*i didn't actually read this collection: this book is being used as "all shakespeare ever written."*

after finishing a blissful little re read of The Tempest, i hopped over to goodreads to review it... and literally experienced an existential crisis.



why, you may ask? i realized -horror of horrors- i haven't shelved a single shakespeare play on here. and im walking around saying he's my favorite author!!!

so i compiled, firstly, a list of the shakespeare i've read, so i could shelve and review it. let's see.

1. The Tempest
2. Julius Caesar
3. Macbeth
4. The Taming of the Shrew
5. Romeo and Juliet

hm. it feels like i've read more than that. i guess because i've seen them performed or read abridged versions of them. ah.



and that's when i had a ✨brilliant idea!✨ i could make this year *drumroll* The Year Of The Great Shakespeare Tbr!



truly a great plan, considering i already have a huge tbr, am currently in a reading slump, and have school things to read, not to mention im in multiple plays and have a million other miscellaneous things to do right now. and god knows what this year is even going to look like anyways. but i decided to go for it.

here is my grand plan.

☽ read the original versions of ☾
-As You Like It
-Much Ado About Nothing
-A Midsummer Nights Dream
-The Two Noble Kinsman
-A Winter's Tale
-Hamlet
-Othello
-Antony and Cleopatra
-Henry VIII
-The Merry Wives of Windsor

☽ memorize a monologue from ☾
- A Midsummer Nights Dream or Much Ado About Nothing
- The Two Noble Kinsman (there's this great lesbian romance monologue from a bi character i loveeee and need to learn)
-Hamlet or Macbeth depending on what i find and like. then, what with my marc antony speech, i will have a comedic, romantic, historic, and tragic monologue!

*theater nerd moment* heh

anyways. on with the plan:

☽ read retellings of/acquire more knowledge of ☾
-Pericles, Prince Of Tyre
-The Two Gentlemen of Verona
-All's Well That Ends Well
-Titus Andronicus
-The Merchant Of Venice
-All the Henrys (or Henries? Idk)
-King Lear

☽ ignore ☾
-King John
-Corialanus
-Anything I Forgot

and there you are. the grand will-use-up-valuble-time-until-i-forget-about-it-and-it-is-never-seen-again plan!! woohoo!



also, i have a feeling a lot of my "read the original versions of" books will transfer to the last list over time. just to prepare you for that.

tl;dr: im going to try (and fail) to read, memorize, and learn about more shakespeare. despite my busy schedule and already-huge tbr. THIS IS A VERY BAD IDEA. KIDS, DONT TRY THIS AT HOME.

I have not finished this yet, although David gave it to me for Christmas about 15 years ago (clearly not the Kindle edition, but I can't seem to change that). Some of my favorites are Henry V, Hamlet and King Lear. I don't care so much for the comedies. I think everyone should read Shakespeare to know what good writing is, and to get an idea of the impact of human behavior for better and for worse. There are so many wonderful and relevant lines that I wish I could commit more to memory. During the recent burst of animosity over the BYU v. U of U football game I posted this quote from Fluellen of Henry V in our home:
If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating
coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also,
look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating
coxcomb? in your own conscience, now?

That's what I call staying power. Written in the 16th and as relevant as ever. Lets us know how little human nature has evolved. Shakespeare is just full of memorable characters and amazing lines.

Young Frankie in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes says that "Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes; you can never have too much." It's a compliment both to the poet and the potato, and I agree wholeheartedly. To read the ol' Swan of Avon straight through has, I believe, made me legitimately smarter, and not just in a know-more-stuff-in-my-chosen-profession sense, but in a understand-the-world-around-me sense. Eliot says that Shakespeare and Dante "divided the world between them, and there is no third." So yeah, he's good.
Anyway, here's a little something I wrote for the kids in my school's creative writing club:

The Ballad of Billy S.

this is the rule: if you can kill
a guy just by dropping
someone's "Collected Works" on him,
the author is a king

because if we collect your works,
it follows that you're good
and if you're writing all that much
we'll read you (or, we should)

and Ceasars come and Ceasars go
but "et tu, Brute?" endures
and what has stood time's test must be
'gainst ipads, too, secure.

