Reflecting on the oeuvre of Shakespeare, I can’t shake a perverse idea: the Bard is underrated. And I think this feeling is tied to the contradictory knowledge that he is enormous, creating the master shadow in which all others dissolve. He’s the Platonic Form that has made possible, via subsequent authorial study and unconscious absorption, so many of the variations of what we consider the best in literature. The introspection and characterization of Woolf. The zaniness in Melville, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace. That ‘disease’, love, in Proust. The soul-searching and linguistic proficiency of Joyce. The paradoxical mix of nihilism and hope in McCarthy. The exuberant wordplay of Nabokov. The tragicomedy of Faulkner. Dostoevksy’s meditations on evil, ambition, and the horrifying acts of which we are capable. It’s all there, centuries prior, in the great prolepsis that is Shakespeare.

LOVE

Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.
-Cymbeline
t
tttt What you do,
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I’d have you do it ever: when you sing,
I’d have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and, for the ord’ring your affairs,
To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that, move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing, in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.
-The Winter’s Tale

Troilus: This is the monstruosity in love, lady: that the will is infinite,
and the execution confined: that the desire is boundless, and the
act a slave to limit.
Cressida: They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able,
and yet reserve an ability that they never perform: vowing more
than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth
part of one.
-Troilus and Cressida

But to be frank and give it thee again;
And yet I wish but for the thing I have.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep: The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.
-Romeo and Juliet

So in considering what Shakespeare anticipated and achieved, the underrating is almost inevitable. But I also think it’s related to the perception that reading Shakespeare is the literary equivalent of forcing yourself to eat healthier, to drag yourself to the gym, to decline a night out in order to guarantee adequate sleep. It’s good for us, so let’s get on with it (or, more often, not). Likely this sense of unpleasant edification is instilled in grade school, at which time most of us are confronted with a confusing combination of experiences upon being assigned a Shakespeare play: that of hearing the Bard’s work extolled to impossible heights by our teacher, and the disappointment of the actual, difficult, strangely-worded reading experience.

But are most of Shakespeare’s plays even edifying? And if so, edifying in what sense? Aesthetically, the answer is unequivocal, but as with the imbibing of Dostoevksy’s Underground Man, the absorption of many of these plays* with their nihilistic and misanthropic aspects can lead to feelings of deep disquiet and a heightened awareness that seems at once empowering and exquisitely desolate. For me, there’s something almost unhealthily addicting about Shakespeare; it’s as if he’s holding up a fun-house mirror in which I can see life as it almost is, or could be, or would be if it weren’t for certain social pressures or any number of complicating aspects that Shakespeare can and does control in his plotting. Or maybe it even shows life as it actually is, and me as I really am. And so I can’t turn away, seeking ever for a clearer, deeper, more complete vision of what I can’t help but feel is true and painful and intoxicating and sick and erotic and poignant and disappointing.

* e.g. Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, et al.

DEATH

This world’s a city full of straying streets,
And death’s the market-place, where each one meets.
-The Two Noble Kinsmen

ttIf I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride
And hug it in mine arms.
-Measure for Measure

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
-Richard II

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-Macbeth

In spite of the depravity he often shares with us in his plays and in spite of what has historically crept into criticism, Shakespeare is anything but moralistic. Redeemed characters generally remain problematic, and most of the wedded endings leave the audience with more discomfort than joy, aware that these relationships are doomed based on five acts of intimation. Shakespeare’s not out to steer us toward or away from something; rather, he shows us the abyss into which, being born, we all must sink—an abyss lined with delights, sparse and temporary as they may be, that encourage us to say with Falstaff: “Give me life.”

LIFE

I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life;
which if I can save, so: if not, honour comes unlooked for,
and there’s an end.
-Henry IV, Part I

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our
virtues would be proud if our faults whipp’d them not, and our
crimes would despair if they were not cherish’d by our virtues.
-All’s Well That Ends Well

Shallow: Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight
and I have seen! Ha, Sir John, said I well?
Falstaff: We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.
-Henry IV, Part II

‘Tis still a dream: or else such stuff as madmen
Tongue and brain not: either both, or nothing,
Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such
As sense cannot untie. Be what it is,
The action of my life is like it, which
I’ll keep, if but for sympathy.
-Cymbeline

