Transitions

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity. I’m George Bartley. 

For the next section of this podcast, I’m beginning a new series I’m calling Conversations with Shakespeare.  And tonight's episode is called get here anyone who ever try to do the right thing    Transition to Shakespeare.

I want to start with something simple—something honest.

I’m doing this now because I’m seventy-five years old, and I have finally stopped worrying about whether I’m doing Shakespeare the “right” way.

When you’re younger, you spend a surprising amount of energy trying to prove you belong in the room. You want to sound smart enough. You imagine that it is important to stay ahead of critics you will never even meet. You worry about being corrected. You worry about being dismissed.

At this age, I’m less interested in proving anything.

I’m more interested in telling the truth—about what Shakespeare has meant in my life, and why I think he can mean something in yours, even if you’ve never read a play, even if high school made you hate the whole idea, even if the word “Shakespeare” makes you feel like someone just assigned you a term paper and forgot to ask if you’re alive.

Because I’m going to argue something gently but firmly in this series:

Shakespeare does not belong only to scholars.
He does not belong only to actors.
He does not belong only to English teachers.

He belongs to anyone who has ever lived long enough to look back on a moment and think, If I could do that again, I might choose differently.

He belongs to anyone who has ever watched a family argument turn into something much bigger than it started as.
Anyone who has ever wanted something so badly they could taste it—only to realize the wanting itself was dangerous.
Anyone who has ever loved someone and thought, How did I get here?
Anyone who has ever tried to do the right thing—and somehow made it worse.

Transcript

(Optional: gentle theme music under—warm, reflective. Fade low.)

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity. I’m George Bartley. 

For the next section of this podcast, I’m beginning a new series I’m calling Conversations with Shakespeare.  And tonight's episode is called get here anyone who ever try to do the right thing    Transition to Shakespeare.

I want to start with something simple—something honest.

I’m doing this now because I’m seventy-five years old, and I have finally stopped worrying about whether I’m doing Shakespeare the “right” way.

When you’re younger, you spend a surprising amount of energy trying to prove you belong in the room. You want to sound smart enough. You imagine that it is important to stay ahead of critics you will never even meet. You worry about being corrected. You worry about being dismissed.

At this age, I’m less interested in proving anything.

I’m more interested in telling the truth—about what Shakespeare has meant in my life, and why I think he can mean something in yours, even if you’ve never read a play, even if high school made you hate the whole idea, even if the word “Shakespeare” makes you feel like someone just assigned you a term paper and forgot to ask if you’re alive.

Because I’m going to argue something gently but firmly in this series:

Shakespeare does not belong only to scholars.
He does not belong only to actors.
He does not belong only to English teachers.

He belongs to anyone who has ever lived long enough to look back on a moment and think, If I could do that again, I might choose differently.

He belongs to anyone who has ever watched a family argument turn into something much bigger than it started as.
Anyone who has ever wanted something so badly they could taste it—only to realize the wanting itself was dangerous.
Anyone who has ever loved someone and thought, How did I get here?
Anyone who has ever tried to do the right thing—and somehow made it worse.

That’s Shakespeare.
But let me start closer to my own beginning with him.

Years ago, after I graduated from college, I wanted to start a podcast. I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew I wanted a long-term creative project—something that would keep my mind alive, keep my imagination working, and give me a reason to keep making something new.

And at that moment in my life, the one subject I felt I truly knew something about… was Shakespeare.

That sounds obvious now, but it didn’t feel obvious then, because Shakespeare is not a small topic. He’s not a weekend project. He’s not “two episodes and move on.” Shakespeare is an ocean.

And I remember standing at the shoreline of it thinking: Where do you even start?

Do you start with the plays? Which play?
Do you start with biography? But the biography has gaps.
Do you start with famous quotes? But then you’re doing Shakespeare like a calendar.
Do you start with history? But then you’re doing a history podcast, and Shakespeare becomes homework.

