Welcome to Star of England: A Blog on Shakespeare. My name is George Wall, and I am a high school teacher and musician. My purpose here is to share my experiences in reading, teaching, and learning from the works of Shakespeare over the course of my career. My focus will be on the works themselves, and how to better appreciate and enjoy them. I hope you find it useful.

Today, I'd like to discuss how important it is to make up one's own mind in regard to Shakespeare. In language, words and phrases over time can have their meanings altered well away from what they originally meant. We call these types of phrases idioms, and once a group of words has become one, there's no going back - they've acquired a new, permanent meaning (e.g. a nest egg). The words have become fossilized, so to speak. A similar thing happens with opinions on Shakespeare. We often take the opinions and/or interpretations of others as truths, without investigating for ourselves. Thus, for example, we are told that some of the plays are weak (in comparison with the others, anyway) or that a line or a speech is not important to a play. But neither of these statements is true. Every Shakespeare play deserves to be read, seen and discussed. And every line is necessary in understanding each whole.

I had a teacher once who put it this way: In a work, it is not the events themselves that are of primary importance, but rather it's the way that one thing leads to the next. Tomorrow and Wednesday, I'll be writing about two sections that were cut from Kenneth Branagh's otherwise brilliant film version of Henry V. (By the way, the title of this blog comes from the play's epilogue.)