ends as Lear. Everyone gets a shot at a soliloquy.

It’s possible to detect a pattern in Doris’ casting, as they say in true crime stories when a seemingly random act of bloodshed begins to look like a work of intentionality as new crimes emerge. In my case, for instance, I had reasonable certainty I would be given a large role in Julius Caesar. This isn’t vanity. Over the past decade, on those rare occasions when I have managed to attend, I have been cast as Macbeth, King Lear, Prospero, Benedick, and Hamlet. Doris always gives me at least one shot at the lead, and I do my best.

Debra says Doris has a crush on me, but I think it’s something else. Our conductor has told the group more than once that she is hard of hearing, and my voice booms.

Getting a plum role is always a supreme compliment and a daunting task. It is also a pain in the ass, to be blunt, for the simple reason that I don’t make a lot of time anymore in my life for William Shakespeare.

                                 *

I make documentaries for a living, which involves a lot of travel, as well as team and time management. I have almost nothing left to devote to study of an Elizabethan text in advance. On the other hand, if I’m going to attend a meeting of the Doris Held Shakespeareans, I refuse to go empty-handed—or empty-headed. This is vanity.

Prep isn’t called for. Participants are not expected to blow the room away. No one aims their iPhone at you and posts your torment on Instagram. People come with their native capacity and not much more. No negative judgments are rendered publicly. On the contrary, group members pass generous compliments to almost everyone. We are a community of amateurs who enjoy the loose nature of the experience.

One time, a reader set a song from Lear to music. Another time, someone went for broad comedy without much regard for laughs. All effort is welcome, as long as everyone makes an earnest attempt at the iambic pentameter. This is a chief joy of our communion, really.

Yet I know Doris cares about the uses and abuses of Shakespeare. I care, too. I never want to fumble the verse. It’s one big reason I have skipped so many meetings. I played Shakespeare leads twice in my life, forty years ago, and one of those performances, in particular, left a weird, almost inexplicable burden, as if the experience mattered far more than it had any right to, as if I might one day face a Shakespearean Judgment Day, when I would be held to account for every time I failed to rise to the Bard’s occasion.

I knew my own reasons for wanting to get the language right, but the nature of Doris’ commitment struck me as beautifully mysterious. Why gather strangers around her to read these works?

I asked her if she would chat with me about the group for this essay, and on an icy early spring New England morning, I went over to her house.

I felt an urgency about my first question. I asked her what was so riveting about hearing a circle of rank civilians wander through these plays with vocal machetes? Especially after a lifetime of far more refined readings in Cambridge?

“For me, it’s all about the language,” Doris flatly responded. “I write poetry, so language is it, and the language has never been topped by anybody. Funny. Ribald. Extremely sensitive. Exploratory. Name any adjective you can think of, and it will work.”

If Shakespeare Judgment Day ever comes, Doris Held will sit on the advisory board.

                                  *

On a work trip to London, I bought the Arden version of Julius Caesar, which explains in the first paragraph of the introduction that it is one of the earliest tragedies, written just before Hamlet (Shakespeare 1998). Before the next meeting, I told myself, I must read everything, the introduction, the annotations, all five acts of the Shakespeare play. I will find my way into the spirit, even though I never much liked Julius Caesar.

It was the first Shakespeare I ever read in full, even before Romeo and Juliet. It was Doris’s first play, too, encountered when she was a student at the famed all-girl Brearley School in New York City. A Shakespeare scholar who attends the group from time to time recently told me that it used to be the one play taught to American high school kids because it contains no sex.

On the face of it, Julius Caesar is no play for children. On the contrary, it seems to address matters that are hard to bear for grown-ups: whether to submit to tyranny or not; whether to resort to violence in the face of that tyranny; and how to bear the consequences of political murder. What could be more deadly serious?

Then again, in re-reading it for the first time as an adult, when I come across Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar, which begins, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” I realize with a happy buzz that the first time I ever heard those particular lines, they were being spoken either by Daffy Duck in a Warner Brothers cartoon or by Spanky McFarland onstage, dressed as a Roman centurion, lifting his shield to ward off a barrage of peashooter projectiles in an episode of Little Rascals (Meins 1935). Back in the 1930s and 1940s, this speech was already being played for laughs aimed at kids.

In 1977, my fourteen-year-old self didn’t think this text was funny or even interesting.

As I got older, other Shakespeare plays sparked my imagination, but Julius Caesar had the reek of desiccated history—too many speeches, too many guys in togas before the 1978 frat comedy Animal House made togas fun again. Even murder seemed lackluster, as if staged for no other reason than to show a kid in a Texas classroom how boring it could be.