I didn’t want Shakespeare to feel like homework. Not for you, and not for me.

Because Shakespeare has been absorbed into our culture in a strange way: people refer to him with such reverence that it can actually make him less approachable. He becomes a monument. He becomes an altar. He becomes something you’re supposed to respect more than you’re allowed to enjoy.

But Shakespeare was written for enjoyment. Not shallow enjoyment—living enjoyment. The kind that contains laughter and fear and heartbreak in the same room.

So back then, I hesitated.

And instead I began podcasting with another figure—someone often called America’s Shakespeare: Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was a world I could hold in my hands: dark, intense, obsessive, beautifully strange. And I built a long stretch of podcast life around creativity and storytelling and voice.

But Shakespeare never really left my mind.

Even when I wasn’t talking about him publicly, he was there—like a melody you can’t quite stop hearing. A line would float up at an unexpected moment. A scene would suddenly feel relevant to something happening in the world. A character’s choice would echo a choice I’d seen someone make in real life.

And the older I get, the more I realize something:

We don’t always choose our long loves.
Our long loves choose us.

Shakespeare has been one of mine.

Now, here’s the part that makes people laugh—because it sounds ridiculous until you’ve lived it.

The thing that finally gave me the courage to approach Shakespeare this way… was talking to toys.

You see, Last month I did a series called Conversations with Toys, where I interview toys in a museum. And I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed doing a podcast as much as I enjoyed doing that series. It was playful. It was surprising. It was freeing.

But it also taught me something serious.

It reminded me that imagination is not a gimmick. It’s a method.

It reminded me that if you want people to care, you don’t just present information—you create an experience. You create an invitation. You build a doorway that doesn’t require a password.

After a month, I realized I had taken that concept about as far as it could go—at least for now. But instead of feeling disappointed, I felt prepared.

Because after spending a month talking to toys, Shakespeare stopped feeling like a monument.

He started feeling like a conversation I had been avoiding.

So yes, I’m moving from toys to Shakespeare. But I’m not leaving playfulness behind. I’m bringing it with me.

Now I want to tell you why you should trust me with Shakespeare—because I didn’t just read him.

I’ve lived him.

About twenty years ago, while I was at Mary Baldwin in Staunton, Virginia—Mary Baldwin College at the time—I interpreted Shakespeare in American Sign Language for multiple seasons at the Blackfriars Playhouse.

And when I say Shakespeare, I mean a full range of Shakespeare: tragedies, comedies, romances—everything from Hamlet to The Winter’s Tale. And I interpreted productions that weren’t Shakespeare at all, like A Christmas Carol.

I eventually obtained a Masters degree in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature and performance - what a mouthful - also at Mary Baldwin University.

I went on to interpret Shakespeare productions for companies outside of Staunton as well—West Virginia University, the Indianapolis Shakespeare Company, and more. In some cases, year after year.

And I’m going to say something carefully here, because I’m not trying to boast. I’m trying to place myself honestly in the story:

Looking back, I suspect I may have interpreted more Shakespeare from spoken English into American Sign Language than almost anyone.

Whether that’s literally true or not, I do know what my years have contained: rehearsal rooms, cues, quick entrances, sudden laughter, tragic silences, and those moments when you can feel an audience shift because a line hit them in a place they didn’t expect.

Interpreting Shakespeare teaches you humility. Because you can’t hide behind analysis. You can’t pause the play and say, “Excuse me, can you repeat that soliloquy?”

The play moves forward like a river.

So you prepare. You learn the shape of it. You learn the emotional weather. You learn the rhythm. And then you step into a live event where anything can happen. And sometimes… you become part of that live event in ways that you didn't intend when you first read the play.

In fact, I once became known as the “vampire interpreter.”

That happened during a production of Richard III at the Blackfriars.

Near the end of the play, the cast and I worked out a ridiculous running gag. An actor pretended to run a sword into me—purely as a joke—and I “died” onstage with everybody else.