“You can’t really sum that geezer up, really, in a nifty sentence. Because everything about him is contrary.” This is Noel Gallagher on Morrissey, but it could very well be describing the genius of the Bard, whose ostensible breadth of human knowledge and internal experience is nonpareil. Socrates’ unexamined life may not be worth living, but internalizing Shakespeare would certainly seem to satisfy the requirement. His plays and sonnets give the impression of containing the full range of human emotions and motivations, of existing as the Hegelian Absolute that comprises all dialectical opposites (or “contraries”, to stick with the Morrissey comparison). Reading Shakespeare, as with Proust’s novel, has been one of those impossibly rewarding experiences, provoking endless reflection on the world, on existence, on others, on myself. And yet, having finished the complete writings, I already know that Nabokov was correct in insisting that "curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it."

If the question is "do you recommend Shakespeare?" the answer would be of course, in what universe would he not be recommended?
So I guess the one that would get any conversation whatsoever would be "would you recommend I read the complete works"? Well it certainly is a ride, a journey, there's quite a bit of stuff in here. One thing I'll say is I'm still not entirely convinced of literature's claim on Shakespeare because when I read these plays there's a yearning for performance, for interpretation, for blocking, for I suppose theatrics. Even so much as reading it aloud immediately transforms it, the wordplay comes to the forefront, sentences that seem to run on too long flow like they were meant for it, everything comes alive. Shakespeare's a theater man through and through. The bit that gets lost in reverse metamorphosis from stage to page is most apparent in the comedies. If I were to dissuade someone from reading this, a few of the comedies would be why. Not only do half of them recycle the same tropes and setups, but the wordplay, the slapstick, the puns, they're placid and lifeless on the page where on stage they would flourish. Though at worst I never thought "this is bad", just that "this isn't grabbing me".
But if I were to recommend this to someone it would be for the surprises, the things you don't think would grab you, the things you might never have read on your own if it weren't part of this whole. For me this was Measure for Measure, and Coriolanus, and the histories which read like one cohesive arc when all read at once, and the sonnets, oh lord the sonnets. The sonnets are a treat after reading the 37 plays, they are the most personal connection to Shakespeare, the most candid thoughts of his that exist in print. He muses on love and death and art and insecurity and even makes dorky puns based off of his name Will, the sonnets humanize him. They flow almost as if meant to be read in the order they're presented and they act as the perfect coda to his other works.
Overall if you feel like making the plunge, I can at least assure I'm glad I did.

n  n

It all ended so fast. I feel like it's just January, but look at the calendar - it's December! You surely remember earlier in the year when I said I had put a challenge for myself. This was the Shakespeare Challenge, in which I had to read all the works known by William Shakespeare. Guess what? I finally read them all!

It started in January. I was bored and I didn't know what to read. One day I went to the library and checked out a book that contained 4 of Shakespeare's best plays. I read it and soon after I told myself I needed to read more of his works. Thus, I got another book: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 11 months after, I finally managed to read them all.

The task of reading Shakespeare's works was not as difficult or tedious as it seems to be. It took me long because I was most of the time busy and didn't have time to read, so I read them in-between classes and studying. To my surprise, I loved some of the plays, others disturbed me, and others made me laugh out loud.

The first plays I read were the most popular ones, and were the ones I enjoyes the most. The tragedies worked better for me than the comedies, with the exception of Romeo and Juliet, which I did not despise but didn't love either. My favourite ones are probably Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and A Midsummer's Night Dream.

About the historical plays, I can say they were harder to read because the tone was more serious and they were not meant to entertain, but they were worth reading all the same. I think the best ones here were the ones about Richard II and III.

As for the poems, they were good too. They were beautiful, and this is said by someone who is not used to read poetry.

I tell you, this challenge is one of the best I've put to myself. For next year, I'm not sure if I'll put more aside the Goodreads one because of my studies, but I certainly will read more classics (for example something by Jane Austen).

Romeo and Juliet — 4 stars
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — 5 stars
King Richard II — 3 stars
The Merchant of Venice — 4 stars
King Henry IV Part One — 3 stars
Much Ado About Nothing — 5 stars
Julius Caesar — 3 stars
Twelfth Night; Or, What You Will — 4 stars
Measure For Measure — 2 stars
Othello, the Moor of Venice — 4 stars
The Winter’s Tale — 5 stars
The Tempest — 5 stars

For Harold Bloom*:

Can 35 Thousand Literary Critics and 3 Million Groundlings Be Wrong? Yes.