I grew up in Texas gun culture, loving John Wayne as he charged four outlaws by himself in True Grit or thrilling to the immortal Clint Eastwood line in The Outlaw Josey Wales: “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’, boy” (Eastwood 1976).

Half a dozen dudes in dresses knifing an unarmed pal seemed, at best, bad sportsmanship; at worst, their act represented bloody cowardice that could elicit no sympathy and could never be excused by oaths of loyalty or pretty speeches. The cinematic heroes of my youth spoke their few words as pronouncements of a decision already made. Often enough, their gunfire ended the sentence. Shooting an unarmed man was the mark of a villain, and a trusting soul rarely made it to the final reel of the movie. Period. Julius Caesar didn’t honor these rules.

I never gave the play much thought until it resurfaced a few years back, when my sixth-grade son, Joe, played two roles—Plebeian Number 4 and Metellus Cimber—in a Waldorf School production. I watched him in toga and Harry Potter glasses with a group of other children follow the stage direction: They stab Caesar. There was a shocking feel, all of the sudden. An unforgettable line from William Golding’s tale of childhood savagery Lord of the Flies hovered in the air: “Kill the pig!”

Now, frankly, Julius Caesar seems almost dangerous. Doris chose it with intention, like she wanted to make us into conspirators. That’s her unspoken stage direction. We should feel the electricity of assassination in the lines. We should taste it.

During my visit, talking about politics, Doris told me about another group that she attends, a gathering of six elderly women, which she calls a “session,” harking back to her days as a professional psychotherapist, perhaps. “Yesterday, we talked exclusively about what we could do. We came up with some ideas, and the excitement of not just sitting passively but of actually doing something, just revved us up. At the end of the session, one of us started a football…what do they call it?”

“A huddle?”

“A football huddle,” Doris says, laughing. “Six old ladies in a football huddle.”

More volunteerism than violence, but conspiracy was in the air.

Around the time of our chat, the cast list for the next reading came out. My forecast proved right. Doris gave me Brutus, who has 700 lines—more lines than any other character in Julius Caesar—530 more than the guy the play is named after, which meant work.

Again, the question posed itself.

What is Shakespeare to me that I should bother with Brutus?

                              *

It’s a hard question to answer for a cultural bystander, a non-actor in a non-dramaturgical life—impossible, really.

What is Shakespeare to anyone?

“What is perhaps most extraordinary about William Shakespeare, bearing in mind that he has been dead for four hundred years,” writes Bill Bryson in his great book for bystander Shakespeareans, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, “is how lively his world remains. Hardly a month goes by that some fairly momentous claim or discovery relating to his life and work doesn’t emerge—never more so perhaps than in 2015 when a South African academic named Francis Thackeray suggested that Shakespeare may have filled the bowl of his little clay pipe with marijuana and possibly even cocaine” (Bryson 2007).

That’s such a typical development for Shakespeare. He is always being made contemporary, updated; his vices even get upgraded. At the same time, his name long ago became an enduring synonym for “genius,” for “writer,” or, alternatively, for writerly pretension.

“He ain’t no Shakespeare!”

Meanwhile, he’s both a primordial meme—Shakespeare went viral before there was virality—and a current one.

A quick Google search turns up a dozen. I like this one, a few words splashed over the famous sketch of a face, a mustached man with curly locks of hair.

“I think I’ll make a love story. Everybody dies!”

What literate person on earth hasn’t had an encounter with a play, a movie based on a play, a text, an excerpt of a text, an audio recording?

A 2016 headline from The Guardian says it all: “Shakespeare More Popular Abroad than in Britain, Study Finds”.

Journalist Mark Brown writes in a tone of vast, clinical dismay, detailing a survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries and showing that “88 percent of Mexicans like Shakespeare compared with only 59 percent of British people. 84 percent of Brazilians said they find him relevant to today’s world compared with 57 percent in the UK; and 83 percent of Indians said they understand him, far more than 58 percent of Britons” (Brown 2016).

Those numbers sound a note of national crisis for the Brits in the age of Brexit, but when it comes to measuring the meaning of Shakespeare for the rest of us, they don’t help much.

For me, the only way to think about what Shakespeare means to anyone on the planet is to think about what Shakespeare has meant, so far, to me personally.

