What's the rush?

There is a great article in the Wall Street Journal this week entitled “Reading Shakespeare in a Sea of Troubles,” by Paula Marantz Cohen. She describes how she came to create her own Shakespeare reading group during covid and carried it on. Her group runs much like ours:

“We stop after each scene—and sometimes after a few lines—to parse, comment, and converse. Our progress through a play is, as a result, extremely slow. But then, what’s the rush?” (emphasis added)

What’s the rush, indeed? We do occasionally have visitors to one or the other of my groups who get frustrated with our slow pace and move on to other groups, but we ourselves have joyfully settled into, “What’s the rush?” :-)

I wish I were as eloquent as Cohen and could express my thoughts about reading Shakespeare together as she does: “Because Shakespeare’s plays are . . . supportive of so many different interpretations, they are a means by which we can come to understand one another, no matter how disparate our views. This is the best therapy I can think of for this difficult time.”

So true.