I asked them to keep a commonplace book—that ancient practice of gathering what arrests you, what teaches you to see. Fifty quotes that illuminate the dark corners where Shakespeare’s characters meet their own London wanderings. I gave them eight organizing categories, yes, but then I told them they could make up their own. And some of them did. They made categories like “characters I would vs wouldn’t be friends with” (with a “maybe” column!), “because we don’t hate women enough,” “Be who you want to be,” “A world of wanderers,” along with “forever young,” “one happy family,” “and that’s ok,” “endings of any caliber,” “detachment,” “safety,” “authority,” “human condition, grit,” “love, illusion, identity,” “ambition, success, social pressure,” “acceptance and failure,” “wisdom and philosophy,” “finding community,” “impact of language,” “femininity,” “ideas to live by,” “periods and exclamations in life,” “made and given community.”
They listened and wrote all semester. They thought in categories the way Renaissance scholars did, the way Enlightenment philosophers did—sorting the world into taxonomies, making sense of experience through structure. They became amateur naturalists of consciousness.
And look at the fabulous breadth of sources they gathered, all in one long beautiful list: Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, Polonius, the Gravediggers, Othello, Desdemona, Iago, Cassio, Emilia, Twelfth Night, Viola, Viola-as-Cesario, Orsino, Olivia, Feste the Fool, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew, Malvolio, Sonnet 29, William Shakespeare himself, Kit Marlowe, Dr. Duncan Salkeld, Dr. Palomino (in Spanish), Dr. Rowan Mackenzie, Ben Duke at the Globe, Nick Hodgson the Malvolio actor and cabinet barrister, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky from our metaphor readings, Adam the tour guide in Ireland, tour guides throughout Europe, the incarcerated men who worked with Dr. Mackenzie, and they quoted each other—constantly, beautifully, as if they understood that their classmates were as worth recording as Shakespeare.
Abby Jimenez’s Just for the Summer, Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, Katadasis, Alchemised, Dragon Republic, The Secret History, Rose in Chains, a Holocaust diary, Detachment, Kate Cayley’s “Lent,” Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka, GK Chesterton on fairy tales, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Khalil Gibran, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Margaret Atwood, Fahrenheit 451, Thoreau, Sun Tzu, Nietzsche, Maurice Wilkins on genetics, Winston Churchill, Elie Wiesel, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, their own mothers (multiple mothers appear in these books, giving wisdom!), their uncles, their pastors, Fat Ham, Wicked, Evita, Hadestown, The Elf Musical, Fleabag with Andrew Scott as the hot priest, Moulin Rouge, My Neighbor Totoro, The Producers, Mulan, Boy Meets World, Lilo and Stitch, Zootopia, Pitch Perfect, Dune, Pixar’s Soul, Wall-E, Ratatouille (who got his own portrait with a giant spoon!), The Incredibles, Blue is the Warmest Color, Black Swan, Coraline, Monica from Friends, Arthur and Merlin, The Great Gatsby, Patrick Swayze, Jack Nicholson, Kehlani, Lana del Rey, Hozier, Green Day, The Beatles (including drafts seen at the British Library), Wham!, Radiohead, Kelly Clarkson, Echosmith, Adele, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Fiona Apple, Kendrick Lamar, The Cranberries’ “Linger,” Taylor Swift’s “Fate of Ophelia,” Tyler the Creator, Nick Hodgson the musician, Jimmy Carter, JK Rowling, Robin Williams, MLK, LeBron James, Angela Davis, Joseph Stalin (on the same page as Sir Toby!), Albert Dürer, King Louis XV’s “Plus est en vous,” Jesus from Luke and Galatians, Paul from 1 Corinthians, Transport for London sayings, TFL signs, overheard conversations on the Northern Line, the Tube, Co-op stores, Hyde Park, King’s Cross station, along the Thames at dusk, Piccadilly to Holborn, blue plaques for Charles Dickens, Bloomsbury squares, street musicians, posters on London streets, mannequins at Co-op, short story dispensers in Paris, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, Notting Hill bookshop with “Given good enough coffee I could rule the world,” the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Cardiff Castle’s WWII propaganda, Stratford-upon-Avon signs, Edinburgh Castle, hostels in Paris, Sevilla Spain with hide-and-seek games, Amsterdam (so many Amsterdam stories), a Welsh castle, Austria where they saw Dürer, the British Library, Hogwarts references at King’s Cross, Hollow Knight Silksong, Instagram reels, sand dollars, koi fish drawings, Totoro looming on handmade notebooks, sketches of people throughout.
This is what they made. A commonwealth of voices. They understood that Fat Ham can speak to Hamlet can speak to Radiohead can speak to their friends can speak to a Holocaust diary can speak to Transport for London can speak to their own hearts. They made London into a text. They made Shakespeare into a companion. They made their friends into philosophers. They made themselves into the kinds of people who pay attention, who write things down, who understand that culture is not a museum but a conversation happening across centuries, and they have been invited to speak.