Read thus far:
The Taming of the Shrew
As You Like It
Twelfth Night
Measure for Measure
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Ceasar
Hamlet
Othello
Macbeth
The Tempest
King Lear
Various sonnets

To read:
The Comedy of Errors
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love's Labor's Lost
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing (seen)
Troilus and Cressida
All's Well That Ends Well
Henry VI: 1, 2, 3
Richard III (seen)
King John
Richard II
Henry IV: 1, 2
Henry V
Henry VIII
Titus Andronicus
Antony and Cleopatra (seen)
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
Two Noble Kinsmen
Venus and Adonis
Rape of Lucrece
the other Sonnets

To date, over the course of 2 quarters on Shakespeare I have read 8 of his plays. Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, & Macbeth. Through other classes I read Romeo & Juliet and Othello. So about 10 total now, and a few rereads. I plan to read the rest outside of class.

Hellova tome, but worth having if you ever need to study or casually reference the works of William Shakespeare

Altogether too big a book to lug around and too nice a book to make notes in the margins. I prefer the Signet editions of Shakespeare's plays for both those reasons and also because the littler books are accompanied by learned essays from the most famous commentators in the 400 years since Shakespeare's death. And because text explication is included at the bottom of each page. As a person who reads footnotes I don't want to be constantly flipping to the back of the book. Too fatiguing.

Looks great on the shelf, though.

A Shakespeare play is only as good as its edition. Fortunately, the Riverside Shakespeare maximizes the positive qualities of both the second (good) quarto and the first folio, borrowing the best elements from both versions of the play to create a new authoritative edition. The introductions to the plays, as well as the footnotes and endnotes, are both insightful and delightful to study. If you love Shakespeare or Shagspear, Shaksper, whatever you want to call him (he wasn't very particular), then you will love the Riverside Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare, you either love him or hate him (or, rather, his works). This rating/review is based on this particular release which is an all-inclusive, hard-cover book: every tragedy, every comedy, every sonnet ever attributed to Shakespeare. The font is necessarily small but not overly so, and the pages are thin to limit the weight of the book. It is still heavy - college lit students everywhere gripe about it - but the full, unabridged text is worth the weight and hassle.

It's taken me more than a year to read this I've been drifting in and out. It is of course massive. Mostly ploughed through it this year.

Does it even make sense to review Shakespeare? I think it does. But obviously it's impossible to speak as if this is absolved of context. There are of course people who don't know Bill and don't know about him but they were likely not raised in the UK, as I was. I'm interested in some aspects of that pretence though. Shakespeare is solidly at the centre of English writing and there's a lot of political scaffolding attached to that. Approaching it as if I _could_ answer the question 'do you recommend reading Shakespeare?' is a caprice I'm into.

Quick paragraph on editions - I got a hard copy of the Arden Shakespeare; it doesn't have annotations / footnotes; I actually read an ereader version called 'the complete works', based on the 1974 Riverside Edition. 99p. The reason I read it on an ereader is because the Arden Shakespeare is too big to read on my lap, and I didn't want to spend several months reading it on my desk. I am an idiot and don't think about these things, and habitually get a physical copy. I'd recommend not doing that because it's 2024 and we can have our massive books and read them in comfortable places, which in this context is the cake we are having and eating. I imagine an annotated edition would be larger. I imagine it would be easier to read also.

So there's a couple of points I'd like to make here which are kind of about the hermeneutics of Shakespeare, if I might be so bold. Shakespeare is not a holy text in the sense of there being a religious tradition but his work is certainly revered by the English establishment, and his work is often central to English identity. I think he's equally a large part of British identity, which is subtly different in ways I won't expand on here. In literary-cultural terms, Shakespeare is one of English writing's most important names.

A part of that relationship is how Shakespeare is writing in a form of English that is... coextensive with contemporary English. And I think it's an important point that I'll come back to - the language of Shakespeare is not the same that I speak, and however many people speak, in the 21st century. His is the beginnings of where the language is now but it is not the same. There are plenty of wee differences - the embedded sexism, plenty of words that have fallen into disuse and are archaic relative to Shakespeare's time. But there are differences at a level of grammar and syntax. The construction "Let us to..." is common and in contemporary English we'd have a verb in there but Bill doesn't need one. And the reason he doesn't need one is because his English is different to ours.