Taking arms against Shakespeare, at this moment, is to emulate Harry Potter standing up to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Simply opposing Lord V-- won't end him. The Shakespeare epiphenomenon will go on, doubtless for some time, as J. R. R. Tolkien did, and then wane. Or so one can hope.

The official newspaper of our dominant counter-culture, The New York Times, has been startled by Shakespeare's plays into establishing a new policy for its not very literate book review. Rather than crowd out the Grishams, Clancys, Crichtons, Kings, Rowlings and other vastly popular prose fictions on its fiction bestseller list, the Shakespeare plays will now lead a separate theatre list. William Shakespeare, the chronicler of such characters as "Hamlet" and "King Lear," thus has an unusual distinction: he has changed the policy of the policy-maker.

Imaginative Vision

I read new dramatic literature, when I can find some of any value, but had not tried Shakespeare until now. I have just concluded "The Comedy of Errors," purportedly the funniest of the lot. Though the play is not well written, that is not in itself a crucial liability. It is much better to see the movie, "The Wizard of Oz," than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision. "The Comedy of Errors" does not, so that one needs to look elsewhere for the play's remarkable success. Such speculation should follow an account of how and why "The Comedy of Errors" asks to be read.

The ultimate model for "The Comedy of Errors" is "Menaechmi" by Plautus, performed in Ancient Rome. The play depicts the mistaken identity of a set of twins named Menaechmus. But Plautus' play, still quite performable, was a Roman musical, not an Elizabethan comedy. Shakespeare has taken "Menaechmi" and re-seen it in the silly mirror of slapstick. The resultant blend of mistaken identities with cheesy Elizabethan idiocy may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of theatregoers and their parents desire and welcome at this time.

In what follows, I may at times indicate some of the inadequacies of "The Comedy of Errors." But I will keep in mind that a host are watching it who simply will not watch superior fare, such as Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist" or the "Tamburlaine" plays of Christopher Marlowe. Is it better that they watch Shakespeare than not watch at all? Will they advance from Shakespeare to more difficult pleasures? One doubts both possibilities.

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Rest is available at [http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/courses/205...]

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*This review is a spoof of Bloom's attack on JK Rowling, which can be found here.

I should also mention that I love Shakespeare. I don't think he'll mind me bringing down his 4.75 average rating too much.

My reading Shakespeare journey is complete!

I started with the plays back in 2010, and then again in 2015. It took me until the end of 2018 to finish all of the plays, and it was quite an amazing journey. I found that I am a sucker for the tragedies but don't often love the comedies. Histories were hit and miss, I loved Henry the Fourth Parts I & II, Henry V and Richard III. In fact, Richard III is in the running for my all time favourite, up there with Macbeth and King Lear. I have a side project to watch adaptations of all the plays, which is taking longer than I thought (some aren't done very often), but it's been a fun experience as well.

After I finished the plays, I took a break from reading Shakespeare. Than in 2019 I thought it was time to finish off the complete works! So I tucked into reading the sonnets and the poems, and the last thing to read was The Phoenix and Turtle (just 1 page!) on April 23rd - Shakespeare's Birthday! It felt like a fitting time to complete the journey.

Of course I loved it. I have a functional hardcover from college, this one, and miscellaneous paperbacks from high school which I suppose I could get rid of. Will is my man. This is what having a crush on your seventh-grade English teacher leads to: Bardolatry. [thanks for that word, [author:Lauren Baratz-Logsted|27212]

I am going to try to read this entire book over the course of 2016, following Matthew J. Franck's 2016 Shakespeare In A Year reading plan. (Hat tip to Emily for letting me know this exists!) I've only ever read maybe eight or ten different Shakespeare plays, and other than a re-read of Hamlet in 2011 while preparing to read Infinite Jest I don't think I've ever picked one up outside of a classroom setting.

This review is a work in progress. I'll try to update it each time I finish a play.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona: This is believed to be the earliest, or one of the earliest, of Shakespeare's plays, and it shows. It is...not very good. It has a lot of elements that will appear again in other Shakespeare plays, and there are definitely some funny and clever moments, but the last act is awful. The conflict just falls away! All friendships and romantic relationships are restored! This one is really only interesting for the glimpses of what Shakespeare will become.

