“Feast with the best, and welcome to my house”
Taming of the Shrew - Act V, Scene ii
Shakespeare's Grammar School
I am a self-educated Bardoloter. I have no formal training in Shakespearean literature.
So what gives me the right to a “daily cast of brazen cannon?”
Simple: I read.
Reading is the cornerstone of any man’s education and if you read and read well you don’t necessarily need someone telling you what you just read.
But even if a formal training were required to wax eloquent on all things Bard, Shakespearean studies would be the ideal literary pursuit for a self-teacher.
There are more than 300 websites dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. More than 5,000 books have been written and essays too numerous to count.
The topics explored range from the extremely narrow – Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis - to the extremely broad - Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays.
If you want to teach yourself Shakespeare, you have everything you need right here on the internet.
Don’t use the excuse that you aren’t formally trained. Shakespeare himself lacked formal training.
He didn’t let it stop him.