The inscrutability of Shakespeare’s language is often cited as the primary reason that Americans have little interest in revisiting his plays again and again and again and and and so on and so forth. 

And and and yet, this very same inscrutability is what keeps me coming back for more. Given the active ACTIVE ACTIVE!!!!! listening required to comprehend his words words words, I never understand 100% of the dialogue in any production, no matter the clarity of the performances.

Rather, every revival becomes a study in which lines resonate on that given night, and then I cobble together anew my conception of the play, filtered through the lens of the particularities of the revival. It’s an impressionistic puzzle that can be pieced together into an infinite variety of pictures.

No matter the playwright, including plain-spoken writers, all revivals — even traditional takes — reinterpret the original text, bringing certain strands to the fore. Yet the ambiguity and poetic expression of  Shakespearean verse offers a wider range of possible takeaways.

And then when you throw in abstracted stagings like whatever the fuck is going on in Yaël Farber’s The Winter’s Tale at the RSC — a script that lends itself to abstraction…and then some (GET SOME!) — and the potential meaning/confusion exponentiates.