If you love the theater, and I do, Shakespeare is non-negotiable. Sooner or later, the meat and potatoes must be served. Over the past fifty years, I have seen more productions than I can count; Richard III at the Guthrie in Minneapolis; two New York Hamlets, one with Jude Law in the lead, another with Liev Schreiber’s bare feet at the level of my eyeballs. I saw The Tempest, with puppets and a Prospero played by Patrick Stewart, otherwise known as Captain Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Yet for me, the ghost of Shakespeare has been most indelible as cinema. At the Film Forum in New York, my home away from home, I saw Orson Welles do Othello in blackface and Falstaff in Chimes At Midnight, arguably his finest hour after Citizen Kane. As a dead-broke writer in London in the 1980s, I emptied my pockets for a ticket to the premiere of Ran, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s take on King Lear, one of the greatest war movies ever made. Polish auteur Roman Polanski made his version of Macbeth after the slaughter of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate by the Manson Family, one of the most unnerving depictions of political murder ever put to celluloid. More recently, Baz Luhrman zazzed up Romeo and Juliet, and the now canceled Joss Whedon staged Much Ado About Nothing in a suburban house in black and white with a troupe of actors better known from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

On it goes, but if you asked me to name the moment when I first understood the profound reach of this sixteenth-century playwright into my world, I would turn to a scene in a 1946 Western directed by John Ford, which I first came across as a freshman auditing a class on the history of cinema at Davidson College in North Carolina. For me, bizarrely, as I think about Shakespeare when he made his first shuddering impact on me, he is attended by Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp wearing Stetsons in a bar in Tombstone, watching from the black and white shadows as a frontier thespian declaims Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy before outlaws who have shot his whiskey bottle to pieces.

The player is standing on a table in a cape, looking ridiculously out of place, but his dignity is absolute as he turns to the saloon piano player and says: “Minstrel, pray help me” (Ford 1946).

Earp, played by Henry Fonda, is about to walk into the saloon and break up the mayhem, when Doc Holliday, played by Victor Mature, stops him. “Wait,” Holliday says, “I want to hear this.”

What follows is, for me, one of the great lyrical moments in American cinema, delivered by a director whose Irish cultural heritage included a profound regard for Shakespeare.

The player struggles through the first half of the delivery before his speech is cut short.

“who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death…”

The thespian cannot finish. He looks up to Doc Holliday and says, “Please help me, sir.”

The gunslinger obliges, picking up on a line that feels made to order for the American frontier:

“The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others we know not of?”

It is a moment of tremendous, unexpected emotion, an outlaw yearning for his own death in lines he learned long before in a long-lost world of East Coast education. Right before my eyes, this camera removed the language of Shakespeare from unfamiliar and formal settings and planted it right in the middle of the mythological heart of my Texas roots. The meaning of the words needed no translation or explanation. I had them instantly and understood them well for the first time in my life. This gunslinger wanted to die but could not bring himself to the act. He was hypnotized, in a sense, by his own indecision.

Shakespeare’s language did not obscure the point. It made the point.

It rendered the scene profound.

                               *

Most of the time, this is how Shakespeare comes to me. Incidentally, haphazardly, intensely.

He springs alive in an unexpected frame.

The invocation of Hamlet in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine was like that.

Except the experience felt more like music than language.

It always does.

Elusive, ephemeral, coming in on the beat and vanishing again into silence like a song or a symphony.

Shakespeare is never the music playing through my headphones, though.

He’s the music next door, playing behind the walls of some other house, one that doesn’t belong to me and never will, the irresistible music overheard, rising when I’m not expecting it, impossible to ignore or forget.

Only once in my life did I get to enter that house and join the band, to pick up an instrument, which was myself, and play for an audience.

Only once did the music next door play inside me. I’ll come back to that story later, but for now, what’s crucial to know about the music next door is this situation.

It was playing again when I got my first email from Doris Held.

The music drew me in.

                                *

I have a favorite photograph of Doris Held, taken by my iPhone in September 2022 at our initial regathering of the group after Covid. We were reading the first half of The Tempest, my favorite of all the plays, in the rain, appropriately, given that the story starts with a shipwreck in a storm.

We sat outside in a member’s backyard, the late summer weather passing through, sprinkling us in our raincoats and hats. True to form, Doris had given me the role of the exiled wizard, Prospero, involving lots of lines, and I was pleased we were only reading the first half because I had bought a ticket to see Country Music great Tanya Tucker at the Fresh Grass Festival. I had one hour to get through the shipwreck in the play before she took the stage.

Making this feel even more fraught, Prospero was one of the two leads that I had played in college, long ago, and here I was trying to get through the role quickly in order to hear an aging country western star perform the live version of “Delta Dawn.”

Fodder for Shakespeare Judgment Day, for sure.

I took the photograph right before the rain came. Doris sits in front of a burst of green fronds and leaves, a spray of pale white flowers that Debra tells me are called, weirdly, black cohoch, looking like the New England seatback of a faerie throne. A magenta rain cap is pulled down over Doris’ snow-white hair, hiding her ears, so the dominant features of her face are a pair of prescription sunglasses and a soft, wide grin. She is dressed in a dark raincoat, and one hand lifts high a Pelican copy of The Tempest. The expression on her face might be called “conductor’s joy.”