Then I popped back to life to sign a few lines… and died again.

And then, when Richard cried, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” I rose from the dead one more time, signed it, and collapsed again.

The cast decided that was my official supernatural identity: I was the interpreter who refused to stay dead.

It was funny. But it also revealed something important: the work was collaborative. The company trusted me. The audience could accept an interpreter as part of the ecosystem of the play—part of the living event—rather than some awkward appendix off to the side.

And it also revealed something else:

Shakespeare refuses to stay dead.

People keep declaring him irrelevant, too hard, too old, too distant, too “not for me.” And then he sits up in the coffin and says, “Not so fast.”

Because the machinery inside human beings hasn’t changed as fast as our clothing or our technology.

Pride still ruins people.
Jealousy still ruins people.
Ambition still intoxicates.
Love still redeems and destroys.
Regret still echoes.

And sometimes someone does the right thing for the wrong reason—which is one of Shakespeare’s favorite truths about us.

Now I want to tell you a story that matters to me—because it answers a kind of cruelty I’ve heard more than once.

I have had callous hearing individuals tell me I was wasting my time interpreting Shakespeare for Deaf people—because Deaf people, they said, are not capable of understanding Shakespeare.

Not capable.

That statement doesn’t deserve an argument. It deserves a fact.

And the fact is: I’ve watched Deaf audiences understand Shakespeare in the most direct way possible—through attention, recognition, timing, laughter, stillness, emotion. I’ve watched it with my own eyes.

And one night in particular stays with me.

I was interpreting Romeo and Juliet.

And in the audience that night was a Deaf woman from England who had played the role of Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet at Cambridge University in England.

Let that land: she didn’t just know the story. She had inhabited the character. She had lived those lines in performance.

During the show, as the hearing Juliet spoke on stage, this Deaf woman in the audience often mouthed the lines along with her—because she knew them. She knew the language. She knew the rhythm. She knew what was coming before it arrived.

I remember watching her—carefully, respectfully—feeling a kind of quiet gratitude, because it was proof without speech. A gentle, unmistakable rebuke to anyone who ever tried to turn Shakespeare into a gate and keep people out.

That night, I didn’t need to argue.
The truth was sitting in the audience.
And it reminded me why interpreting matters.
Interpretation is not charity. It’s not a “nice extra.” It’s not a favor.

It is a human right and a a way of accessing an art form that belongs to everyone.

It is the simple, radical idea that a great play is meant to be shared.

And now I want to add one more layer—because this series is not only about what Shakespeare is.

It’s also about how Shakespeare changes as we change.

I interpreted King Lear several times at the Playhouse.

And I can tell you: King Lear does not sound the same to me at seventy-five as it did when I was twenty-five.

When I was younger, I heard that play with the ears of speed. I cared about structure, about rhetoric, about who was winning the argument in a scene. I heard Lear’s terrible choices and I wanted to judge him—quickly, confidently, as if judgment were the same thing as understanding.
But at seventy-five, I keep hearing the moments where people are simply… exposed.

There’s a line in King Lear where Lear says:

“I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”

When I was twenty-five, I heard that as self-pity. I heard it as pride dressed up as suffering. I thought, Yes, Lear is dramatic. Yes, he’s making excuses.
But now I hear it differently.

Now I hear a human being trying to survive his own story.
Now I hear a man who can’t bear the full weight of what he’s done and what he’s lost, so he reaches for the only sentence that lets him keep standing. It may not be fair. It may not be accurate. It may be a desperate attempt to protect his remaining dignity.

But it’s emotionally recognizable.

At twenty-five, I judged him.

At seventy-five, I understand him.
And that doesn’t mean I excuse him. It means I see how grief and pride can get tangled together—how people can be both responsible and wounded, both guilty and sincere, sometimes in the same breath.

That’s one of Shakespeare’s great gifts: he doesn’t flatten people into good and bad.

