he moment I stepped into Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), the indiscriminate jealousy was vibrantly real. Like stale air in an unopened room, this nagging emotion haunted me and filled my days. So much so that I had not even known it was there until the deceptively suppressed but uncontrolled jealousy got the better of me and staked its claim to my soul.

SISU was a far cry from what I had fancied. For me, it was not so much a high road to sort out my future but a damper, mining all within—I lost my old confidence. Born and bred in an isolated small village, the instant I joined the School of English Studies (a.k.a. SES) I was sensible of my glaring weaknesses compared to others: I have a strange accent, an extremely poor reading, but a soaring ambition. It just seemed the closer I sought to get to English, the more forbidding it became. Doom and gloom marked the tenor of my campus life. Lumbering in pursuit of English proficiency, I straggled helplessly behind most of my peers, despite my relentless efforts. 

Fear consumed me and brought on unhinged jealousy. At that time, I was wired like a March hare and a glimpse of others' achievements would gnaw at my soul—forever. Gradually, peers around me became sources of my chronicle of discontent, and the spiritual epitome of SES—the bronze bust of Shakespeare—loomed up ahead of me like a despot, poised to demoralize me, a self-styled budding English master. Believe it or not, I never understood what had turned Shakespeare into a deity and why generation after generation had hailed him as the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", in part because however gamely I tried, his grandiose words always came out like shibboleths from nowhere. The green-eyed monster seized and devoured me. Desperately I even convinced myself that all this driveling quest for affinity with English was absolutely a wild goose chase and I, a dweller in a fool’s paradise. 

Then, an “aha!” moment struck me when I first read Sonnet 29:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The immortal poet was resenting his bad luck. Sitting all alone and wailing that he was an outcast, he persistently bothered a seemingly deaf God with useless cries. While rattling off the ills and misfortunes of his life, he suffered mental anguish at the successful art of others and the vision of youth's merrymaking cut him deeply. However, the recollection of the sweet love of his dear friends rejuvenated his spirits; therefore, he no longer wallowed in the unresolved and unhappy past, but embraced his household dictum that "what is done is done" and forcefully claimed, "I scorn to change my state with kings."

This sonnet easily took the wind from my sails. It was the herald of the morn, for I had long been living in the sullen earth of jealousy, cursing Shakespeare's perpetual heyday. It turned out that the smoldering ember of disgruntlement was finally quenched, and a jocund, brisk, new day stood tiptoe greeting me: Look, even Shakespeare had bad days; even Shakespeare was harassed by loneliness; even Shakespeare was undone by the black magic of jealousy. Ordinary people like me would not escape this kind of test by Fate; to be smitten by specters of jealousy—how strange.

Back then, I was lucky in that my mind was not cordoned off from dateless complaints. Sonnet 29 saved me at my most insecure and troubled. Also, by reading it, I came to recognize one of Shakespeare's most admirable traits; that is, although like us lesser mortals, he sometimes devoted himself to constructing “The Trump Wall ” against enemies he thought he saw across the frontier, enemies who never attacked that way—if they attacked at all, or, if they were indeed our enemies. We might descend into endless self-pity and hatred towards others, whereas Shakespeare, with enough experience and reflection, lifted the burden more easily.

“O, I will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!” How to sing the praises of Shakespeare? Julius Caesar’s well-known quote, I came, I saw, I conquered, renders an excellent variation for my tribute to William Shakespeare, who, through his sonnet, extends a soothing hand over my troubled mind. Namely, I came, I saw, I concurred. 

This is one of the award-winning essays in the 2016 Shakespeare Writing Award of Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). The author, Lin Jun, is an undergraduate student of SISU's School of English Studies.

The supervisor, Curtis Evans, is a foreign expert and international research fellow at SISU. The supervisor, Dr. Sun Shanshan, is an associate professor of English at SISU. Her research fields are contrastive linguistics and text linguistics.