What did Shakespeare do for me?

Shakespeare has had a large impact on my life from when i began to read it in year eight through to uni and beyond. When i began to study A Midsummer Night's Dream in year eight i was bored beyond belief and lacked enthusiasm through lessons, predominantly because of the teacher and how she talked the whole play at us with little around it. Safe to say this left me a little less than enamoured with the Bard and his works.

In year nine they probably did something else, but seeing as i missed all but three weeks during the back end of year nine this can be discounted without any prejudice to the bard.

Year ten and eleven melted into one for me, as it was predominantly learning for GCSE exams. For the coursework we studied Romeo and Juliet, as most pupils up and down the country do. For me Romeo and Juliet was a gateway through to another pupil, a friend of mine who i was attracted to, and who many people knew that i was attracted to. As an aside at this point i believe it is important to inform you that i was overweight, struggling with health and sporadically in school. I'd been attracted to this girl for a while, but never been able to vocalise it through being shy around her, and at that moment i was quite properly stuck in the 'friendzone'. However, in my English class all of that was able to change. My English teacher at this point was of a higher caliber, and the person who motivated me to further my career with English. Her idea was to distribute roles to the class, and the roles of Romeo and Juliet were changed every lesson. When it came to my turn to be Romeo and the teacher turned around to the class and said 'Who's going to be Juliet?' and several of my friends shouted out this girl's name, i blushed at the back of the classroom and smiled a bit, but felt utterly embarrassed. The teacher laughed and agreed, so for a short while i was her Romeo and she was my Juliet, which made the world of difference to me and opened me up to be the romantic person i have become today. Safe to say that this girl wasn't romantically interested in me, but she remained a good friend who didn't know what i felt during our GCSE classes until i left halfway through year 11 for health reasons. Shakespeare had opened up a vault of emotions that i had no other way of accessing unless it was through literature, my teacher and Shakespeare's play.

After this my thinking around Shakespeare delved into the analytical and theoretical through college and university, where i found the true humour and tragedy in the plays, but the main thing that Shakespeare did for me was to open me up to another way of thinking and feeling, and giving me a chance to experience how that other person felt for me as Romeo. Without the Bard, I can honestly say that i may have been a lesser person today.