The Taming of the Shrew: Oof, another rough one. It's clearly more developed than The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but this play hinges entirely on a man gaslighting an overly opinionated woman until she turns into a submissive wife. There's also the somewhat bizarre fact that this is two plays rolled up into one, with the opening act taking place in a tavern, setting up the staging of a play-within-a-play, and then never returning to the characters in the tavern.

1, 2, 3 Henry VI: This was my first time reading any of Shakespeare's history plays, and this was also the first time I had regrets about buying the inexpensive but bare-bones Oxford Shakespeare, which does not contain any footnotes. I definitely know more about the Wars of the Roses now than I did before reading these three plays, but...not by much. A lot went over my head, and there were so many different characters that I had a hard time keeping track of everyone. I suspect the history plays are going to be an ongoing slog for me.

Titus Andronicus: While it was refreshing to get a break after three history plays in a row, Titus Andronicus is pretty much a nonstop bloodbath. I enjoyed parts of it, especially toward the end when Titus begins getting his revenge, but there's a rape scene, multiple mutilations, probably an even higher body count than 1, 2, and 3 Henry combined, and one single black character who is, cringeworthily, pretty much evil incarnate.

Richard III: This play continues the action of the three Henry VI plays. It is, I think, a better-written and more interesting play than its predecessors, but it's also the play that totally killed my momentum. I fell behind schedule for the first time since starting this project, and after finishing the play a few days late I decided to give myself "a short break" that lasted almost the entire rest of the month of March.

Edward III: I am skipping this one for now. Its authorship is contested - Shakespeare probably only wrote portions of it at most - and the thought of facing another history play kept extending my "short break." I'll try to come back to this one later, but given the questions about its authorship, I won't feel too guilty if I never do get around to it.

Comedy of Errors: This play is really funny and silly and was a welcome point of return after taking a few weeks off. It's about two pairs of estranged twins and ongoing cases of mistaken identities. It's a little frustrating in that all four of them know they have a twin, and the two from Syracuse should have been able to put things together that they were getting the royal treatment in Ephesus because people were mistaking them for their twins, but nobody makes these connections until the very end. Nevertheless, this was probably the first play of this Shakespeare project that I fully enjoyed.

Ya'll already knew this was coming because I did the same thing for Oscar but these compilations of my reviews are so damn satisfying to me.

The Comedies
• As You Like It
• The Comedy of Errors
• Love’s Labour’s Lost
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• A Midsummer Nights’ Dream
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Taming of the Shrew
• Twelfth Night
• Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Tragedies
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus
• Romeo and Juliet
• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra

The Histories
• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV Part 1
• Henry IV Part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI Part 1
• Henry VI Part 2
• Henry VI Part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII

The Late Romances
• Cymbeline
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• The Tempest
• The Two Noble Kinsmen

The Problem Plays
• All’s Well That Ends Well
• Measure for Measure
• The Merchant of Venice
• Timon of Athens
• Troilus and Cressida
• The Winter’s Tale

The Poetry
• The Sonnets
• A Lover’s Complaint
• The Narrative Poems

It took me four years to finish Willie's entire body of work, and even though there were some ups and downs, ultimately, I am more than happy that I followed through with this project. I learned so much along the way (about literature, about England, about myself, about reviewing books, about researching and doing secondary reading). Willie's works are truly a treasure.

The Winter’s Tale: Misturaram as maluquices de Othello e King Lear mas com história tipo conto de fadas em que nada corre realmente mal nem nada é explorado a fundo. A Hermione compete contra o Harry Potter em dar nomes, porque aqui ela tem os filhos Mamillius e Perdita. Esta é a peça da famosa didascália "he exits, pursued by a bear".

--

Recomendo grandemente conhecer no geral as peças de Shakespeare. Talvez não todas, e certamente não as lendo de seguida, mas o homem realmente era um génio de escrita e há muitos trabalhos posteriores e até contemporâneos que referenciam estas obras. As peças históricas são definitivamente um Must Watch por ordem genealógica das personagens, porque não só são bom drama, como também dão a conhecer momentos importantes da história inglesa, como a Guerra das Rosas. Richard III é um espetáculo para se seguir nestas peças que recriam momentos marcantes da idade média do país.
As tragédias são talvez as peças mais reaproveitadas de Shakespeare, com Hamlet a ser enfiada no The Lion King ou King Lear a ser reestruturada para Ran (乱). Até em fanfiction temos malta a referenciar esta série de peças. Lidas de seguida acabam por ser um bocado formulaicas (...e toda a gente morre no fim de maneiras malucas! wow) mas quase todas têm toques distintivos e exploram temas da sociedade na altura.
As comédias foram a parte menos interessante mas não por isso más. O humor porco e banter que Shakespeare usa é sempre lindo, e até nem está confinado a estas peças. Devido ao necessário final feliz e por serem um bocado mais coisa para pipoca, não exploram temas tão profundamente como as tragédias e tornam-se menos interessantes e distintivas.