I'd imagine some readers would groan at this as a point so obvious as to be facile. But what I want to establish is that there's a lot about Shakespeare that's prohibitive to many readers. I read an edition without footnotes or annotations and that made a lot of it hard. I read an edition in English that is not the same modern English I know and use, and that made a lot of it hard to read. Part of the elegance of Shakespeare lies in the eldritch, ornate, rigorously mutable syntax. A large part of what renders Shakespeare prohibitive lies in precisely his mastery, and also his mastery of an English that is uncannily dissimilar to ours.

There's a political ramification that doubles back into a reading as well. So Shakespeare, in some senses, represents the peak of English writing to the world. And some of that is circumstantial. But some of it is related to the content. I read that Shakespeare is the beginnings of 'the history of England / Britain'. Prior to this the culture (writing) does not reflect the politics (lineage of monarchy). I think it's worth adjoining to that a context - Shakespeare is part of how the British establishment identifies itself. I mean that there are aspects, especially of the toothless histories (which are most of them), which are small-c conservative, and also big-c Conservative. Clueless French antagonists, dullard Welshmen, astonishingly outmoded antisemitism (not just Shylock - I think every mention of Jews is negative in a way that should be embarrassing for a national author).

It's not a particularly incisive criticism to say 'old writer is a bit racist' but my point is that Shakespeare reflects a part-jingoistic view of Britain itself, a Britain that writes about its own monarchy in effusive terms. And Shakespeare historically sits in the middle of some very volatile history that culminated in a republic (and then, notoriously, conservative recidivism took over and plagued the country every since). The way the culture embodies the politics is important and Shakespeare's history and politics tends towards an uncritical approach to royalty.

And there are relative criticisms - it's not fawningly positive. But in contemporary times Shakespeare represents a status quo with regards the political systems of the UK. Our national writer doesn't write women well and is pretty racist - though tellingly not always as racist as you might expect towards people we'd now call black.

I don't want this to seem like a shallow and lazy criticism - like 'old writers context was different and bad, boo'. I mean that part of the reason Shakespeare is 'the national writer' is because he writes the nation, he embodies conservative values that have been the political status quote since the 1600s.

And back to the prohibitive writing - it's telling also that the national writer is almost unbearably codified. It's a form of English that requires a lot of context and intellectual overhead to dig into. No surprise that a country ridden with class and elitism in its political structures should have a national writer who is largely opaque to most readers of the language _in its own country_ - let alone folk reading this in second languages etc.

We give this to children and expect them to understand it. I enjoyed it as a wain. But it's _difficult_ to read and young people, especially those who aren't that engaged with historical literature, are liable to end up feeling stupid when exposed to it. Most contemporaries (Johnson, Marlow, Greene etc) of Shakespeare are for specialists - degree + level academics or those with a particular bent. And that seems appropriate - there's a lot of context that makes that writing difficult. Plonking a difficult writer in the centre of our literary culture is... well, it's very classically English. It's wrong-headed.

Now I've said all that and it sounds like I'm not a fan of Shakespeare. That's not true. I struggled with a lot of this and I really should've read it more slowly. More on that in a sec. But it's all high quality. It's all densely suffused with a poetic style that is incisive and persuasive. It'll be weird reading other things now because I've lived with this very sing-songy flow for a few months. Instantly familiar and yet enormously durable. The stories are largely amazing, even if I could do with less 'the social tribunal' and 'alienated, hero returns in disguise' plots. I genuinely look forward to coming back to it - to see if I still find Timon a weirdly anxious, freighted little bitch, to see if Henry VI changed from a solid hero in part 1 to a bumbling fool in part 3, to see if I still read Lady Macbeth as a conniving dogshit... etc. These are living, full-bloodied people, characters who all sing by Shakespeare's hand but each with a subtly different tenor. For all the difficulty of reading this - and I have to stress, I feel like that isn't talked about enough - there's plenty to return to.

On how to read this - so I'm not going to presume to tell people how to read this. What I can tell you is that my way of reading didn't behove me well. I basically read it obsessively, rushing through, with a view to finishing it quickly. I brushed over parts. What I _should've_ done was to read it sparingly and slowly. I'll probably go for a play every other month or something next - rather than being paralysed by the 'must finish' principle, I'll do it at leisure. Because there's so much detail, constantly overwhelmingly detailed, I wolfed it down and didn't digest it well. I should probably read an annotated version, or at least give myself space to look up passages (there's no shortage of help online). It's a sumptuous complexity and I'd not recommend rushing, unless you're confident and familiar - the plays I've acted in as a teenager were more familiar than the ones that were new to me.

