It had to happen, we had to take on the challenge of the bard himself - William Shakespeare.

Most of us are forced into reading Shakespeare in high school and, as a result, have a dislike for it. I was fortunate to have a great teacher for extension English in my last year of high school. She brought King Lear alive for us, and I developed an appreciation for it.

When I lived in Sydney, I made a habit of going to see at least one Bell Shakespeare production a year. I’ll never forget Baz Luhrmann’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an English garden party with the men in cricketing flannels and boaters and the women in bustles and parasols. There was also the production at Parramatta Riverside Theatre of (I think) The Tempest, where, weirdly, they included The Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” as the music. I don’t recall the play as much as the incongruity of the music.

Anyways, it’s fair to say some of us had some trepidation going into Much Ado About Nothing, and we all approached it differently, something we discussed in our book club meeting.

One thing I completely forgot to bring up in book club (and I have no idea how I forgot) is the whole debate over whether Shakespeare is who he was supposed to be. Much of this centres around the fact that despite him being so well known, we actually don’t know a lot about him. Some academics have gone as far as suggesting a woman might have authored Shakespeare’s work. Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name creates a fictional narrative of this theory. I currently have this on reservation at the library and can’t wait to read it.

In Much Ado About Nothing, the character of Beatrice is the most textured of all - and remarkably feminist in attitude for the time … could she have been written by a man?

On that bombshell, I’ll leave you to listen to the podcast, aka the recording of the book part of our book club meeting.

Next month, for our Christmas special, we’re trying something different. We won’t all be reading the same book, but instead talking about Jane Austen.

I can’t wait …

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