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I won't say I've read all the entire book (I'm leaving King John and Henry VI for some time later)--but I think I've read enough to comment on it. A good edition of Shakespeare, with a general introduction, textual notes, and illustrations (including coloured plates).
Here's my review of Hamlet:
The hero wears black, is a university student, writes poetry, studies philosophy at university. He's got a thing going with Ophelia. Horatio has his back. Following the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother, Hamlet finds himself questioning everything he had formerly believed. When some of his friends tell him they've seen a ghost, he sets out to investigate, with surprising results.
The play has a ghost, madness, melancholy poetry, meditations on suicide, self-reflexivity, radical doubt, political espionage and intrigue, rebellion, graveyard humor, a moment of Zen, a duel.
Shakespeare had a double task here: creating the fascinating mind of the prince, and then constructing a situation equal to testing his hero's estimable capacities. He succeeds at both.
Hamlet is sometimes thought of as the most "modern" of Shakespeare's plays. Among all of Shakespeare's characters, Hamlet is the one who would have been most capable of writing Shakesepeare's plays. I have heard it said that one spectator liked the play because it was "full of quotations."
I've recently re-read Othello, and think that it is one of the most "Jerry Springer-ish" of the dramas.
Other plays I'd recommend in particular:
Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of King Richard III,Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, King Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V.
Acquired Apr 20, 1991
Received in an exchange with a friend
Here's my review of Hamlet:
The hero wears black, is a university student, writes poetry, studies philosophy at university. He's got a thing going with Ophelia. Horatio has his back. Following the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother, Hamlet finds himself questioning everything he had formerly believed. When some of his friends tell him they've seen a ghost, he sets out to investigate, with surprising results.
The play has a ghost, madness, melancholy poetry, meditations on suicide, self-reflexivity, radical doubt, political espionage and intrigue, rebellion, graveyard humor, a moment of Zen, a duel.
Shakespeare had a double task here: creating the fascinating mind of the prince, and then constructing a situation equal to testing his hero's estimable capacities. He succeeds at both.
Hamlet is sometimes thought of as the most "modern" of Shakespeare's plays. Among all of Shakespeare's characters, Hamlet is the one who would have been most capable of writing Shakesepeare's plays. I have heard it said that one spectator liked the play because it was "full of quotations."
I've recently re-read Othello, and think that it is one of the most "Jerry Springer-ish" of the dramas.
Other plays I'd recommend in particular:
Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of King Richard III,Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, King Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V.
Acquired Apr 20, 1991
Received in an exchange with a friend
