Shakespeare is one of those topics at school that you hated in the beginning–what is this language? This ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ business? Why can I understand nothing?–but the older you grow, the more you truly appreciate how incredible a playwright he was, and just how much he understood the inner workings of humanity.

Like every other diligent schoolkid, I started studying Shakespeare in year 7 of high school with A Midsummer’s Night Dream. A fanciful flight of the imagination, a mix of sheer confusion and strange humour that was funny for a reason you couldn’t quite pinpoint. Ah, perfect for 12-year-old children. Perhaps not.

A year or two later, my friends and I stumbled into an empty classroom with copies of Romeo and Juliet piled on tables. I can’t quite remember what we were supposed to be doing at the time, but I can remember what we did – grab the plays, open to the most iconic scene we knew, and begin to recite with overdramatic passion and inappropriate amusement.

By year 10 I have begun openly admitting (rather reluctantly at first) that I liked Shakespeare. My friends and I became a little too enamoured by Macbeth, discussing it in far more detail (in a most non-literary way) during whispered conversations in class. I’m fairly certain our English teacher hated us. But we also contributed some very insightful comments, so maybe he liked us just a little.

Year 11 (2012) was a turning point. Othello remains, to date, one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. We had to reenact it in class – my partner and I deliberated on every detail, and gave an Oscar-worthy performance of Cassio and Iago’s ‘reputation’ scene that would have made Leo DiCaprio cry (because we would have stolen his Oscar, get it?).

This was also the year of The Hollow Crown, an absolutely amazing BBC mini-series of Shakespeare’s histories: Richard II, Henry IV (parts 1&2) and Henry V. I dived in for Tom Hiddleston (Hal/Henry IV) and emerged raving about Ben Whishaw, who played Richard II. But this was it. I had crossed a threshold that high school students rarely cross – I had watched not one, but four Shakespeare plays for fun.

By my last year of high school, it was no secret that I adored Shakespeare. We studied Hamlet, my favourite play for many reasons. It has everything an audience could possibly want – murder, treason, betrayal, fighting – and yet gives the most insightful commentary into the nature of humanity. Life and death, fate and destiny, suspended between a desire to do nothing and a need to do everything – those are the challenges that Hamlet faces, but more importantly, those are the challenges that everyone faces. It was even more pertinent for me at that time when you are at the crossroads of your future, and a thousand different paths stand between you and destiny.

In the end I decided in much the same way Hamlet decided:

“Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.”

Ah, Shakespeare. I cannot put into words what he has done for English literature, for humanity, and for me. But Ian McKellen can.

Happy 400th deathday Shakespare, though I am a day late. But nobody can decide exactly when you were born, or even exactly who you were. Sooner or later you and your tales will pass into high legend,  and in that company you will stand proud.