Shakespeare Tradition Continued --in Quotes for the Circumstances

Friday was Shakespeare’s 435th birthday. And as she has for 15 years, Columbine High School teacher Carol Samson had asked her advanced placement English students to each bake a cake and decorate it with their favorite quote from the Bard.

Normally, Samson’s students take their literary cakes to the school cafeteria to share with the student body. But this week, one of her students was killed and three are lying in local hospitals. Nevertheless, even with their school shuttered and crawling with investigators, a handful of Samson’s students who were spared harm baked their cakes and brought them to a faculty meeting Friday at a nearby church.

Here are some of the quotes they chose:

From “Macbeth”:

Angels are bright still though the brightest fall.

What is done is done.

Let me enfold thee and hold thee to my heart.

From “Hamlet”:

When sorrows come, they come not in single spies but in battalions.

From “King Lear”:

Was ever low, gentle soft--an excellent thing in woman.

This cake was baked by a boy who had been a friend and classmate of Lauren Townsend, a tall, gentle girl who loved volleyball and wildflowers and Shakespeare--and who died Tuesday in the school library.