I have to admit that when I saw the subject of this month’s talk, I gave a silent groan. I will confess that I have never read a book by William Shakespeare nor have I ever seen one of his plays. Don’t get me wrong, I do love to read and enjoy books by authors such as Tom Clancy, David Silva or Lee Child. That’s a completely different genre.

I had thought that my personal view would be prevalent amongst our members. I couldn’t have been more wrong! I had thought that 85 chairs would be more than sufficient to accommodate what I expected would be a minority interest topic. Those 85 chairs soon filled up and we had to scramble to put out many more chairs to accommodate the significant volume of members that were clearly interested in this subject. We actually had over one hundred members joining us for this topic.

The title, My Life With Will, gave no hint of the interesting presentation that we were about to hear from our guest speaker, Mike Holmes. Mike
and his wife Ruth had, he explained, not only read all of Shakespeare’s books but had seen all of his plays. Not just once but they had seen the
various plays around 450 times! He clearly knew his subject and went on to describe the plays passionately, talking about the different theatres and venues that they had attended to see these plays and the wildly differing scenarios that the plays had been set in. He explained how each director put their individual stamp and interpretation on Shakespeare’s plays and how each one had it’s own unique slant on what was essentially the same story.

Far from being bored, I found his presentation very interesting and I learnt that the old adage is correct in that ‘You shouldn't judge a book by its cover’. Thanks to Bernice for organising this talk in her final act as our Speaker Finder.

Mel Gordon