Y’all have no idea how relieved I am to have this New Year’s Resolution underway. I hate that it has taken me this long to return to the warm embrace of my favorite dead guy.
Seven years ago, I completed what I called the “Trippingly on the Tongue” project. I had spent a year reading all of Shakespeare’s works, and I vowed to memorize one passage from every play. I’m proud to say that at one point that year, I was capable of reciting soliloquies, speeches, and songs from every play, upon request. I felt special.
Today, I only remember three by heart, but the rest I recognize and still recall enough lines to identify the corresponding play. And that’s fine with me. I would like to learn a few other passages for fun (particularly John of Gaunt’s beautiful “Sceptered Isle” speech from Richard II), but mostly I just want to return to the plays, brush up on the language and terminology, and delve into some varied critical essays. Thus, my "Year of Shakespeare Project" begins. But I like the "Shakespeare Is My Boyfriend" title much better, so I'll go with that as a series tag from now on.
ALSO, I needed a GINORMOUS distraction from the trainwreck that occurred in my personal life in the latter half of 2019 and I want to see that shit diminish into my rearview window.
So of course, one must construct a college-level syllabus for two semesters worth of material on the great golden Bard himself. It’s just what one naturally does.
In December, I purchased a handful of volumes on Amazon (used textbooks yay!), subscribed to The Great Courses Signature just so I could review 24 video lectures on Shakespearean scholarship, and collected several films on my Prime queue to watch or re-watch as I study each play. I have my eye on a few more books, but I have enough literature to get rolling for now.
The only big question was what path to take through the plays. By genre? By theme? Switch them up every week (comedy this week, history the next, tragedy after that, etc.)? I took down my Bible-rivalling edition of The Riverside Shakespeare and I decided to go with a generally chronological direction. I quickly nursed a headache after realizing that there are almost as many chronologies as there are scholars—everyone has a niggling idea as to exactly what year some plays were written/produced/played. So I’m just going with the Riverside’s chronology list for simplicity, and it’s a well-trusted resource if I ultimately want to get a decent feel for how Shakespeare’s writing skills progressed through his career.
Of course, this means we embark upon January with four of the most complicated and dense history plays in the canon: the so-called “Wars of the Roses” tetralogy consisting of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. Don’t get me wrong; these are some intensely dramatic and bloody plays that put Game of Thrones to shame (I mean, all Shakespeare puts GOT to shame, especially Titus Andronicus). It culminates with Shakespeare’s most charming asshole of all time: that cunning humpback of York, old Dicky the 3rd. The guy killed Lady Anne’s beloved father-in-law andher husband and he managed to convince her to marry him while she was weeping over King Henry VI’s coffin. Then he poisoned her to death. That takes some goddamn brass ones. What a dickweasel. I just can’t wait to revisit his deliciously evil soliloquies (I had memorized two lengthy ones of his). It will be cathartic for me.
In addition to the extensive informational context included in the trusty Riverside, I am turning to a few compendiums of play-by-play essays. The first is Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), which is a doorstop of a book full of eminently readable and illuminating thoughts from a long-time Shakespeare fan. I am loving Tina Packer’s Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays (2015), as it highlights the characterization of all the dynamic ladies that ground the often wacky males that tend to get the most notice. I also picked up a slightly older set of books: Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakspeare, Volumes 1 and 2 published in 1951, just to set my modern perspective by some super old white dude opinions.
I have on order Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture (2009) because I really enjoyed her nearly 1,000-page doorstop Shakespeare After All (2004) the first time I read all the plays and I believe she’ll have some great insights for me this time around. I also included Pronouncing Shakespeare’s Words (2003) by Dale Coye, because it’s good to have on hand a reference that would usually only be useful to actors and directors. These are playsafter all. I’ll probably pick up a few more over the year, because I’m a BOOK FIEND.
Of course, to accommodate my on-the-go elder millennial life, there’s also the very handy Shakespeare Pro app that has never left my phone since I downloaded it an epoch ago. It’s all of $9.99 and worth every dime. It’s got every word Billy Shakes has set to paper (including sonnets and poems and the “apocrypha” of plays he might’ve had a hand in according to computerized stylometry stats), the ability to take notes and collect bookmarks, a comprehensive search feature, background info, integrated glossary, chronology, scene breakdowns, character descriptions and arcs, as well as ridiculous text analytics I don’t even know what to do with at this point. Where else will I, a lowly armchair scholar, be able to peruse the original text from the First Folio and the Quartos for side-by-comparison to the spellings of the modern publications? Even my fantasy husband Sir Kenneth Branagh is quoted as saying “It’s really great!” Don’t go on stage without it.
On top of all of that paper and screentime, I am also including whatever filmic representation of the plays I can possibly obtain. Some are more popular than others, obviously. Not a lot of Troilus and Cressida floating around out there, but I am happy to report that I already approve of the one motion picture portrayal of Coriolanus that I know of starring Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, and Gerard Butler. It’s free if you have Amazon Prime! My favorite of the lesser-known plays to be sure. I’d love to see the National Theatre Live version with Tom Hiddleston someday, despite my complex feelings about that particular former movie boyfriend of mine. You know what you did, THOMAS.
So yeah, I’m going DEEP into Shakespeare for 2020, folks. Strappin’ it on. There’s going to be some serious penetration. Old William is my boyfriend for the foreseeable future.
I’ll probably hook up with Sir Ken again because, well, he’s Kenny. And his audio commentary for his mercifully four-hour-long epic production of Hamlet just gives me all the comfort feels. Every. Goddamn. Time. Hey nonny-nonny indeed.
Mine corpus is preparèd!
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