"it cannot be coincidence"
(his chant was like a seer's)
"it flows in such easy iambs:
The Bard: William Shakespeare."

People always complain that the language is hard to read but, while it is easier to watch than read his works, the effort is worth the reward. The poetry and craftmanship of his words are magical. So emotive. He somehow speaks straight to the soul. Who else would be remembered so fondly after so long a time?

One of the ten best books I've ever read.

Well that was a quick read--for Yale’s recently departed Harold Bloom, who could read 400 pages an hour and recall them with his photographic memory. Long ago I vowed to read all of Shakespeare as I thought it would get easier and more rewarding with age. So I recently bought Longman’s door stop because I liked the binding and it includes 200+ pages of commentary by Shakespearean scholar David Bevington. One of my 2020 New Year’s resolutions is to read at least one or two works a year, so I will be gradually adding entries to this review.

“HAMLET” 5 January 2020
I decided to start with “Hamlet” because I just read a biography of John Quincy Adams and it was his favorite work. At 4000 lines, it is Shaekespeare’s longest play. Harold Bloom considers “Hamlet” to be “the most extraordinary single work of Western literature that I have ever read” (2003 PBS interview).

Reading “Hamlet” cold without brushing up on my Elizabethan English made for tough sledding, but my first reward was discovering that my favorite literary quote came from this work: “This above all: to thine own self be true” (1.3). I still can’t appreciate iambic pentameter, but I know a good couplet when I see it:
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. (3.4)
To my great surprise, neither of these lines are uttered by Hamlet.

I didn’t find Bevington’s supporting commentary to be as enlightening as I had expected, so I then read Bloom’s 17 pages on Hamlet in “How to Read and Why” (2000). Bloom’s final thought is my favorite, “Whether we ourselves expect annihilation or resurrection, we are likely to end caring about our name. Hamlet, the most charismatic and intelligent of all fictive characters, prefigures our hopes for courage at our common end” (p. 217-8).

I concluded my reintroduction to Shakespeare by watching Lawrence Oliver’s wonderful interpretation and modest abbreviation of “Hamlet” (1948). Pure joy. Let me know if you find a better way to spend 2.5 hours on YouTube!

Celebrity Death Match Special: The Complete Works of Shakespeare versus Deep Learning

Ubergeek Andrej Karpathy had the bright idea of training a recurrent neural network on the complete works of Shakespeare. It produces remarkably good output for an algorithm which not only knows nothing about Shakespeare, but can't even tell a noun from a verb! Here is the first of the two samples he gives:

PANDARUS:
Alas, I think he shall be come approached and the day
When little srain would be attain'd into being never fed,
And who is but a chain and subjects of his death,
I should not sleep.

Second Senator:
They are away this miseries, produced upon my soul,
Breaking and strongly should be buried, when I perish
The earth and thoughts of many states.

DUKE VINCENTIO:
Well, your wit is in the care of side and that.

Second Lord:
They would be ruled after this chamber, and
my fair nues begun out of the fact, to be conveyed,
Whose noble souls I'll have the heart of the wars.

Clown:
Come, sir, I will make did behold your worship.

VIOLA:
I'll drink it.
____________________

The Karpathy article is excellent, and if you're at all geeky yourself I strongly recommend looking at it. The examples are impressive: the random Shakespeare is good, but the random algebraic geometry and random Linux kernel code are even better.

