Shakespeare in a Year: May-July

Yeah, yeah, it's almost August. May was a frustrating month, so I decided to take a break for June. I spent July focusing on the sonnets.

In the last three months I have consumed the following Shakespeare works:

• The Taming of the Shrew

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona

• Sonnets 3 – 34

We see one of the more frequently performed plays, but we don’t see the richness of characters that Shakespeare’s later works are known for. Hence, taking a break.

The Taming of the Shrew

I watched the 1967 film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Why not take an opportunity to watch one of the most fabled acting pairs of all time do their thing? And I have to say even with these amazing actors, it took me a couple of attempts to get through it.

As big a proponent as I am of reading the classics, there are certain things about them that can be frustrating, especially if you belong to any historically marginalized group, including women. There have been debates going on for centuries as to whether this play is misogynistic.

Katharina’s final speech appears to advocate wives’ submission to their husbands. But it’s debatable whether that speech is meant to be interpreted literally, ironically, or in some other way altogether. Perhaps it’s a testament to Shakespeare’s writing skill that multiple readings are plausible. One thing’s for certain: few actresses can smolder on-screen like Elizabeth Taylor.

Another confounding factor in the interpretation of this play is the original framing device. You may not even know about this (I didn’t until I looked at the text of the play), but Shakespeare wrote the story as a play-within-in-a-play. The external framing device, which takes place among drunken revealers at an inn, is rarely included in performances. But its existence hints at a story that is more farcical in nature and maybe not meant to be taken so seriously.

The title pretty much gives away the plot. Is the whole story as depressing for feminists as the title suggests? I'm afraid it is. I found 10 Things I Hate About You much more enjoyable to watch, and that’s coming from someone who isn’t particularly keen on teen comedies in general.

As fun as Elizabeth Taylor’s interpretation of Katharina is to watch, the character doesn’t actually have that much agency. Granted, this was often true of women at that time, but we’ve seen in previous plays that Shakespeare can write more three-dimensional characters, such as Margaret of Anjou and even Joan of Arc.

That said, those were supporting characters and not romantic leads. And we might be getting into my personal preferences here. For instance, in the musical version of Les Miserables, I find Marius and Cosette, the main couple, two of the least interesting characters in the story. Eponine and Enjolras forever.

I don't know what it is, but it feels like that women characters can often be romantic leads, or they can be layered and nuanced, but seldom both. And we know this dichotomy doesn't exist in life. Attractive people have inner lives. Many people outside traditional ideas of attractiveness are in happy relationships. It's probably one of the main reasons I don't read a lot of romance. If anyone has recommendations in the genre that avoid this trap, feel free to drop them in the comments.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Many Shakespeare enthusiasts consider this his weakest play, and I understand why. I couldn't find a single professional performance of the play, and all the amateur productions I found insisted on dressing up the play with song and dance numbers. It's a bit like a dollar-store version of The Comedy of Errors.

I won't get into the plot here because it's incredibly silly, as are all the characters in it. It's not even a fun kind of silly like you might find in Alice in Wonderland or something. I'm talking about watching a friend talk themselves into what everybody seems to realize is a bad decision but them. But instead of a friend, it's some stranger, so you're not invested in the outcome. Maybe this play should have been called Characters Nobody Cares About Making Decisions Nobody Understands. If you think I'm being unnecessarily cranky, I dare you to watch the play for yourself.

Sonnets

Most days in July, I read one sonnet per day. At first I feared this was going to crash and burn with the previous two plays. We get it, dude, you think it would be tragic for this attractive person not to reproduce. But even Shakespeare can only say that so many ways, after which it gets repetitive. Fortunately, around sonnet 18 he starts to diversify a bit. Also I found phrases that were referenced in future works that I didn't know were references. For instance, the phrase "remembrance of things past" appears in Sonnet 30, which is one version of the title of Marcel Proust's magnum opus. So now that every sonnet no longer concerns the same narrow topic, I'm enjoying reading them a lot more.