We had lost no one in the plague. The Shakespeareans were intact. We turned to the text.

                                  *

In 2016, after her husband, MIT neurologist Richard Held, passed away, Doris moved to Northampton from her longtime home in Cambridge. With the encouragement and help of friends and the assistance of a son-in-law, Tom Martin, she launched a stripped-down version of the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association that was more in line with the aging hippy vibe of the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts.

No dues. No fancy dress. No snobs.

The readers. The plays. The snacks. Basta.

And it worked.

Tom, a businessman and former chef, was a theater kid in school. He told me Shakespeare was important to him before he met Doris, but reading with the group has surprised him with its force. “The close reading of the words is profound for me,” he told me. “You’re wading in the same river as his genius…There is very little like it that I have encountered in the world” (Martin and Marks 2025).

Tom’s wife, Julie, Doris’ daughter, never attends, and never has, whether in Cambridge or Northampton. Can’t be bothered.

“She doesn’t like Shakespeare,” explained Doris. “It’s not her thing.”

For me, it’s a helpful reminder that the vast majority of people in the world share that opinion. They do not give a damn about Shakespeare. We few, we hardy few, ply our plays against the tide.

The format is simple. The group meets roughly four times a year. We don’t learn much about the play or even talk about it. We get right down to the text.

“It’s like seeing an opera without movement,” Doris explained. “Have you ever seen an opera where people just stand on the stage?” She pointed to a performance she once saw of the Gluck opera Orpheus and Eurydice. “They just stood up there and sang, and I thought it was better. Without all the other stuff. Without the trappings.”

The Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association had trappings. It had a rival, for one, the Shakespeare Club of Boston, which she says was not as good.

When I paid my visit to her home, Doris lent me two thick files of papers related to the OCSA, as it is known.

The papers consisted mostly of invitations to readings of various plays over a span of decades from roughly 1960 to 2000. Certain invitations seemed representative of the cultural and communal values of the group in certain moments of its history.

For instance, I came across an invitation from the Shakespeare Club of Boston to members of the OCSA to join a reading of Julius Caesar on Monday evening, 15 March 1976, at 7:30 p.m., roughly two years after Nixon resigned from the White House in the wake of the Watergate scandal, another era when hints of treason and tyranny were in the air.

On that night, a paper program informed, Julius Caesar would be played by Mr. William Fowler and Marcus Brutus by a Mr. Miranda, my predecessor.

Doris’ files opened a door to a world in which the plays of Shakespeare were axiomatic. No one could doubt that he mattered. Not in Cambridge in 1976 (Held 2025).

“People dressed up!” Tom Martin told me. He had attended at least one gathering of the OCSA in the early days of his marriage. He recalled slicing smoked salmon and then being allowed to sit in and listen to a reading of The Merchant of Venice.

When Doris and her husband, Richard, joined, circa 1960, she told me, the 35 members of the OCSA read from dedicated copies of plays called the Red Rolfe series, which cut out the bawdy bits.

Invitations were formal. One attended regularly or didn’t get asked back. There were fines for late cancellation. Dues were relatively small. In 1979–80, for instance, “though the cost of living has risen precipitously, the dues for the O.C.S.A. remain the same as for the season of 1978–1979, to wit: $5.00 for each member or $10.00 for a couple.”

Doris was then treasurer. Eventually, she would become president. That “to wit” indicates a lineage within this group, a seniority, perhaps, and a future; she had truly earned that “to wit” by 1980.

Then there are the invitations, which display a mix of elegance and severity without much irony. They assert a set of priorities and assignments that amount to a worldview.

For the Seventh Meeting of the Ninetieth Season, the reading was held at the home of Rev. and Mrs. Dan Huntington Fenn, on Tuesday, 9 March, at an address in Old Cambridge. The right street number counted; for decades, it was an important requirement of membership. One had to live in the right zip code. For cognoscenti, that meant the area west of Harvard square before you reach the Old Pond Parkway, inclusive of Brattle Street and its many homes on the National Registry. There were meetings held, for instance, at the Longfellow House.

The emphasis on address may have been less an exclusionary tactic related to race and antisemitism than a reversion to class. When Doris joined, there were no restrictions against Jewish membership. As the daughter of Edward Bernays, often said to be “the father of public relations,” not to mention the great niece of Freud, she had all the credentials she needed to belong. It would be many years, though, she told me, before a South Boston accent would be heard in the salmon-scented chambers of the OCSA.