This is NOT The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition

The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition was published in hardback in 1997. The first edition was published in 1974. This electronic version contains nothing but the texts of the plays from the first edition. The title page of this electronic version states, "based on the 1974 Riverside Edition." When I took a course on Shakespeare in my second year of undergrad studies in 1 985, we used the original first edition (I do not know which printing of the first edition we used. About a year ago I bought the first edition in hard copy, used and in good condition (sixth printing, with corrections and additions) for only $4.00 because all of my books were destroyed in an apartment fire in early 1986. The pages of the first edition are 10 inches tall and nearly eight inches wide, with thin (but not extremely thin) paper. It is 1,923 pages long and contains a 26 page general introduction, followed by an 18 page section titled Shakespeare's Text. That section begins with several quotes of text familiar to Shakespeare readers, such as "[m]ost readers know that MacBeth, reproached by Lady MacBeth for seeming cowardice, asserts, 'I dare doo all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none,'" and other such examples. After four more examples, the essay states': " What most readers are not aware of, however, is that none of these familiar lines appeared in the original, basic texts in exactly the same form here quoted; in fact, each contains one or more amended words designed to restore meaning to an otherwise corrupt passage. " This section of the first edition is followed by a chronology of texts and sources. Each play has an introduction of its own introduction. The first full-length page of The Comedy of Errors contains 39 footnotes making it possible to understand the text (e.g., "making amain" means "proceeding at full speed"; "gave healthful advice" means advice saving the lives of shipwracl'd guests, etc.).
The second edition 2,057 pages long, with additional information. It is available used in good or very good condition on Amazon and through other outlets for a mere $10.00. I could not possibly understand what I am reading without those notes and all of the other helpful information, all of which is missing from this electronic version falsely advertised as the second edition.

https://goodticklebrain.com/home/2020...

I never want to have to read this entire thing cover from cover ever again. Titus Andronicus was really good though.

Edward III

For anyone saying, "Huh?" right now, let me say that EIII is one of the "Apocryphal Plays" that have been credited wholly or in part to Shakespeare at one time or another but that do not have conclusive proof of authorship by Big Bill Rattlepike. In the Second Edition of the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, the whole text of all plays the editors are convinced Shakespeare had a hand in is printed. This means that they have made the brave decision to include Edward III, convinced as they are that Shakepeare wrote up to four scenes in the play. The text has undergone every stylistic and vocubulary test known to scholarship and there is a growing consensus that Shakespeare wrote some, at least, of this play. Now, I don't know anything about these tests, but if you'd asked me which scenes stood out as the best, I'd have picked the four that the present editors claim were by Big Bill the Bard.

The play is a straightforward history, showing Edward the III first having trouble with the Scots then invading France, where his son gets caught, massively outnumbered, in a valley surrounded by hills...Cue ridiculous triumph-against-the-odds...

Between the two are some scenes where the King meets an exceptionally attractive member of the Nobility and woos her, despite being already married himself. These scenes raise the bar in terms of the language used and feeling expressed and are reminiscent of numerous similar scenes by Shakespeare - I could easily believe he wrote them. Later, the Prince of Wales, pensive before apparently insurmountable odds of battle, finds courage whilst meditating on the inevitability of death. Once again these passages are reminiscent of other famous Shakespeare scenes.

The plot is reminiscent of Henry V and I can easily imagine that Shakespeare took this play and used it as the model for that later, greater and entirely solo effort.

What Edward III lacks are depth of characterisation, depth of feeling conveyed by the language (outside the four scenes mentioned above) and a unity in the whole. The early part with Edward's attempted adultery seems disconnected from the subsequent invasion of France.

Even taken alone, Henry V eliminates all these problems.

This play illustrates to me the genius of Shakespeare: he was able to take a populist form that demanded a continuous supply of fresh material that allowed little time for rehearsal and create work that showed such psychological and dramatic insight in such glorious language that it transcended his era to the extent of him being widely considered the best Britsh playwright ever to have lived, 400 years later.

