There's a remedy. Stop regarding Shakespeare as an icon. Take under advisement the thought that Will the S may not be the Greatest Playwright in the History of the World. Maybe not even in the ten best.

It's refreshing to think of him that way. Just a guy that writes plays. Just another working stiff, putting words on a page. A colleague of, say, Harold Pinter and Sam Beckett who just happens to talk a weird four-centuries-old dialect.

But who, if listened to carefully, can surprise you with a lance of light into your brain.

Does wonders for me. I tackle Shakespeare from a cockeyed angle, and, given his terms of looking at the world, find him (or her -- who knows, maybe Anne Hathaway wrote the plays :) -- fresh as this morning's daisy...freed from all that Literary Worship that only gets in the way.

But then on the other hand, I'm nuts.