In 1971, members read The Merry Wives Of Windsor, which, the program tells us, was last read on “15 November 1966.”

It was going to be an evening of “cuts,” not the entire play. “ACT I—Scenes 2 and 4. ACT II—Scene 1, from line 168, Scene 2, from line 210,” and so on.

By contrast, the complete Henry V would be read at the “Eighth Meeting of the Ninety-Fourth Season”, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. George Faison, on Tuesday, 29 April 1975, co-hosted by Mr. Charles Fleischner. The last reading of that play had been on 9 December 1969, three days after the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway, incidentally, where Hells Angels murdered a member of the audience and ended the 1960s, according to the lore of the counterculture.

“PLEASE BE PROMPT”, each invitation insisted in caps. Adorning the top of each was a print of the headpiece that “appears above the Epistle Dedicatory of the First Folio, 1623,” and a legend that told the recipient that the OCSA was founded in 1880, beneath which ran a line from The Winter’s Tale: “I feel the play so lies that I must bear a part. Act IV. Sc. 4.”

The spirit of the invitations was reinforced by a brief unofficial history of the OCSA as it existed in the decades before Doris joined in 1960. In the introduction dedicated to the “Second Fifty Years” of the OCSA, I found a clue to the sense of the antiquity and continuity that stamped this group:

The euphoria arising out of the festive observance of the 50th Birthday in 1930 was shortly thereafter shattered by the deaths of three of the Club’s stalwarts, close upon one another in a single year’s time—William Coolidge Lane, the President, George H. Browne, the first Vice President, and Walter Deane, who had been both a founding member and the Club’s very long-time Secretary. Uncertain moments ensued as the Club foundered for a brief period. But there existed—most particularly—the inspiring and forceful example of Mr. Deane’s long and all-encompassing Secretaryship, covering, as it did, 42 of the first 50 years of the Club’s existence. Happily, just as the Club had been up to then the virtual shadow of one man, it was now destined to become in turn the shadow of succeeding stalwarts during the fifty years from 1930 to 1980.

By the end of the 20th Century, that stalwart was Doris Held, who served as president for several years before her husband passed away, before she then brought all of this glorious lineage to us, a modest gathering of unassuming strangers in the humble hippy hollow of the Connecticut river valley of western Massachusetts.

                               *

Why me and Shakespeare, though? That is the question.

What is he to me? Personally? Finally? Existentially? What keeps me returning, if only fitfully, to Doris and the group?

The question keeps rolling back to me like a ball down a hill because I don’t have a good answer.

I did once, though. There was one year, my sophomore year at Davidson College in North Carolina, when I would have said: “Everything.”

That was the year my life as an adult truly began, the beginning of the life I live now, and Shakespeare framed it.

Life is too complicated to boil things down to direct causality, but there is a version of my story in which I would never have moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, with my family in 2005, because I somehow doubt I would ever have met my wife Debra as a fellow writer at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so we could then move to New York and have our son, Joe, if I had not first immersed myself in Much Ado About Nothing in an English class in 1982.

                                 *

Lots of people have their Shakespeare moment.

My favorite personal anecdote of all time regarding Shakespeare is my wife Debra’s story of a college tour of Harvard, when she had an all-important interview with an admissions counselor.

Debra was a literary girl who had already impressed a high school English teacher with her excellent writing, but she was also a punk-loving stoner and B-minus student. She was nervous. Adding to the tension, seated like a revenant in the Harvard admissions office waiting room with her, was a star student she knew, the valedictorian of her Maryland high school, someone who would certainly knock the interview out of the park.

Right off the bat, the admissions counselor asked Debra a question she hadn’t anticipated—Who is your favorite author? She had no good answer, so she went nuclear.

“Shakespeare!”

When the unexpected follow-up question came, Debra was truly stuck. “What character in Shakespeare do you most identify with?”

Who knows? Maybe this Harvard admissions counselor was a long-time member of the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association and wanted to stick it to a young woman who seemed unprepared to wear the big boots of the Bard. My future beloved was caught like a deer in the headlights, and her answer surprised even herself:

“Ophelia.”

Right away, as soon as the name came out of her mouth, she knew she had triggered alarm. She rushed to assure the counselor that she was not suicidal and hastened to add that she identified with Ophelia because she was really confused and felt really strongly about things.

She did not get into Harvard.

This story made me fall in love with her as soon as I heard it.

                                *

On my way to that Shakespeare class at Davidson, there were other teachers, other performances, and other events that year, playing their part, but that class stands out as the fulcrum on which the rest turned.