The Merchant of Venice

Well that was - short! Also, fun. It's a mess of a play in some respects - the plotting and structure are a muddle. The dramatic crisis occurs in act 4, leaving the entire last act over to the kind of banter and romantical silliness typified by As You Like It's forest scenes, which could feel anti-climactic if not played up to the hilt in performance, because when it come down to it,this play is dominated by Shylock. So much so that it ended up also popularly known by the alternative title The Jew of Venice and, in an era when actors dominated performance decisions, frequently curtailed at the end of act 4 when Shylock's part is over and the dramatic crisis is resolved.

This seems typical of the comedies, where much of the plot is an excuse to get a bunch of people into romantic shenanigans and the women into disguise as men, with little of the concern for pace or structure that we tend to demand of an genre of film these days. It's not that he couldn't do it - Richard III and Hamlet, even if bloated in places, certainly show how to organise things and Henry V doesn't even have much excess verbiage. MacBeth (aided no doubt by Middleton's many interventions) is superbly constructed and never slow - hence I conclude that Shakespeare was all about the laughs in his early comedies and never mind the preposterousness or the plots that go away for three acts.

There is no escaping the fact that Shylock dominates this play; his character is the only one developed to any real depth and the fact that the debate rages to this day as to whether Shakespeare and his contemporary audiences would have seen him as sympathetic or merely a pantomime villain testifies to this. Because a case can be made either way, villain or victim it seems plain to me that what we have is a sympathetic antagonist - not a monster everybody loves to hate but a human whose flaws in the end bring his own downfall in the very definition of Shakespearean Tragedy. He's abused and railed against for doing what Christians won't whilst at the same time being patronised by the very same people because he is fulfilling an essential function in a market economy and earning a living from it. When the opportunity arises he must have revenge, not the moral high ground of magnanimity and mercy - there-in lies the seed of his destruction.

It's hard not to compare this with Jonson, given that they were contemporaries and I recently finished a five play volume by one of the men said to have drunk Shakespeare into the fever that killed him. The contrasts are in fact stronger - Jonson being more prosaic, less witty in banter and more prone to showing off his learning, especially by quoting Latin and more concerned with "ordinary" folk than the rich and powerful. Shakespeare here also shows his mastery of character (if only in the form of Shylock) whilst the best of Jonson is much more in the way of caricature.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

This play doesn't seem to have enjoyed much popularity in my (adult) lifetime - I can't remember hearing about, let alone actually seeing, any film or stage production of it - and I can't understand why. It's ripe with opportunities for visual humour, has everybody's favourite character from Henry IV, much wit and punning, a more coherent plot than many another Shakespeare comedy and even offers wide scope to set and costume designers. I'd love to see this, filmed, or, even better, live on stage.

For those not in the know, the play revolves around an episode from John Falstaff's life prior to his association with Prince Hal, in which he attempts to cuckold his neighbours. There is a subplot regarding who will marry one Anne Page, from three suitors, leading to a typically Shakespearean ending with (implied) happy marriage.

In one sense this is a-typical Shakespeare - despite ostensibly being historical - set in the reign of Henry IV - it could, if you changed the characters' names, not be identified as anything other than contemporary with the author. It also deals not with the high-born and rich but with professionals and labourers - and rogues and thieves - making it very Jonsonian.

Julius Caesar

My first exposure to Shakespeare was this play, read in English class, when I was 13. Apparently it is a very popular choice in schools because it has no "bawdy." This wasn't any concern of my teacher, though, as he had us reading MacBeth later the same year.

Julius Caesar didn't go down very well; it was terribly confusing. Caesar dies half way through having done and said very little. What was that all about? The only bit that I remember liking was Antony's great rhetorical swaying of the plebians. The way he achieved that was fascinating.