Going forward

I can't commit to a specific timeframe for reasons that I'll reveal soon, but here are the next plays coming up in the chronology:

• Love's Labour's Lost

• Romeo and Juliet

I'm particularly interested in revisiting Romeo and Juliet, since I had to read it in high school, and I suspect it will hit quite differently for me now.

Have you changed any of your opinions of a Shakespeare play after rereading it? Let's talk about it in the comments!

Shakespeare in a Year: April

Content warning: sexual assault, mutilation, homicide, suicide

In April I have consumed the following Shakespeare works:

• Titus Andronicus

• The Rape of Lucrece

Thanks to a bit of international travel and a bit of a reading slump, I didn't get as far as I'd hoped with this project in April. I strongly recommend not consuming these two works back to back for reasons that will become clear. You could say that I chose... poorly.

Thankfully the next plays on deck are significantly lighter in tone, so I intend to resume a quicker pace in May.

Titus Andronicus

I watched Julie Taymor's 1999 film adaptation, simply called Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and quite a star-studded cast, actually. The film has a surreal take on the source material that works surprisingly well.

In his review of the film, Roger Ebert suggested the play might have been sort of an Elizabethan slasher story. Audiences in Shakespeare's time tended to favor gory violence in their plays, and since this was one of Shakespeare's earlier works, he might have felt the need to amp up the violence to get attention. Since much of the plot is already kind of ridiculous, the deliberate anachronisms like arcade games don't seem so out of place.

That said, I generally don't care for slasher films, so this wasn't one of my favorites. Also, the characterization felt really thin, so it was hard to feel invested in any of the characters. I didn't imagine that I'd say Titus Andronicus is less sympathetic than Richard III for me, but here we are.

The plot is basically a bunch of people choosing violence practically every moment of their lives, which can at least be entertaining at times. Most of the actors take a campy approach to the material, which feels correct. To give you an idea of the tone of this play, one character says as he's about to meet his end that he wishes he could have done more evil deeds.

Two characters serve as exceptions to the above description. Marcus, Titus's brother, seems to be the only adult in the room. Lavinia, Titus's daughter, is a sweet young woman, and you can guess what happens to her in a story like this. More on that in a bit.

The Rape of Lucrece

The title pretty much gives away the plot. Is the whole story as depressing as the title suggests? I'm afraid it is.

I don't understand why Shakespeare chose this Roman story as his source material, although maybe he didn't, since this was a commissioned work. But even if his patron chose the source material, I don't understand what Shakespeare was going for. I at least understood his take on Venus and Adonis, even if I found it bizarre. The Rape of Lucrece falls flat from a storytelling perspective before we even get into the content.

There's been a lot of discourse about the portrayal of rape in fiction, and some of it has raised valid points. Of course, none of this discourse existed in Shakespeare's time, so it seems unfair to evaluate his work by those standards. But this story still feels incredibly odd, even by the standards of that time.

Tarquin, the rapist in this story, spends the whole time on his way to rape Lucrece thinking it's a bad idea and he shouldn't do it. So, um, why do it, then? You could just not, you know. I know we wouldn't have a story then, but what I'm getting at is we have no understanding of Tarquin's motive here. And once Tarquin commits the rape, he immediately feels bad about it. So why'd you go to all that trouble, dude?

Lucrece feels shamed by the attack, which is at least realistic. She identifies her attacker to her husband and immediately kills herself. Her husband and his soldiers vow revenge on Tarquin, and we learn in the last line of the poem that Tarquin is banished. No confrontation? Come on!

A "lesson" I got from both this poem and Titus Andronicus is that virtue doesn't pay for women. In Titus, both Tamora and Lavinia meet violent deaths, but at least Tamora had some fun first. Although Lavinia did get a taste of vengeance when Titus killed her rapists in her presence. And maybe Shakespeare was trying to make some sort of commentary on a vicious cycle of violence. I'd buy that, although that doesn't make me enjoy the story any more.

But The Rape of Lucrece just leaves me confused. A woman is raped and driven to suicide, and for what? We never find out what Tarquin's motivation is or see him get his comeuppance because it's merely summarized in one line. This is easily the most frustrating work of Shakespeare's that I've encountered in this project, and I'm glad we're done with the narrative poems for a while. I'm also glad that most of the upcoming plays in the list are comedies.

