My friends, I didn’t think I would ever stand up here and talk about something I can't seem to neglect, whether it's for better or for worse. What I may say might provoke you as it has done to me, or maybe it’ll inspire you –as it has also done to me. Much to your dismay or to your pleasure, here is how I feel about Shakespeare.

If when you say “Shakespeare”  you mean the man who romanticized the deaths of many, if not all, his characters, the man who burdened said characters with ditzy and featherheaded names, the man who loved crying so much he made you share this unsettling feeling through his work, the man who tortured his plays with language so fallacious it lost all sense; if you mean the playwright who cursed todays vexing thespians with insufferable quotes and nonsensical behaviors that make them so desperately worship his portrait, which, by the way, lays above a shelf cluttered with his most haunting and daunting and taunting work, as they recite melodramatic lines that they will inevitably take too seriously from his hopeless romantic blueprints, then certainly I am against him.

But if when you say “Shakespeare” you mean the father of tragedy, the creator of the tragic heroes who we, for some peculiar reason, inherently tether ourselves to, the bard whose sonnets emanated feelings far beyond anyone's understandings yet made perfect sense when spoken poetically enough, the one who wrote us not love stories, but stories about love that told the untold side of its elusiveness that humanity would’ve never professed; if you mean the prodigy who meticulously crafted scripts to be the utmost nuanced with feelings that danced across a stage as we, the spellbound audience, witness life’s most valuable intangibles in a different spotlight as the star crossed lovers break or as Rome’s tyrant bleeds, then certainly I am for him.

Not that you asked, but there's my stand. I don't plan on retreating nor compromising, so I bid you adieu.