Be not afraid of Shakespeare’s greatness | READER COMMENTARY

For the assignment for the sixth and final week of my Shakespeare class for Johns Hopkins University’s Odyssey lifelong learning program, I asked the participants to choose a specific passage from one of the plays we read and tell us how the passage relates to today. How much have we actually learned about life in nearly 500 years?

It turned out to be an easy assignment for my mostly retired professional participants.

In “Antony and Cleopatra,” written in 1607, Mark Antony, a famous general...