He lets them be complicated.

The way real people are.

And that brings me to something I want to say plainly, because it’s part of why I’m approaching this series the way I am.

Interpreting Shakespeare didn’t just give me experience with the plays.

It taught me a few lessons about language and human beings that I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

First: timing is meaning.

When you’re interpreting live theatre, you learn quickly that meaning isn’t only the dictionary definition of a word. Meaning is also when it lands.

A joke delivered a second too late stops being a joke and becomes a puzzle. A threat delivered too early sounds like melodrama. A confession delivered without the right beat of silence can lose its vulnerability.

In Shakespeare, timing is not decoration. It’s the bloodstream of the scene.

And that’s why the old idea that Shakespeare is “too hard” sometimes misses the point. Often, what people are struggling with isn’t intellect—it’s pacing. They’re trying to read a play like a textbook, when it was written like breath.

Interpreting forced me to honor the breath.

To respect the beat.

To let a line land.

Second: clarity is not simplification.

There’s a fear some people have—especially people who love Shakespeare—that if you make it understandable, you’ll flatten it.

But clarity doesn’t mean you drain the mystery out of something. It means you remove unnecessary fog so the real complexity can be seen.

In my interpreting work, I had to constantly aim for that balance: to be clear without being cheap, to be accessible without being shallow, to make the meaning visible without turning Shakespeare into a set of bumper stickers.

And the longer I did it, the more I realized: Shakespeare is already clearer than people think.

He writes human beings under pressure. People who are trying to persuade, seduce, manipulate, survive, confess, threaten, distract, charm, and justify themselves.

If you understand what the character wants, you can understand the scene.

And if you can understand the scene, Shakespeare stops being a mountain and starts being a room you can walk into.

Third: the audience teaches you what lands.

This might be the biggest lesson of all.

A lot of people talk about Shakespeare as if the meaning lives entirely in the text, like a sacred object. But theatre reminds you: meaning is co-created by the audience.

I have seen the same line land differently in different rooms.

I’ve seen a line that usually gets a laugh fall into silence because the audience suddenly heard the pain under it.

I’ve seen a line that usually plays as cruelty land as fear.

I’ve seen audiences lean forward at moments some people treat as “minor,” because they recognized themselves in a character’s small, ordinary weakness.

And when you interpret, you don’t just watch that. You feel it. Because you are translating into a language that lives in the body, and the audience’s response becomes part of your own timing and intensity.

So here’s what I learned from that: Shakespeare isn’t only “great writing.”

He’s great writing that survives contact with real people.

And that’s why I’m comfortable approaching this series as conversation rather than lecture.

Because what the theatre taught me—again and again—is that Shakespeare is most alive when he is shared. When the words are in the air. When people are responding. When the plays feel less like relics and more like living events.

And that leads directly into what I’m going to do next.

And that’s why I can say this with confidence—this is the heart of the whole series:

You already know these people.
You’ve met them at work.
You’ve met them in your family.
You’ve met them in yourself.

You’ve met Hamlet—the person who thinks so much he can’t move.
You’ve met Macbeth—the person who wants one thing so badly he sacrifices the rest of himself for it.
You’ve met Iago—the person who poisons a room and then calls it honesty.
You’ve met Lear—the person who mistakes flattery for love… and has to pay to learn the difference.
You’ve met Viola—the person who has to disguise herself to survive.

And you’ve met them not in books, but in life.

Which means Shakespeare is not “other.”

He’s familiar.

And once you realize that, Shakespeare stops being an exam.

He becomes a conversation with human nature.

And if any of those the previous names are unfamiliar to you, they won't be after you have listened to this podcast

Now here’s the deal with this series: I’m not doing Shakespeare the standard way.

Most shows start with the plays and sprinkle in “background” like seasoning. I’m doing the opposite. I’m starting with Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare’s world first—because you can’t really understand the plays until you understand the world that produced them.

