Shakespeare

I have a similar Shakespeare reading project except mine has no time frame for completion. I'm avoiding the plays I had to read in school since I'll just be reminded of homework, but so far I've finished Julius Caesar and The Tempest. I liked the second one more, plus as someone interested in classical history I found Shakespeare's Romans to basically be Elizabethan gentlemen with Latin names.

I think I prefer the Folger editions with the notes on the facing page, they're quite handy when you're reading and you're not constantly flipping back and forth like with end notes or footnotes.

This is a great idea. I did the same myself in a very deliberate way, reading the majority of them in succession.

So you're looking at thirty-eight canonical plays (though the Royal Shakespeare Company recently published a new collection which includes several of the contested works either thought to be partly or wholly Shakespeare's: www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/updates/new-collaborative-works.aspx). A couple of his plays were also lost. You could read them by genre if you wanted, or chronologically according to when he wrote them. Doing the latter would give you a better sense of the progression of his style. Some you'd probably want to read in succession like the two historical tetralogies. Confusingly, the "first tetralogy" (sometimes the "Henriad," as Dr. Dastardly mentions, and the one he wrote first) is Henry VI, in three parts, and Richard III, whereas the "second tetralogy" deals with historical events prior to the first and comprises Richard II, Henry IV, in two parts, and Henry V. Henry V ends where Henry VI, part I begins. I also read the "Roman trilogy" of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus in succession.

I like the Cambridge J. Dover Wilson editions which include useful criticism, stage histories and so on, though they aren't heavily annotated like some. Also helpful are the editions of Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare Through the Ages" which have excellent critical essays from each century since the plays were written. Bloom has some very bombastic (and repetitively made) but convincing opinions of his own which I enjoy. You can find them online if you want to be a bit unscrupulous. Reading those and perhaps watching the relevant adaptations, such as from the BBC television series, after reading each would help to keep them from blurring together, though that would obviously prolong the endeavor.

There's also his Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and various other poems.

As to movies, I highly recommend the Laurence Olivier-directed trilogy of Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III. Though the last is usually thought a lesser play, I thought it was Olivier's best performance. He was also the protagonist in Stuart Burge's Othello but I've not seen it. Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet is thought very good by many, based on a translation by Pasternak. Akira Kurosawa's films are admired (Kumonosu-Jo, in particular, based on MacBeth). Although I felt the film had minor issues, Ian McKellan's performance of Richard III is excellent. Radford's Merchant of Venice wasn't bad. Above all in recent years, I thought Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus was worth watching (That play was T. S. Eliot's favourite). And that BBC series adapted possibly every canonical play over seven years.  What I would really like to see is the stage performance of Helen Mirren in Antony and Cleopatra from 1983, which is collecting dust in an archive somewhere.  I don't think there's footage of her 1965 performance and then she reprised the role in 1998 but critics thought it was marred by poor direction and...Alan Rickman.  She did a few lines from it during a BBC interview this year, though, and good Lord is it stunning. 

I would much, much rather she'd done this than be in Taymor's "The Tempest."  Maybe opposite Day Lewis or Irons.  Antony and Cleopatra were at advanced ages for the time when they were together, so it could still work.  I feel like this was the part she was born to play.  It's as disappointing as there not being a film version of Olivier playing Macbeth.

I forgot Olivier did a television version of King Lear. I'll have to find that and Othello.

Weird, because I loved Whedon's Much Ado (though it definitely isn't without its problems), and kinda hate Romeo + Juliet (that fucking plus sign). Different strokes, etc. I guess.

I clearly should not suggest 10 Things I Hate About You but I will anyway.

I read The Winter's Tale a few years ago. I thought it was.... weird. I am baffled by the tonal shift between the first three acts and final two acts. And the ending is kind of unsettling. But, I don't think Shakespeare meant it to be.

The Tempest is the only other of his late plays I have read, and I quite liked that one.

Okay, here comes my unpopular opinion: I think reading them is better. Or at least indispensable. Okay, I know, but here's why: Shakespeare is super difficult and super ambiguous.

Super Difficult
As you know. He was difficult at the time, too: he's much more complicated than peers like Marlowe or Jonson. The intro to his first folio in 1623 comes with this quote from the editors:

“Read him, therefore, and again and again; and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.”

Which shows us that the editors are dicks, but also that audiences at the time thought he was confusing too.

And what this means is that if you watch him, especially without having read him first, there's a real tendency for the words to sortof tsunami you: you end up underwater, not even sure which way is up, much less what the fuck anyone's talking about. (Or you're smarter than me. But that's what happens to me.) But if you read him first, you're ready for it: you have a vague sense for what's going on, and you have a few handholds to grab so you're not totally swept away.

Super Ambiguous
One of the things Shakespeare does is he chops the motives out of his stories. In the original Othello story, for example, Iago sets Othello up because he's in love with Desdemona. But Shakespeare leaves that out: in his version Iago's motives are left basically unexplained.