May preview

In May I plan to get through at least the following works:

• The Taming of the Shrew

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona

• Love's Labour's Lost

• Romeo and Juliet

I'm particularly interested in revisiting Romeo and Juliet, since I had to read it in high school, and I suspect it will hit quite differently for me now.

Have you changed any of your opinions of a Shakespeare play after rereading it? Let's talk about it in the comments!

Shakespeare in a Year: March

In March I have read the following Shakespeare works:

• Richard III

• The Comedy of Errors

• Venus and Adonis

Going forward, I'm tweaking my commitment a bit. At the beginning I said I intended to read all of Shakespeare's works this year. However, especially when it comes to the plays, I don't think reading is necessarily the best course of action. Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, not for publication. If possible, I'll have a copy of the text handy as I'm watching the play, but if all I can do is watch a performance of a play, I'm counting it. That said, I did read everything listed above in this post.

Richard III

This is the first of the "hits" that I've read as part of this project. And as I mentioned in last month's summary, Henry VI, Part 3 sets up both this play and its protagonist. Indeed, some adaptations have included scenes from the previous play or at least some representation of its events, as we can't assume that modern audiences already know this information.

The play begins with Richard alone on stage uttering the famous lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent / made glorious summer by this son of York," referring to his brother, King Edward IV, having defeated the rival Lancaster family, at least for the time being. He goes on to announce that he is there to cause chaos and chew gum, and he's all out of gum.

Throughout the play he schemes to have his rivals picked off one by one until he becomes king himself. But as king, he becomes increasingly paranoid and mistreats even some who have been consistently loyal to him. Eventually Richard is defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field by the forces of the Earl of Richmond, who becomes King Henry VII, later grandfather to Queen Elizabeth I. This marks the end of the Plantagenet dynasty and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty.

I know I mentioned the possibility of a deep dive on this play, but it didn't come together. Although I found a lot of interesting material in the play and its characters, I also found pretty much anything I would have had to say has been said better by other people. And that's not me being hard on myself. I'm capable of finding angles on a story that haven't been done to death; that just didn't happen here.

I'm not going to get into the details of how Shakespeare's Richard differed from the historical king, but if you're interested, there's a docudrama playing in some theatres called The Lost King about scholars' search for Richard III's remains, which debunked some commonly held beliefs about both Richard's physical condition when he was alive and what happened to his body after his death.

The Comedy of Errors

Some scholars believe that this was Shakespeare's first play. It was definitely the play that convinced me to prioritize performance over reading. While I had a copy of the play handy during my viewing, if that had been all I'd had, I would have missed a lot of what this play has to offer.

For one thing, it's difficult to convey physical comedy on the page. This is even more true with Shakespeare, who tended to limit his stage directions to the bare minimum information needed so his actors understood what to do. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to find performances of this play.

Venus and Adonis

Venus and Adonis is one of the two narrative poems Shakespeare wrote when the theaters were closed due to a plague outbreak. The other one will be discussed in next month's roundup. The poem is loosely inspired by Roman mythology and follows the love goddess Venus's attempts to seduce the famed hunter Adonis.

A good modern title for this poem might be He's Just Not That Into You. Venus frankly acts kind of desperate in her increasingly brazen attempts to gain Adonis's affections, and he simply isn't having it. He's all about the hunt. But Venus is persistent, and finally Adonis gives in to her momentarily in the hopes that she'll be satisfied and go away. But things turn tragic when Adonis insists on going on another hunt the following morning.

It struck me as a gender-flipped version of a common occurrence in Greco-Roman mythology, where a deity takes interest in a human and things end badly for said human. For example, you have the stories of Pan and Syrinx or Apollo and Daphne, just to name a couple. Some of the lines in the poem are really beautiful, but it felt a bit like Fatal Attraction: Roman Edition, which I'm not sure Shakespeare was going for.