So for the first six or seven episodes—at least—we’re going to build the stage before the actors walk on.

We’re going to talk about Stratford—not as a postcard, not as a tourist stop, but as a shaping place. A place where your future isn’t guaranteed, where life has pressures, where imagination has to fight for oxygen.

We’re going to talk about London—and what it meant to make a living in a city that could be thrilling one month and lethal the next. We’re going to talk about theatre not only as art, but as work: as business, as competition, as survival, as risk.

We’re going to talk about the plague—not as trivia, but as an ever-present shadow that closed theatres and rearranged lives. Plans evaporate. Work stops. Life narrows. The future becomes uncertain. That’s not ancient history. That’s human history.

And yes… we’re going to talk about the so-called mystery years—those “lost years”—not because I think I can solve them, but because I think the mystery is part of the story, not an inconvenience.

Real lives have gaps.
Real lives have missing chapters.
And sometimes those gaps are where identity forms.

Then—once we’ve built that context—we begin the plays.

But even then, I’m not doing plot summaries like a textbook.
I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: interviews.

This is called Conversations with Shakespeare, and yes, we’ll have conversations with Shakespeare himself—the man, the artist, the working theatre professional, the chameleon who could write a tragedy soaked in blood and then turn around and write a comedy full of mistaken identities.

But we will also interview the characters.

Not just Hamlet and Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra—though I promise we’ll talk to them.

We’ll talk to the overlooked ones too: the fools, the messengers, the friends, the servants, the people who walk on for a handful of lines and somehow reveal the moral weather of the play.

And I want to ask them questions that feel human rather than academic:

What did you want?
When did you know you were in trouble?
What did you tell yourself so you could keep going?
What would you do differently if you could see the end from the beginning?
At seventy-five, I’m less interested in judging these people… and more interested in understanding them.

And I want to give you permission to understand them too.

You don’t have to “master” Shakespeare to experience him. You don’t have to know all the terminology. You don’t have to pretend you caught every reference.

You just have to listen the way you listen to human beings.

I also want to say one more thing about interpreting and access, because it’s not a side note to this story—it’s part of why I’m telling it.

When you interpret Shakespeare into American Sign Language, you can’t cling to the surface of the words. You have to go for meaning, intent, texture, speed, mood.

You have to decide: Is this line a knife? Is it a plea? Is it a joke? Is it a distraction?
You have to decide: Is the character trying to reveal truth—or trying to hide it?

And doing that for years trains you to hear Shakespeare differently.

It trains you to stop treating the language like a riddle and start treating it like speech—human speech, made artful.

So when I say “Conversations with Shakespeare,” I mean it literally.

We’re going to treat these plays as conversations with people.

So who is this series for?

It’s for the lifelong Shakespeare lover who still gets chills from certain lines.

It’s for the skeptic who thinks Shakespeare is overhyped.

It’s for the person who thinks, “I don’t know anything about Shakespeare, and I don’t want to feel stupid.”

And I want to say something gently:

If you’ve never liked Shakespeare, it may not be Shakespeare’s fault.

It may be the way he was delivered to you.

It may be that you were handed a play like it was a punishment instead of an invitation. It may be that no one told you Shakespeare is not a puzzle you solve—he’s a world you enter.

So if you’re new and you think, “I don’t know anything about Shakespeare”—you’re exactly who I’m making this for.

I’m not building a gate.
I’m opening a door.

Then Shakespeare, the world.
Then his works—especially the characters

And I am genuinely looking forward to delving into arguably the most creative writer in the English language—because the older I get, the more I realize that the greatest artists aren’t the ones who simply impress you.
They’re the ones who keep giving you back your own humanity in a form you didn’t expect.

(Pause. Let it breathe.)

Thank you for listening to celebrate creativity. Now… let’s open the doors of the theatre.

(Optional: theme music rises slightly, then fades.)

Sources include: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackrold, and ChatGPT.