Shakespeare. The very mention of his name is likely to send a fair proportion of you directly to the sports or classified adds section of this newspaper. There are two types of people in the world: those who love Shakespeare and those who couldn't give a fiddlers. Me? I suppose I love him like an old friend, with a love that could quickly turn to hate if our paths were to cross too regularly.

I was introduced to the Bard on September 14th, 1975. That same day, I walked out of short pants forever and into secondary school for the first time. And what should have been a momentary handshake with Henry IV Part One evolved into a drip-fed, brain-dead experience of five-minute daily doses

over three years. Before I knew it, the Inter Cert was around the corner, Mr Ryan was around the bend and panic had set in.

"Ye're all thick!" Mr Ryan screamed, as he bounced his forehead against the blackboard. Ten days to exam day, and me and the other 37 bowl-cuts just sat dazed and fazed at our desks watching any hope of passing English being dragged from the classroom in a straight-jacket. The last we heard was the shrill tone of Mr Ryan's voice - "I know you all and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness" - echoing along the corridor. And then - the rest is silence. The new teacher was freckly and spotty. Under a mop of foxy hair, he had lapels the size of flat-fish and flares flapping at his ankles. "Just call me Trevor!" he said, as his platforms clippityclopped across the teak block flooring. Trevor couldn't have been much older than ourselves; a rookie drafted into the frontline trenches from some teacher training college or other.

"Can anybody tell me what this play's about?" said Trevor, his eyes drifting across the valley of the bowl-cuts.

"Sir! Sir! Sir!" Jerome jumped to his feet. "It's about the royal family, sir!"

"Just call me Trevor," he said again, and paused. "Think of it this way: it's the summer holidays, you've two weeks before you go back to school, what do ya do?"

"We go bananas, Trevor!"

"Dead right! Ya go bananas. Well, that's what this play's about! Prince Hal knows that he must knuckle down to work when he becomes king, so he goes bananas before he settles down!"

"And what about Harry Hotspur?" asked Jerome. " Harry Hotspur? He was teacher's pet, the swot! So listen, lads. Summer's well over, now is the winter of our discontent, it's time to knuckle down!"

Eureka! Just like that - clarity. That was the day I tuned into Shakespeare and Jerome became his disciple - you know the type: pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon, the front row of every performance, laughing excessively at the slightest nod to humour - I mean, come on, even Jack Benny wouldn't get away with gags that old.

Anyway, last Wednesday night, Jerome arrived at my place with My Own Private Idaho. He slid the cassette into the slot. "You're in for a treat," he said.

Inspired by Henry IV Part One, Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991) follows the adventures of the mayor of Portland's son, Scott (Keanu Reeves), as he slums it, before assuming his rightful position in society. Along the way, he hooks up with Mike (River Phoenix), a narcoleptic male prostitute, and like Shakespeare's Prince Hal and co., they blaze a debaucherous trail through thievery, coffee houses and same-sex "wenching". It's a tale of tested loyalties, adventure and friendship - a friendship which Scott must ultimately abandon because, to paraphrase Shakespeare, he must step out of the foul and ugly mist to become more godly, attract more eyes and be more wondered at. The "foul and ugly mists" in question are Mike and Bob, the Falstaff clone.

The reaction to My Own Private Idaho was mixed, probably due to the perception that it didn't have a plot and to what some might describe as a cumbersome juxtaposition of Van Sant's text with Shakespeare's original. Personally, I loved this film. It's character-driven to the core - do look out for the powerful scene where Mike expresses his love for Scott; it's anything but a camp campfire confession.

Incidentally, my second encounter with Shakespeare was via Hamlet for the Leaving Cert. Trevor decided to cut the messing, so he brought us to a schools' production of the play at the Cork Opera House. For simplicity's sake, it was a scaleddown version. Trevor cracked a teacherly gag and called it "Piglet" (truthfully, it was more "ham" than anything else).

But our hormones were up with our pimples - Shakespeare and over a thousand pubescent boys and girls in a darkened room don't really go together. In fact, the only line I remember from the whole production was when Hamlet declared from the stage, "I am Hamlet of the Danes", only to have some wise boy from the balcony boomerang it back: "You are in me hole; you're a teacher from Mayfield Community School!", followed by a barrage of bubble gum.

River Phoenix as Mike in My Own Private Idaho