April preview

Now that I'm not attaching myself to the written text as closely, I hope to pick up the pace a bit. In April I plan to get through at least the following works:

• Titus Andronicus

• The Taming of the Shrew

• The Rape of Lucrece

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona

We have another narrative poem in The Rape of Lucrece (content warning, etc.). The same patron who commissioned Venus and Adonis also commissioned this one. We also have another "hit" in The Taming of the Shrew and possibly Shakespeare's worst play in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Then again, I saw one ranker put it above both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, so it pays to remember that this stuff is always subjective.

What is your least favorite Shakespeare play? Let's talk about it in the comments!

Shakespeare in a Year: February

In February I have read the following Shakespeare works:

• Henry VI, Part 1

• Henry VI, Part 2

• Henry VI, Part 3

• Sonnets 1 - 2

I'm going to hold off on discussing the sonnets for now, as their publication comes toward the end of Shakespeare's career. But since the sonnets were probably written over a long period of time, I'm going to sprinkle them in with my reading of longer works.

Some context

Since these are not among Shakespeare's most popular plays, I think adding a bit of context, both historical and literary, might help here.

Historical context

The Henry VI plays concern the events leading up to the Wars of the Roses and the wars themselves. Even if you aren't into medieval English history, you might recognize this period as the one that inspired George R. R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, also known as Game of Thrones.

The stories are centered around the Houses of York and Lancaster, two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, and their struggles for the English (and French) crown. There's court intrigue, epic battles, beheadings, people uttering their dying words in Latin, questionable religious interference, and more. We even get an appearance from Joan of Arc in Part 1.

Literary context

Most scholars believe that Parts 2 and 3 of this series were written first, with Part 1 appearing later as a prequel. Part 3 sets up Richard III, which I'll discuss in March, as it comes right after Part 1 in the Chambers chronology.

All of these plays fall under the history category, but what does that mean? The First Folio, the first publication of Shakespeare's plays after his death and the most authoritative source for the texts of many of his plays, divides the plays into 3 genres: comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Shakespeare's tragedies feature a protagonist, usually of high status, who is brought down by a character flaw or a bad choice, ultimately leading to their death by the end of the play. Comedies, by contrast, typically start with a misunderstanding or unusual situation but ultimately end happily. History plays, as the name suggests, dramatize historical events and might not fit into the genres of comedy or tragedy.

These classifications are not universally agreed upon but make a good starting point. And of course, many of the plays contain elements of different genres. For instance, Richard III has enough markers of a tragedy that some scholars classify it as such. But more on that in March.

My observations

In this section I'll talk about the story, the characters, and the language of these plays, including what did or didn't work for me.

The story

These plays are among Shakespeare's least performed, and it's not difficult to see why. They have kind of an inside baseball vibe, and if you're not already interested in this part of English history, I don't know if these plays will help much. George R. R. Martin had the sense to sprinkle in dragons and magic. And since his work is fiction, he didn't have to stick to real events.

That said, I can see why these plays would have been popular to audiences in Shakespeare's day. The events shown would have been relatively recent history, not so different from Hamilton or 1776 in the US. And while the plays seem a little "rah-rah English patriotism" now, they were considered pretty nuanced for their time.

The characters

Previous tellings of these stories tended to have all the subtlety of a Bible camp skit (if you know, you know) and heavily favored one side over the other, a tendency Shakespeare avoids. Nobody is completely virtuous or completely terrible, which is a strength of Shakespeare in general with his characters. It's nice to see that come through in the earliest plays. Even characters who Shakespeare clearly intended to portray as villains often have their highlight moments, at least from a dramatic perspective.

In fact, for these particular plays, the villains tend to be the most interesting characters. Henry VI is kind of a passenger in the story. True, the plays are to some degree about how he isn't capable of standing on his own and how others manipulate him. But that leaves a bit of a hole in the center, and not a tasty donut hole.

The language

I also want to note a couple of things about the language. First, it's surprisingly clunky in places, especially in Part 1. In Act 1, Scene 4, Line 39 of Part 1, we get "In open market-place produced they me" (i.e., "they brought me to an open marketplace"), which I have to imagine raised even a few Elizabethan eyebrows.

In fact, some scholars cite the differences in linguistic style between Part 1 and other plays to argue that Shakespeare did not write Part 1 by himself but in collaboration. We'll probably never know for sure.

