There is perhaps not a single thing Shakespeare has not written about. Of opportunities, he says, “We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” I followed his advice some centuries later, when the Office of Global Education and Strategic Partnerships at Ashoka circulated an email about a scholarship to the summer programme at the University of Cambridge; I applied. To my good fortune, the current served, and I was washed onto the banks of the river Cam. Apart from the scholarship, which covered the programme fee and accommodation, Ashoka made the otherwise inconceivable voyage possible. The generous financial aid covered travel, visa, books, and other resultant expenses.

Of the many programmes offered at Cambridge, I chose Shakespeare and Renaissance, based on my association with The Bard since I was 12. The lines I knew from him through theatre had become silos of meaning in my literature classes; I hoped to expand my exposure to him. And expand, I did. I returned from Cambridge with a mind exercised in intellectual thought and a heart warmed with prized memories.

The place teemed with scholars and students, serene and smiling in a perfect summer, speaking of subjects ranging from politics to writing. One would sit down with a plate of hash browns as a stranger, and rise as a friend. The opportunity to learn in Cambridge was about much more than just the classes: literature had taken birth here, Marlowe and Newton, Milton and Byatt had walked in that campus: to learn there was to dwell in that history, to link oneself to that genealogy of thought.

One of the four courses was a dream for a performer like me: acting The Winter’s Tale with Vivien Hielbron, an Emmy-

One of the four courses was a dream for a performer like me: acting The Winter’s Tale with Vivien Hielbron, an Emmy-nominated Shakespearean. She changed my approach to reading and performing Shakespeare in fundamental ways. With Prof. Alexander Lindsay, we undertook a purely scholarly pursuit: to compare the style, versification, themes of desire and magic in Dr Faustus and The Tempest, thus including Shakespeare’s contemporaries in our studies. More contemporaries visited us in Prof. Paul Suttie’s course on Elizabethan Love Poetry. He rekindled my interest in the intersection of queer theory and sonnets, and also gave me the merit of a distinction – I was evaluated for a paper on the subject of this course. The course unexampled, though, was Henry IV, Part I, again by Prof. Paul Suttie: we studied both the play and its historical sources side-by-side, unraveling the layers that go into writing a play. This led to an analysis of not only the themes and characters, but characterisation and structuring.

nominated Shakespearean. She changed my approach to reading and performing Shakespeare in fundamental ways. With Prof. Alexander Lindsay, we undertook a purely scholarly pursuit: to compare the style, versification, themes of desire and magic in Dr Faustus and The Tempest, thus including Shakespeare’s contemporaries in our studies. More contemporaries visited us in Prof. Paul Suttie’s course on Elizabethan Love Poetry. He rekindled my interest in the intersection of queer theory and sonnets, and also gave me the merit of a distinction – I was evaluated for a paper on the subject of this course. The course unexampled, though, was Henry IV, Part I, again by Prof. Paul Suttie: we studied both the play and its historical sources side-by-side, unraveling the layers that go into writing a play. This led to an analysis of not only the themes and characters, but characterisation and structuring.

Such an assortment was embellished by the plenary lecture every afternoon, on the theme of the year ‘Transformation’ – of genres, values, cultures, and technologies. It foregrounded the crux of Shakespeare’s everlasting vitality: adaptation. My most special moment came in Stratford-upon-Avon, where I attended a stellar production of Measure for Measure by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I had only virtually been to this theatre, through pirated videos of their productions. To watch them live was a dream come true.

My biggest takeaway from Cambridge was the diversity it welcomed into academia: not only in terms of nationalities but in terms of age. In Prof. Lindsay’s class, for instance, I was the only undergraduate; the rest of the students were all seniors: retired advocates, working carpenters, all of them passionate to study Shakespeare at university. Age is no bar, I learnt, to take some time and get a classroom experience. One can read Shakespeare or any other writer all they want, but to study them under a scholar is a novelty. Cambridge teaches you all that need to have is the desire to learn, even if the normative time has passed. And thus Cambridge seemed like a corrective to the line I quoted in the beginning, “If you lose your venture, then Cambridge creates another current for you.”

Vighnesh Hampapura, Undergraduate 2020, writes on his summer experience at the University of Cambridge