Today is the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, a date I never forget since it comes a day before my father’s birthday. I blush to admit I may have first noticed this coincidence 50 years ago when a big deal was made of the Bard’s 400th.

But I first encountered the man’s magic even earlier. My grandmother had a part time job as an usher at the Cleveland Playhouse and must have snagged unsold tickets for me and my mother to see Hamlet. I was so young I believe I must have fallen asleep in the middle, but have never forgotten being awed by the ghost in the beginning and being awakened by the clangor of swords at the end.

That’s a reminder that Shakespeare may have been the most inventive and beautiful word spinner that ever set quill to foolscap, but that he also understood theatricality down to the ground, or in his case to the groundlings. Hamlet may be a profound and moving meditation on life and death, duty and honor, falsity and reality but it begins with a ghost, ends with a bloodbath and has suicide, murder, mystery, sex, subterfuge and a play within a play called The Mousetrap in between. Whether you are a member of the Inns of Court or one of those groundlings, how can all that not be worth the price of admission?

It is interesting that Shakespeare, needing to churn out two or more plays a year as well as acting in them and taking a share in managing the business of the Globe, rarely bothered inventing stories but grabbed what came to hand or that he already knew had audience appeal. His genius was to see gold in the ore and refine it by cutting and pasting, altering and embroidering to make the material listenable and playable.

His range is astonishing and probably also is due to the need to please a diverse audience in order to keep the receipts coming in. So, he offered up bloody power politics from Roman and English history, but often not that far from his own day’s headlines. He cranked out tragedies set in Denmark, Italy, Scotland and the Celtic past but their themes of jealousy, greed, vengeance, ambition are universal.

There are also strange romances that fit in no contemporary genre category and comedies that start in the real world, take us to an enchanted place and then bring us back. Often they are inhabited by adorable, admirable, idealized heroines far better than any of his men – Viola, Olivia, Rosalind, Portia, Beatrice, Miranda.

Part of the difficulty of confining the plays to categories is that they refuse to be conventionally simple-minded, single-minded or black and white. Yes, there are villains like Richard III, Iago, Goneril and Regan. But they are so energetically dark as to seem like the world’s first studies in psychopathology. Damn good theater, too.

Often his characters are more complex than the needs of the play require. Hamlet, of course. But Othello could have just been jealousy personified or Shylock the stock stereotypical Jew. But they aren’t. They are human, all too human and rouse not hisses from the audience but fear and pity.

When I first thought it would be nice to remember Shakespeare’s birthday, I thought I’d mention some of the memorable performances of his works I’ve had the luck to see, but the list quickly got too long to share and covered a lot of territory from the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival of my youth to The Mount in Massachusetts and the Guthrie in Minneapolis. My worst memory is personal. In college I played the First Gravedigger in Hamlet opposite a gloomy Dane who hadn’t learned his lines. Every performance was like jumping out of a plane unsure if the parachute would open.

I am not sure I’ve ever seen a Tempest or a Lear to match the stagings in my head. I’ve never really warmed to Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, or Julius Caesar. Most of the histories, other than Richard III and Henry V seem tedious, but I can’t get enough of Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and Othello. I’m not quite sure I understand Measure for Measure, but I’m fascinated by it. I’ve only seen Antony and Cleopatra once, but it surprised me with how well it played and how powerful it was. The older I get, the less I need to see another Midsummer’s Night, but the more I am attracted to the odd and very difficult to stage Winter’s Tale.

I was lucky in being in a place where Shakespeare was available live and on film when I was young. Through the magic of Netflix and Streaming, young people have a chance to see all I did and more in video format but perhaps less on stage. That’s a shame. Live you are immersed in the work and realize it feels more like a musical performance than a literary one. No wonder so many operas and musicals have been made from his work.

If you encounter Shakespeare early and are hooked, he will be a friend for life. And the more you live, the more he will have to say. He shows us the black depths to which human hearts can sink but also the love and joy, great courage and charming silliness of which we are capable.

If I ran the schools I’d try to make sure every teen saw Hamlet or Othello, the Helen Mirren Tempest and Al Pacino’s Merchant of Venice and two fairly recent comedies. One is the brilliant, minimalist, modern dress Much Ado about Nothing directed by Joss Whedon at his own California home. It was a revelation to me, making the play come more alive than it ever had before. And finally, the glorious Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night with Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Kingsley, Nigel Hawthorne, the best I’ve ever seen.

Walt Whitman, a poet obviously deeply in thrall to Shakespeare, said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Whitman’s great but was a borough compared to the Bard. All the world is compassed by his stage. He frightens, consoles, amuses, ennobles, and teaches how to live and how not to behave. What a piece of work he was.

Happy Birthday, Will, and thanks for four and a half centuries of magic. As usual, you said it best. “Your presence makes us rich, most noble Lord.”