My second encounter with the play was an outdoor performance in the courtyard of Conwy Castle, my main memory of which was having a sore bum because of inadequate cushioning from the courtyard floor (sat as I was on a couple of camping mats placed directly on the flagstones). So not much joy there either. And the whole structure was still confusing - it isn't about Julius! This fact was never explained by my teacher. But there is an explanation: the play is based on Classical dramatic models where-in this type of thing happens quite often. The central figure of the title is an enigma around which the real action revolves - the motive force for chaos and tragedy more by other people's responses to him than by his direct actions. And that's what we have here. Shakespeare writing a play after the fashion of the Latin dramatists he was familiar with from school, who in turn were following the fashion and subject matter of the Greek plays of antiquity.

Now, having learned this and also having come into contact with some of that ancient drama, I re-read Julius Caesar and find that it does in fact make sense, structurally if looked at this way. There is no central character except Caesar, despite him being conspicuous by his absence. There have been attempts to re-cast (and re-name) it as the Tragedy of Brutus but these are distortions or adaptations. The fact is that Cassius, Antony and Brutus are all compared and contrasted with each other and with Caesar and this is a necessary thing for understanding the character of each. Cassius's worldly motivations and ready perception of character are the opposite of Brutus's lofty ideals and inability to recognise that he is being used. Antony is motivated as much by will to power as by revenge; Cassius is aware of this. Brutus is a fool politically but is the superior general it turns out; they ould have won if Cassius had been more careful on the battlefield and Caesar - he's a greater figure than all of them put together, though he's just a man, with human frailties as Cassius points out, remembering how he saved Caesar from drowning in the Tiber. Greater - but for reasons not clear, not ever expressed - and the eye of the storm.

It's a fascinating mess and everybody ends up dead except Antony who walks off with the power and all the best lines in the play, back in that crucial "Friends, Romans, countrymen..." scene that forms the bulk of Act 3. The bit I liked even when I didn't have a clue about the rest - still the best part, even with the rest suddenly making sense.

Troilus and Cressida

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare mentions that early 19th Century critics were "baffled" by this play. I have some sympathy with them; I don't really know what Bill was trying to do with this one. No contemporary writer worth the name would plot the final two acts this way, for a start. Now plotting was never Bill's strongest suit but we aren't talking about one of his daft comedies where you can ignore plot development in exchange for extreme verbal and physical comedy down in the woods tonight and go home chuckling at what you've seen and heard and not really caring about the absurdity of it all. Nor is this Romeo and Juliet 2.0, despite the set up in the first three acts where we start with a lot of wit and word play and silliness but get progressively more serious as time goes on, ending up with a full-on Tragic denouement and a bold statement about the destructive nature of feuding and partisan violence within respectable society that is alarmingly relevant 400 years later. Here, if there is a Tragic figure at all it is Hector, sadly too naively trusting in others' honour because his own is impeccable, rather than Troilus or Cressida, let alone both. And the play, despite having two endings, never really resolves the issue of the Troilus-Cressida-Diomedes love triangle at all. It's a mess.

Apparently more recent criticism has focused on Shakespeare's treatment of sexuality in the play but I don't really find the idea that people can be fickle and inconstant and driven by other people's looks all that profound or interesting, though I find it believable that Bill might have been aiming at a discussion of it.

So what I'm left with is a play that starts humourous then becomes amusingly chaotic and diverting in the final act (alarums and excursions abound) but stops rather than really concludes and suffers horribly in comparison with the Iliad's treatment of all the characters they have in common - a comparison that, at least while reading off the page, is unavoidable to anyone who has previously encountered Achilles' rage as described by Homer.

And on we go to Sir Thomas More, a play for which Shakespeare wrote probably only one or two scenes.

The Book of Sir Thomas More

The editors believe Shakespeare wrote a three page passage in the extant "book" of this play, which was originally composed by Munday. Those pages were included in the 1st Ed. of this volume but, as with Edward III, here in the 2nd Ed. they print the full text of the play. The parts attributed to Shakespeare are higher quality than the rest but some of the material by Munday is almost as good. However, for me the real interests of this play, which overall is disjointed, unbalanced and a second rate work of the period, are twofold and not really related to Shakespeare directly, namely, the portrayal of More and the insight into the politics, censorship and mode of operation of playwrights of the period.