Quanto a este livro em si, é mais algo para referenciar. Apreciei bastante as notas "introdutórias" às peças mas são sempre melhor lidas no fim delas, quando já sabes a que personagens se referem. Tem uma boa introdução ao homem em si e explicações das diferenças de pronúncia na altura e hoje em dia. Muita coisa rimava na altura que hoje já não pela evolução da língua. Apesar disto usei notas online das peças para as ir compreendendo porque realmente o inglês antigo é-me bastante alienígena e há bastantas referências a temas e mitologias que desconhecia.

Have I read this book? Only part of it.

Even so, why argue about that rating?

See bottom of review for a list of the plays in order

What follows is little more than the GoodReads description of the edition pictured. But I feel I can do that, since I wrote the description.

This tome includes all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, as well as his poems and sonnets. It was produced "for college students in the hope that it will help them to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the works for themselves. It is not intended for the scholar ..."

Two-column format throughout.

Introductory Material (90 pages):
1. The Universality of Shakespeare
2. Records of the Life of Shakespeare
3. Shakespeare's England
4. Elizabethan Drama
5. The Elizabethan Playhouse
6. The Study of the Text
7. The Development of Shakespeare's Art
8. Shakespeare and the Critics
9. Shakespearean Scholarship and Criticism 1900-1950

Plates:
16 full-page Halftone Reproductions
6 full-page Line Cuts
9 pages of Notes on the Plates

The Plays:
Generally in order of writing.
Each play has its own Introduction
Footnotes at the bottom of the columns. This makes them both handy and unobtrusive. Liked by this reader.

Appendices follow The Poems:
30 Appendices in about the same number of pages; these deal with a wide variety of topics, everything from "The Melancholic Humor" to "Cuckolds and Horns" to "Hawks and Hawking".

I don't know how it compares with other editions of Shakespeare's works. It is the one I have.

Here are Shakespeare's 37 plays, in the order presented in this edition. This is the best guess (at the time the edition was printed) of the order in which they were written, when on my no-longer-young journey I read the play, and links to my review. (It will take several years for this quest to be completed.)

1. The First Part of King Henry the Sixtht
2. The Second Part of King Henry the Sixtht
3. The Third Part of King Henry the Sixtht
4. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third _2017_Apr.t
5. The Comedy of Errorst
6. The Tragedy of Titus Andronicust
7. The Taming of the Shrew _2017_Apr.t
8. The Two Gentlemen of Veronat
9. Love's Labor's Lostt
10. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second _2016_Aug.t
11. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliett
12. A Midsummer Night's Dream _2014_Feb.t
13. The Life and Death of King John _2016_Apr.t
14. The Merchant of Venicet
15. The First Part of King Henry the Fourtht
16. The Second Part of King Henry the Fourtht
17. Much Ado About Nothingt _2016_Jan.t
18. The Life of King Henry the Fiftht
19. As You Like It _2015_Feb.t
20. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar _2017_Oct.t
21. Twelfth Night; or What You Willt
22. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarkt
23. The Merry Wives of Windsort
24. The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressidat
25. All's Well That Ends Well _2015_June
26. The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venicet
27. Measure For Measuret
28. The Tragedy of King Leart
29. The Tragedy of Macbetht
30. The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatrat
31. The Tragedy of Coriolanust
32. Timon of Athenst
33. Pericles _2016_Oct.t
34. Cymbelinet
35. The Winter's Talet
36. The Tempest _2017_July
37. The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Next library review: Shakespeare: The world as stage Bill Bryson

I read almost all of this book in high school. Had already read a few of Shakespeare's plays in other books/editions. This is a terrific collection and I do highly recommend it. I'm especially fond of it. Although, reading each of his works in different editions is perfectly ok as well, and I've read and enjoyed other versions too. But read him!; nobody is greater.