On consistency - by and large it's all worth reading. Much of the histories is dry, and much of the comedies are not that funny but principally there's very little that isn't woven with Shakespeare's astonishing capacity for these vocal rhythms that drill into your head (I had dreams in iambic pentameter). It's very noticeable where a play is questionably a Shakespeare play or where Bill has a lessened authorial voice (Henry VIII) but even so those act as contrast and relief from the other plays.

So really there's two points here - there's a strong political motivation to his elevation as 'our national writer' and that is often rum; but there's also a writer who is bastard complex, wily and witty and sharp and illuminating and often plain dumb, and that's worth reading. But doubly so worth reading with a view to dismantling the systems that elevate Shakespeare the nationalist, the maker of cheap jokes about the French, the antisemite.

I appreciate that a lot of what I've said here is covered at length everywhere because there is nothing left to say about Shakespeare. But I've said it now.

tl;dr - cracking book, yeah, recommend.

Need a comprehensive volume of all of Shakespeare's works? This book is for you.

How about a security system? I guarantee any burglar you bash over the head with this book is going to have at least a concussion, if not brain damage.

What about a doorstop? do you live in a drafty house with doors slamming all the time? You need one of these then, any door parked behind this tome is going nowhere.

Got kids? Are they too big for a high chair but still a little too short for a regular chair? Park one of these babies under their butt with a pillow on top. Problem solved!

Great literature with multiple household uses! I'd like to see a Kindle edition try and do that.

The plays I have read thus far:

Histories:

Richard II 3 1/2 stars My first Shakespeare play. I liked it, but it was hard to read.

1 Henry IV 5 Stars One of my favorite Shakespeare plays. Right mix of poetry and prose, and I love the men in it!

Tragedies:

Antony and Cleopatra 4 stars. Another of my favorites. The relationships that the reader establishes with characters in this play are intense. I also liked that the "biggest affair in all of literature" was not overly pornographic.

King Lear 3 1/2 stars It was interesting, intriguing, etc. But gross and disturbing in too many parts.

Romeo and Juliet 4 stars. Everyone knows this is a great play. I must say that Romeo sickens me, though. Whenever I read his lover lines, I get a distinct curl in my lip.

Comedies:

Midsummer's Night Dream 3 1/2 stars. Cute, fun, light. I felt like I had wasted my time after reading it, though. Perhaps my feelings of disgust was because I had to read it in 4 hours before class.

Measure for Measure 3 stars. Dark, disturbing, and troublesome. I felt very dark after reading this play.
The Tempest 5 stars. Fun, intriguing, good morals, magical. I would love to see this one performed. Prospero is my hero!

Poems:

Venus and Adonis 4 stars for writing, 1 star for my preference. Umm...pornographic... Yeah, to paraphrase Kate from NCIS, I am going to hell just for reading this poem.

Some of the Sonnets 4 stars for writing, 3 stars my preference. Although I love many romance novels, I do not care for desperation.

So far I've read:
- Hamlet (November 2009
- King Lear (January 2009)
- Macbeth (December 2009)
- Measure for Measure (March 2012)
- Merchant of Venice (November 2009; March 2012)
- Much Ado about Nothing (March 2010)
- Othello (October 2009)

- Venus and Adonis (April 2011)
- Sonnets (majority) (January-February 2011)

My copy is highlighted, underlined, and covered in markings of a student exploring her love of the written word. Still, I pull my copy from the shelf and explore, re-read, and revel in the genius of Shakespeare. Every person who loves to write should also love to read and this is a must-halve for your bookshelf!

Finished off with The life of King Henry the Eighth. I read it side by side with the Yale edition published in 1925 and edited by John M. Berdan and Tucker Brooke because I like how the Yale edition plays are published in individual 4" x 6" blue cloth-covered volumes that you can hold easily in your hands. People get all caught up in studying Shakespeare, and I think that sometimes that gets in the way of remembering that the reason he's lasted this long is because he's a wonderful storyteller. What I like about him is how I'll be reading him and there's the action, and the story all moving along, and then Blammo, his characters do something that is so completely true and right to the heart of how people think and act, and those moments are magical.