What we have is a playbook originally written by Munday dealing with the rise and fall of Thomas More, which was heavily criticised by the Master of the Revels who read all plays before performance and had the power to demand any alterations he deemed fit or suppress the play entirely. More was a controvercial figure in Elizabethan politics still, being considered a Catholic martyr by many and a champion of the working people to boot. Catholicism vs. Protestantism was inextricably mixed up with the right to the throne and international power politics. Nevertheless, the Master of the Revels didn't ban the play out-right but instead gave copious instructions for deletions and modifications that were written directly on the play-book.

Subsequently various authors, including Chettle, Heywood and Dekker as well as Shakespeare, revised the play, replacing passages and altering existing ones - it's a professional critic's wet dream. The demand for original material for the stage was difficult to keep up with and collaborations between playwrights were commonplace, as were revisions of extant plays. (Middleton appears to have revised two of Shakespeare's plays, for example.) Here we get a good look at an extreme example of attempting to rescue a play because writing a new one from scratch was too long a process, as well as an insight into the role and attitudes of the Master of the Revels, which clearly was considered politically important and taken seriously. Despite all of the effort by nearly everyone, it seems the play was never performed on the contemporary stage.

Which brings me to the character of More himself. Here he comes over as a trickster and humourist who uses pranks to teach more pompous folks and genuine fools various lessons but also a champion of mercy and restraint in keeping the peace between the lower classes and the aristocracy. He goes in humble and brave fashion to his martyrdom, refusing to break with his Catholic principles regarding Henry VIII's divorce.

In A Man for All Seasons More is presented as a much more serious but still saintly martyr who dies for his principles. A biography of William Tyndale that I once read, gives a different picture, by illustrating what some of those principles were: More had a network of agents who spied and informed on anybody connected with translating the Bible from Latin to English or printing or distributing such. Anybody found guilty of said "crimes" were burned alive at the stake - no mercy whatsoever.

All of these authors had a partisan agenda regarding More: Catholic martyr, champion of the unprivileged, murderer of anybody who opposed the Church's control of Christian thought. Could he have been all of these things?

Measure for Measure

The editors believe that this play was adapted somewhat by another writer and additionally that it was Thomas Middleton. The same view is widely held regarding MacBeth, which to my mind loses it's unity of view and expression in the scenes of the witches spell casting and giving cauldrons a bad reputation forever after. Here, though, any adaptation is more subtle and doesn't impair the play at all.

This is also the earliest of what are known as the "problem plays" so called, as far as I can tell, because they do not fit neatly into any of the three conventional genres of the time, namely, comedy, tragedy or history. Earliest problem play does not mean early play, however - we are in the second half of Shakespeare's career by now. This leads me to propose a simple solution to the "problem": By this time Shakespeare was successful and confident enough to dispense with convention and write whatever kind of play he wanted and it seems to me that this is a morality play.

This play attacks everything that was appalling about the status of and attitudes towards women of the period, making it a stark contrast with The Taming of the Shrew. The law that the plot hinges upon is an ass, along with the prevailing obsession with virginity prior to marriage and as some kind of morally pure state that gets you extra bonus points from the Heavenly authorities. The convention of dowries and concomitant "wife as chattel" is also attacked.

There are no really memorable speeches but the play gets its points across successfully and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Henry V
Yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to be reading King Lear, but the BBC broadcast Brannagh's Henry V film and I thought I'd catch it on iPlayer before it disappears. Go here for the review because there isn't room left here for it all:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

King Lear (Quarto)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Tragedy of Richard III
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Timon of Athens
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

MacBeth
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

All's Well that Ends Well
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Pericles
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Coriolanus
Fierce warrior, great general, total prat.

The Winter's Tale
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Cymbeline
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Two Noble Kinsmen
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

It's Shakespeare

There is no other who can play with words and ideas as well. It is Shakespeare. What more can I say?