Or take Lear: in the original Lear story, the king plays this "Who loves me more?" game because he's trying to get leverage over his daughters, to make Cordelia (in particular) marry the guy he wants. But in Shakespeare's, he's just like fuck it, I want an emotional handjob. No real reason at all.

And of course there's Hamlet, where that dude spends the whole middle of the play just wandering around acting like a nut, and one of the great debates in literature is what the fuck, Hamlet?

And by chopping the motive out, Shakespeare leaves all these questions that we get to answer for ourselves, which makes his plays endlessly adaptable. You can interpret his characters any number of ways. Hamlet can be sly, or just an annoying slacker. Taming of the Shrew can be a wrestling match, and btw @satelliteskynet that scene is fucking wonderful, I loved it.

But you only get to make up your own interpretation of his characters by reading it yourself. If you watch it, you get someone else's interpretation. And that's super fun, especially when it's totally different from yours, don't get me wrong. But I like to have my idea first, and then I can go into a performance and be all "Wow, I hadn't thought of that."

In Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, for example, Benedick is played as a total asshole; I'm glad that wasn't my formative exposure to that play, because that's not at all how I see Benedick.

So. Hate away, my friends, but I'll read him first.

BTW yeah Dellarigg, it wasn't Greenblatt who first pointed out this motive-amputating tendency on Shakespeare's part but it was in that book Will in the World where I first heard of it. I don't love the first part - that biographical guessing game you mentioned - but in the second half I think his analysis of the plays is wicked smart. Ron Howard Voice hates Greenblatt.

Oh yeah, I am planning to watch performances of the plays as I make my way through this poorly-conceived reading project.  And I have decided to make this a much more manageable and less overwhelming thing by pacing it out to one play per month.  That's still a set timeframe, but it'll be a bit over three years, which seems fairly sensible, at least without the benefit of hindsight.  And as someone who didn't major in English and hasn't read a ton of Shakespeare, my opinion here is obviously not as well-informed as that of most on this thread, but I do tend to agree with Dastardly re: reading being the best way to experience Shakespeare first, because of all the moral ambiguity and whatnot.

Anything that pisses Harold Bloom off* is A-OK by me, but I didn't understand any of the words in your post.

(Seriously, I have put some effort into what this whole...schools of criticism thing is, and I've just failed entirely to understand any of it. I'll just...I'll just be over here reading books.)

* In case anyone didn't know, Harold Bloom is a famous literary critic whose Western Canon is one widely paid-attention-to list of "books you should read" - but he's also a famous curmudgeon, and extremely prone to un-PC comments about how books by Doris Lessing or Maya Angelou are only "canon" for PC reasons, not because they're actually good, which if it was true would be a valid criticism but it is not true so instead it's just sexist and racist. Also, he once sexually harassed Naomi Wolf. Today he's generally seen as an old crank.

I struggle to understand some of it too, but I've never not found it fascinating.  Not for everyone, though, certainly.

I'm not a great devotee of his or anything, but I do think he (mostly) has impeccable taste and makes intelligent observations.  He admires black and female authors (Toni Morrison, I believe, for instance), so I think it's more charitable to assume he just doesn't like Lessing and Angelou on the merits.  He works too hard to cultivate the image of a lonely, counter-cultural sage and he's extremely repetitive, admittedly.  As for Wolf, I can't remember her specific allegations, but while I suspect they were true, they were mild enough (in her mind) to refer to him as "dear" (or something) in the article she wrote about it and to suggest that despite accusing him of casual sexual harassment, she most certainly didn't wish to be invidious about him, but rather to bring the (of course, very real) inattention to sexual harassment at colleges into relief.  But, of course, it was invidious and it was rather distasteful to have named him if that's how she felt.

I will co-recommend both of those things. That "Compleat Wrks" play is so much fun. I've seen it twice and loved it so very much. And Hoskins is fantastic as Iago.

This isn't about ol' Shakey, but what are some recorded performances of Waiting for Godot and No Exit that I should check out? It feels wrong just reading them; they aren't books, they're plays.

It's a fun plan, Roy Batty's Pet Dove, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you as it goes. I might try to dip in on a couple of these: I've been meaning to re-read Titus too, and Midsummer was already in my plans for next year. (Although I'm going to be pretty tempted to tackle that, y'know, midsummer.)

The only thing that jumps right out at me about that plan is that you're frontloading with some of Shakespeare's weaker shit. His early stuff can be weak - same with his very late stuff, the ones he cowrote with shitty-ass John Fletcher. Two Gentlemen, Shrew, Love's Labour and Errors are...well, I don't really remember them, but I don't think they're supposed to be super hot. The Henry VIs are pretty lame, although it's pretty fun when Joan of Arc pops up just being a total cunt about everything. And King John is fuckin' terrible.

But hey, you've got Titus, Richard III and Midsummer; those are all great.

I guess what I'm suggesting is, if you start to get bogged down in the Henrys or whatever, don't feel like you're a failure if you want to skip a few here and there. It wouldn't be your failure; it'd be Shakespeare's.