Hawks can honor Shakespeare’s Birthday with their rendition of a sonnet

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Samantha Jette, Copy Editor

The 29th annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Celebration will take place on April 23 on the Hilltop. Any student, faculty or staff member who wishes to attend is welcome to join the festivities as 154 Shakespearean sonnets are read aloud.

The tradition began on a brisk spring day in April 1989, as Dr. Gary Bouchard and 75 readers celebrated Shakespeare’s 425th birthday by reading his sonnets on the Alumni quad. Since the first year, several additions have been made to the celebration; however, the initial essence of the sonnet marathon remains constant throughout time. Now, 29 years later, members of the Anselmian community look forward to the celebration each year, as it marks the true sign that spring has come.

The event has gained popularity over the years; the recent celebrations have seen as many as 150 readers, and far more audience members. This year, Dr. Bouchard, founder and director of the festival, expects between 120 and 150 sonnet readers. He also anticipates a broader crowd, including guests from outside of the campus community. For instance, the Saint Mary’s school in Worcester is expected to be in attendance. Notably, alumni from 25 different graduating classes dating from 1957 to 2017 will be present. An alumnus has even founded a Shakespeare company in Maine that will attend to sing and perform, while dressed in traditional costumes. The Abbey Players will also perform a few Shakespearean scenes for the audience, including scenes from Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello.

Dr. Bouchard stated that the birthday celebration is the “ultimate class outdoors,” during which the group will marathon read the sonnets between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. He remarked that the “most important aspect of festival is that it gets people close to poetry, especially those who would not otherwise get close it. Shakespeare is a good excuse for that; he is so famous that you couldn’t do this festival with anyone else.”

In fact, many unlikely members of the college community have become involved with the sonnet marathon over the years, including Physical Plant, Human Resources, and College Advancement employees. Dr. Bouchard even admits that the students he has enlisted to read a sonnet in the past have entered the festival believing it will be strange, and have been pleasantly surprised. Many people have decided to return each year afterwards because of their connection to the poetry.

Bouchard stated that the sonnet marathon is very much like a baseball game: “It is very predictable, but wild stuff can happen. Sometimes there are 37 runs, sometimes there are two. There is always at least one home run each year.”

Hopefully, the weather will cooperate on the day of the celebration. Bouchard commented that it is best to hold the marathon outside, so that passers-by can also take part in the festivities, even for a short while. The sonnets are best paired with warm spring weather. In the event of rain in previous years, the celebration had been moved indoors to the Cushing Center. It is uncertain where this year’s festival will be held in the event of rain, but Dr. Bouchard is not overly worried. “I don’t check the weather until four to five days before,” he stated.

Dr. Bouchard commented on the transcendence of Shakespeare into the modern time period: “The divisiveness of our country right now has always been true, at least in some place in the world. The arrogance, pride, and hubris we see and the fall of man because of that is nothing new. This makes the themes of Shakespeare more relevant than ever.”

On the importance of the sonnet marathon, Dr. Bouchard added that “sonnets achieve as well, or better, than any work of literature or art. It is a very profound and moving meditation on love, death, and time. Those are the only three things in literature, art, and life, really. If you remove death and time, you will have no problems, and if you remove love, there is nothing to live for.”

He found that these elements of the sonnets have helped readers to connect over the years. While the sonnets are assigned randomly, some readers will serendipitously get a poem that speaks to them in a profound way. “It wouldn’t be true literature and art unless people find something personal in a poem that was written in the 1590s for other reasons,” he said. Real connections can still be made even hundreds of years later.  

The Shakespeare celebration also serves as a way to remember readers from the past who have passed away. Dr. Bouchard keeps a list of the names of those in memoriam in the inside of his book of sonnets. “You can’t have a good birthday party without thinking of the past,” he remarked, “Poetry is born out of loss. We write about things that we want to have, not things we do have.”