The second thing I want to note about the language is there are more Chaucerian-sounding bits (words like yclad and malapert) than I remember seeing in any of the Shakespeare plays I've previously studied. This isn't a bad thing—just something that surprised me. I'm curious to see if things sound less Chaucerian over time or if I'm misremembering my earlier reading experiences.

March preview

The list for March will be more eclectic. I am confident that I can get through at least the following works:

• Richard III

• The Comedy of Errors

• Venus and Adonis

Richard III might get its own in-depth writeup, while Venus and Adonis might be unfamiliar even to many readers who have consumed their fair share of Shakespeare's work. It's a narrative poem, one of two that Shakespeare wrote for a wealthy patron while the theaters in London were temporarily closed due to a plague outbreak. Even Shakespeare had to find different ways to pay the bills during a pandemic.

Have you read any of these plays or seen them performed? Let's talk about it in the comments!

Announcing Shakespeare in a Year

I've set a goal to read all of Shakespeare's work in 2023. Why?

Background

Last summer YouTube recommended a video to me by Benjamin (Ben) McEvoy titled How to Get an Oxford English Education for Free. Since I'm all about getting fancy literary things for free, I was intrigued.

Ben is a graduate of the University of Oxford's English literature program. In the video he explains how you can get the literary knowledge that he did without the expense and high-pressure environment of Oxford or another university. It's more than I want to do right now, but I was interested enough in his views on literature that I immediately watched another video of his about building your own personal literary canon.

While I didn't necessarily want to follow Ben's advice to the letter, he did sell me on the value of deep reading great literature enough that I joined his Hardcore Literature Book Club on Patreon. In the club we get a reading schedule, and at certain points, Ben will post his thoughts on a given work and encourage us to post our own. I won't get into the details of that content because most of it's posted privately, but he posts occasional videos publicly, including this year's planned reading schedule, if you're interested (I'm so behind on War and Peace, but more on that another time).

You might infer that reading all of Shakespeare in 2023 is one of the book club's projects, and you'd be correct. But why take up the challenge? I'll freely admit that I don't have the bandwidth to read everything Ben recommends when he recommends it; I have to choose my literary battles. So why am I so keen to choose this one?

Motivation

There's a personal aspect to this project, as Shakespeare was one of the first great authors whose work I connected with growing up. My grandmother had some booklets that contained two or so plays each. I won't claim that 11-year-old me understood every nuance, but between some decent footnotes and frequent trips to the dictionary, I got the gist of it. Even then I could laugh at Nick Bottom being temporarily given the head of a donkey in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Also Bottom, teehee. In any case, I look forward to revisiting those early favorites.

Another goal of mine is getting a stronger grasp on Shakespeare's influence in English literature. Over 400 years after his death, he's still considered one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived and holds the top spot for many people. Filmmakers continue to use his work in both straightforward and reinterpreted performances.

Approach

However, we're going through all his work, not just the "hits." Furthermore, we're going through his work chronologically. Even an all-time great like Shakespeare developed his voice and craft over time, and reading his plays in chronological order allows us to sort of follow him on that journey.

A word on chronology: we'll probably never know the exact order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, but we have educated guesses from multiple scholars. For this website, I'm going to use the one presented by E. K. Chambers, originally published in 1930.

Ben also asks us to rank the plays, taking inspiration from an assignment Kurt Vonnegut gave his students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The point is not how closely our ranking matches anyone else's, but rather that we can articulate what does or doesn't work for us in a given play. We can then reuse this approach when we want to do a deep dive into the works of other authors.

I hope to get through the equivalent of a play a week. Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and 4 longer poems that survive today. At that pace I should be able to meet my goal, even after basically missing January.

To keep things simple I'm just going to post a roundup of my Shakespearean activities at the end of each month. I'll include my general thoughts on each work, but I think I'm going to defer assigning a rating as such until the end. Maybe I'll do a tier ranking on YouTube - who knows?

Have you done any deep dives on great authors? What is your favorite Shakespeare work? Let's talk about it in the comments!