The class would be split into two halves and run over fifteen weeks of the spring semester. The first half focused on exegesis of the text, understanding its literary roots, and looking at the history of its performances since the era of Shakespeare. For the second half of the semester, class members would each take an acting role and a role in production, culminating in a public staging of Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare 1600), which was the work chosen to conduct this experiment (Shakespeare 1998).

By the time I was cast as Benedick, I had been giving it a go on the stage for two years. My senior year in high school, after hearing from a coach that my years as a football player were over, whether I liked it or not, I tried out for a production of Pygmalion, directed by the most decisive teacher of my life, a woman named Linda Raya, who introduced me to my best friend for life, Doug Wright.

Doug played Professor Henry Higgins, and I played Alfred P. Doolittle, the father of Higgins’ lab rabbit, Eliza Doolittle.

More than almost anyone else in that era, Doug offered me an alternative vision of what the future might hold. He was already a disciplined actor at that point, as a senior in high school, but he would go on to be one of the great playwrights of his era, a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning author of Quills and I Am My Own Wife, among many others, who would give me the opportunity to participate at times in his process. He even made me one of the characters in Wife: an American journalist and childhood friend, John Marks by name, who leads him to an East German transvestite who survived Nazi and Communist governments. My theatrical phantom double walks the boards to this day in theaters all over the world (Wright 2003).

Doug and I graduated the same year from our Dallas high school; he went to Yale when I went to Davidson. When I visited him in New York, he took me to see a production of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love that set a permanent stamp on my own writer’s brain.

By the start of that class in the spring of 1982, I had already acted in several productions of the Davidson College Theater Department. I had briefly considered becoming a theater major. But my parents hated the idea, and I didn’t need to be a major to keep performing.

Benedick is the male lead of the comedy Much Ado About Nothing, and this is how Shakespeare became a living spirit for me: not through the language on the page, but through the experience of surviving the speaking of that language on the stage, more specifically through the surviving of that language on a stage in front of an audience that contained the one person I truly wanted to impress, a ginger-haired British exchange student named Harriet.

To be clear, she didn’t play the role of the female lead of Beatrice in my production of Much Ado. She was the real Beatrice in my life at the time, an actual romantic sparring partner who happened to be English and a harsh judge of performance.

If I say Shakespeare is about survival to me, in the end, and for all time, it’s due to Harriet.

Harriet leads to Doris, I am quite sure, but it is a torturous path.

                                *

The first time I ever had lunch with Harriet, she told me four things about herself in one sentence, and by the time the sentence ended, I was in. “I’m a hedonist, an atheist, a Marxist, and a feminist,” she said, by way of a warning.

I met her at the start of the spring semester when I would be performing Much Ado for an audience. When I signed up for that class the previous semester, I had no idea I might be trying to woo a young English woman by declaiming Shakespeare, but that project quickly began to develop a momentum of its own. She and three other British students, another young woman and two guys, had come to Davidson on a half-year fellowship created by Dean Rusk, former Secretary of State to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, to foster transatlantic understanding.

Harriet and Caroline were the women, James and Tom were the men. They took classes with a light touch. Grades were the least of their concerns. Their mandate and mission was to experience America in full, and so it went. They burst onto our sleepy North Carolina campus and into my life like roving players occupying a medieval village. When they cleared out, so did I.

It began with a show, like most good stuff in that era for me. All of us tried out for the Davidson Theater Department’s production of Pawel Kohout’s absurdist work Poor Murderer, which told the story of a mock trial in an asylum, orchestrated by a psychiatrist and meant to determine whether one of the inmates has purposefully murdered a fellow inmate or accidentally killed him in the delirium of his performance as Hamlet (Kohout 1976).

Yes, Hamlet.

This is what I’m getting at, really. For one brief moment, Shakespeare was everything and everywhere all at once, directing my action as if I had been caught in one of his comedies, as, in fact, I had. This was not a play, though it was surrounded by plays. This was my life, scripted by the Bard.

He had even provided in my actual presence native players to authenticate the scene, a romantic heroine with the very accent that was required to ground the play of emotions in a workable reality. Yes, it could be seen as a production hindrance that the male lead was a pale Texan who had never spoken a line of Elizabethan verse in front of an audience before, but in the end, as any veteran director might tell you, it was an obstacle that made the comedy that was for a few brief weeks my life.

Harriet and Tom did not get parts in Poor Murderer, but Caroline and James did. That was good news. Hat, as Harriet was known, spent all her time with Cas, as Caroline was known, which meant she would turn up at rehearsals, and James had known both of them in school back in England, so could always provide witty context and strategic counsel, which mostly amounted to, “Be careful with that one, John. Harriet’s notorious.”

