The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare enters John’s life as an old, battered book brought from the Antelope Kiva, but its words soon become a way to interpret and express feelings he could not previously name. Found when John is about twelve, it gives him reading practice and, more consequentially, language through which his resentment of Pope becomes newly articulated and real.

Discovery and Physical History

John comes home one day to find a thick book on the floor of the bedroom. He has never seen it before. Its binding has been eaten by mice, and some pages are loose and crumpled. The title identifies it as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. John later calculates that this discovery must have taken place soon after his twelfth birthday.

Linda explains that Pope brought the volume. It had been lying in one of the chests in the Antelope Kiva and was supposedly hundreds of years old. Linda has looked through it, dismissed its contents as nonsense and uncivilized, and nonetheless suggests that it will be good enough for John to practice reading on. Her casual appraisal contrasts with the importance the book will acquire for him: she treats it as a rudimentary learning aid, while John discovers in it a powerful interpretive language.

Reading and the Power of Language

John opens the book at random and encounters lines from Hamlet beginning, “Nay, but to live.” The unfamiliar language does not become fully clear to him; its force comes in part from being only half-understood. He experiences the words through comparisons with the drums at summer dances, the singing of the Corn Song, and Mitsima’s ritual speech. Shakespeare’s writing feels to him like a kind of magic, but a magic that means more because it seems to speak directly to his life.

The passage’s emotional charge attaches itself to Linda and Pope. John thinks of Linda lying in the room and of her relationship with Pope; the language gives shape to a hatred that was already present but that he had not known how to express. Its words do not merely intensify his feeling. They help him recognize and describe its grounds, making Pope more real to him as the object of his hostility. The book thus changes the terms of John’s experience: an inherited literary text becomes personal speech, even while its source and full meaning remain beyond his complete understanding.

The Book in John’s Conflict with Pope

The role of the book becomes more acute when John comes in from playing and sees Linda and Pope asleep together. The sight unsettles him, and Shakespeare’s words recur in his mind. He remembers a line about a man being drunk asleep or in a rage, and the language seems to explain and direct his anger. He takes the meat knife from beside the fireplace and attacks Pope, wounding his shoulder before Pope restrains him.

The episode shows the book acting not as a detached object of study but as part of the immediate circumstances of John’s response. The remembered verse supplies a frame for his anger at precisely the moment that anger turns into action. Yet the scene does not make the text a simple instruction manual: John’s partial understanding, his pre-existing resentment, the sight of Linda and Pope, and the words he has absorbed converge in an act whose consequences include his restraint and emotional collapse. The book’s language mediates his feelings without separating them from the relationships and events that provoke them.

Literary Inheritance and Significance

The worn volume carries a cultural past into John’s room: it has survived for generations in a chest at the Antelope Kiva, far removed from Linda’s dismissive judgment and John’s immediate circumstances. Its damaged binding and imperfect pages mark it as a physical remnant, while the words inside make that remnant active in John’s present. He does not encounter Shakespeare as a complete or scholarly reader; he opens the book at random, understands only part of what he reads, and nonetheless finds language that helps him make sense of his own life.

For John, the book joins literary language to ritual and song, yet also sets Shakespeare apart from Mitsima’s magic: it seems to speak about Linda and Pope with an explanatory force. That connection gives the volume significance beyond its stated use as reading practice. It furnishes John with terms for hatred and a means of interpreting an intimate conflict, demonstrating how an old text can be newly made personal when a reader brings it to bear on lived experience.