Shakespeare's timeless gift for capturing the full spectrum of human feeling became, for Bob Smith, the hinge on which his entire life turned. Where no one else had managed to reach him, Shakespeare did — validating the contradictory emotions of a boy caught between fierce devotion and resentment toward his family. His mother hovered on the edge of depression. His father was absent in ways that mattered. His beloved sister Carolyn was severely handicapped. His grandparents, though loving and attentive, sometimes failed to understand what a child needed.
Now sixty, Smith remembers his childhood and adolescence through an extraordinary practice he has developed: reading Shakespeare's plays aloud with groups of elderly people, many of them isolated or living in care homes. As they move through the stories of Hamlet, Ophelia, Romeo and Juliet, these readers find their own lives mirrored back to them. They discover themselves in the emotional landscapes Shakespeare draws.
What struck me most forcefully about this deeply human and honest book is the author's tone. He writes of experiences that must have marked him profoundly, yet he avoids both self-pity and bitterness. Instead, he transforms what he endured into a gift for others — a generosity of spirit that few people achieve.
by Cristina Tersigni, 2004
Sometimes Mom and Dad would go out, and Carolyn and I would stay with the shrew and the fat guy who terrified me. One night we were in our sweltering room, door shut so they wouldn't hear Carolyn cry, windows shut so the neighbors wouldn't hear her either. Carolyn looked at me. I was by her crib making faces. Suddenly she stopped crying and looked at me for a long, long time. I was amazed and a little frightened. I'd never seen her look at anyone before — she never did! But now she was watching me, and she wasn't crying. Then something happened that was even more beautiful than the religious calendar from George Pistnev's funeral home: my sister smiled at me! She stopped crying and there, in that stifling little room where everything outside was shut out — the world we didn't want to hear us, the Florida sunset burning through the cracks around the old shutters, no taxi drivers staring at my mother with pity, no fat guys making fun of me, no mean people — just me and my little sister. I took her hand and we made a pact, forever: even if everyone else left, even if I grew up and went away, we two would never, ever be separated.
From: "The Boy Who Loved Shakespeare"