My rehearsals for Much Ado tracked exactly with the work on Poor Murderer, which meant I was practicing to play Benedick and a version of Polonius at the same time; my friend Roy got the part of the inmate playing Hamlet, and I was the analyst Polonius who would be his murder victim. I felt like one of those Globe players who might be a King one night and a Queen the next.

It was one of those glorious southern springs with the smell of magnolia blossoms in the air, and I was becoming ever more deeply infatuated with Hat. Catching sight of her as she and Cas flounced across the green in their light summer frocks between school buildings had a tinge of erotic nostalgia, as if I had known these visions once before, long ago, in another life, and the next round of encounter would be even more deliciously annihilating than the last.

My mind was expanding. I had started to question my religious faith and the values of my upbringing, but these were dour and often tedious exercises. The change promised by these British lasses transformed the entire notion of what the world could mean. Existence could mean joy, delight, laughter, abundance of beauty and wit and intelligence, and long breakfasts with great coffee and superb breads and cheeses—and sex. James and Tom and Cas belonged to Hat’s world, but Hat heightened it all. She was the ineffable signal that the road to come would be better than the road behind, and so it turned out to be, if without her.

I invited her to see the play, unwisely. I felt that playing Benedick to her real-life Beatrice down in the audience, trading quips about our differences, the Texas rube vs. the English radical, would give my performance an urgent realism and metamorphose the two of us into an actual couple there and then while I was onstage, a miracle, the transubstantiation of flirtation. She would be blown away by what I was doing to the audience—and to her.

The day of the great seduction arrived. We performed Much Ado in a chapel on campus. The pews filled up. The students handling the ticket sales informed us we were sold out. I felt the buzz in the air. I had been having dreams about walking onstage and forgetting my lines, but the fears faded, changed into adrenaline. I wasn’t just acting this time. I had spent months preparing to actually do Shakespeare, the sine qua non of the acting pursuit, in one of the greatest roles ever written for an actor.

Annihilation happened in a single moment.

I had come to Benedick’s soliloquy about bachelorhood, when he is about to eavesdrop on Leonato, Claudio, and Don Pedro to hear them say Beatrice is in love with him. He is going to be tricked, but he’ll think he is gaining deep intelligence and will start to rethink his position on love. His soliloquy suggests his readiness to be fooled: “I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster.” Stage directions call for him to conceal himself in order to eavesdrop, and I had been playing around with a plant in a pot. During dress rehearsals, I got laughs with this business.

I had no reason to doubt myself. Up to this moment, in this first performance, I could feel the pleasure from the audience.

People were with me. They sparkled with that particular light that comes from an enthralled audience when things are working. You sail on it. You fly with it. The closest thing I have ever felt to that experience is skiing. You lose yourself on a slope like that; it’s all sunshine and blazing landscape and a sense of sublime freedom, carried on the legs of physics. In Shakespearean performance, you are carried by the most beautiful language ever written.

I soared. I was high. Then—Harriet.

She had planted herself right in the middle of pews, equidistant from the stage and the back of the chapel, halfway between the tall, arched windows, dead center. Around her waved the anemone clusters of the other people, who seemed to love me. They smiled with bright eyes. They had a warm, reddish tint. They wanted me.

She, though, the only one I cared about, became winter at sea. Ocean grayness. I caught her look right at the end of a roll of laughter, as I was about to utter the last stretch of the soliloquy, and she dropped me as if she’d fired a bullet. Her chin lay as plain as a soft-boiled egg in one hand. She didn’t frown, exactly. There wasn’t that kind of effort. Her mouth settled on a show of extreme indifference, as if she were waiting for a bus and suddenly found herself confronted by a street clown who hadn’t bathed; she felt just enough compassion to avoid my eyes. She looked away.

This was no seduction. This was a rout. If I keep with the English theme, this was the evacuation of Dunkirk, and I had only one boat.

Shakespeare.

To this day, I don’t know for sure how I got out of that soliloquy without losing every last word, but I think it must have been the language alone.

Shakespeare as survival.

Hat and I are still friends, and I have told her this story. She denies remembering any of it, though she may have admitted at one point that she found it insufferable to hear the lines of her sacred national poet delivered with a Texas-infected accent, like pouring Texas Pete on a steak and kidney pie. I have thought about that moment over the years, my original Shakespearean sin. I have imagined her urge to break out into laughter, and her fighting that urge in the pew.

The road that leads from Harriet to Doris is clear to me. Anyone who has ever been saved by Shakespeare forever after takes him seriously. I do not take his words in vain. The Englishwoman taught me that.

Doris is at the other end of that road. Doris doesn’t judge. Doris believes I can deliver the lines. Doris cast me to read for her as Brutus, after all. If it hadn’t been for Harriet, I wouldn’t even try.

“Brutus is so complicated,” Doris told me when we spoke at her house so many decades after my rite of passage on the stage, on that icy early spring morning two weeks before the Ides of March 2025.

                                *

Doris Held’s Shakespeareans reconvened for the second third of Julius Caesar on Sunday, March 16.

As ever, we jumped right into it.

I had over-estimated my number of lines. The big speeches in this section belong to Mark Antony, and Doris had given that role to someone else, a guy I knew, Scott, who did a fantastic job.

In this part of the play, Brutus’s lines tend toward quiet manipulations behind the scenes, telling Mark Antony, for instance, to say nice things about the conspirators when he gives his funeral oration, which Mark Antony uses to incite the mob to turn on the conspirators in the most famous speech in the play.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!

Brutus does have a critical speech, though, one that he gives before Antony steps up to the pulpit. Brutus thinks it’s a clever move, clearly. He thinks he will overshadow the next speaker. He has his plot sewn up. In his oration, the murder is transformed into a heroic act of self-sacrificing patriotism.

As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; as he was ambitious, I slew him.

It’s great stuff, but it will not work out for Brutus.

Afterwards, we lingered over cookies, cake, and grapes. Another member of the group, an English teacher who has taught a lot of the plays over the years, told me that a local Shakespeare company that had been doing performances every summer for years in Northampton had decided to close up shop. There wasn’t enough interest and definitely no money.

Beyond the news lay the tsunami of artificial intelligence, which made writing anything look like a task for machines going forward, Shakespeare reproduced with a prompt. There were the same old representational issues that had been around for fifty years. Dead white males had had enough of a spotlight, none more than he.

An academic in the group said that when she taught Shakespeare to her classes at Smith College, she bypassed any attempt to plead on his behalf. Like Doris, she simply asked her kids to open the play and start to read.

The next meeting is set for late spring or summer, the final third of Julius Caesar.

Will I attend?

                              *

The following week, I hit the road again for work, first a week in Los Angeles, interviewing producers of many of the earth-shattering entertainments of the last half century in Hollywood, then finally ending up in a small town an hour north of Tucson, Arizona.

At the end of a weary day of travel, finding myself in a chain hotel next to an outlet mall in the Sonora desert, a hundred miles from the border with Mexico, nothing for dinner but a bottle of water and peanut butter and crackers, I aimed the remote at the room’s TV screen and looked for something to watch.

What I found was the Oscar-nominated 2024 movie Sing Sing, the true story of the Rehabilitation through the Arts program developed by incarcerated people at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York (Kwedar 2023). In the plot of the movie, a scattering of players discover their meaning, purpose, and humanity through the experience of creating theater together.

By coincidence, I landed on the moment in the movie when one character, Divine G, played by the great Colman Domingo, coaches another character, Divine Eye, played by the real Divine Eye from the program, on how to deliver an Elizabethan soliloquy.

That soliloquy.

That same speech from Hamlet that appeared in My Darling Clementine almost eighty years earlier.

To be or not to be…

And there I was less than a hundred miles from Tombstone, the setting of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, the movie that first gave me my very own authentic experience of understanding Shakespeare.

The music next door, once again, except this time playing on the TV set in my hotel room.

Tears came to my eyes, truly. I won’t say that the Bard was sending a signal through all the vast, black, empty night of the American Southwest into that nondescript space, in an hour uncertain for my country and all the people in it, but I felt what I would call an emanation from the outer edge of perception.

I beheld the beauty of the debt, and how it connected me to those real incarcerated souls at Sing Sing, and the real actors playing them in the movie; to the movie stars in that much older film about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday; and from these screen encounters to all those who have ever spoken or played or loved that language, including Doris and the circle seated around her in Massachusetts, and through her, to the strangers I will never know in the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association, circles within circles within a ring so large that it might be called the spirit world.

What happens to art when it is absorbed by countless, nameless humans over centuries, again and again? What does it do to us? What does Shakespeare become in the course of this cosmic transmission? Is this what it means to commune with the dead? Or is it how the dead remain alive?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to those huge speculative queries. No one does. The responses can’t be measured.

But they do take me back to the much less grand question at the start of this essay.

What he means to me. Here’s the beginning of my answer

Long ago, I dedicated myself to storytelling as a way of life, whether in novels or journalism or documentaries. Eventually, by fixing my entire life to such a pursuit, which never ends, I discovered that the greatest stories connected me to things I can’t otherwise name.

I’m not just telling stories. I am in them. I am them. Along that road, which often feels darker than the Southwestern night, I keep rounding the corner to Shakespeare, the fire that someone built for me ages back in all that cold and all that dark, flickering up to warm my bones when I least expect it.