I took up a year-long project. But I realized that if I wanted to do it in its entirety without choosing just the best parts, it is a YEARS-long project. And I am happy to have this to look forward to.
With the hope, obviously, that I feel motivated enough to keep going for such a long time.
The project in question is:
Reading the Shakespeare plays from the First Folio
Which means, reading them in their original language as they are available to us.
Now, there are 38 plays.
My project, as I designed it, has me reading 1 play a month.
At that speed, I will be reading them right through 2024, 2025, 2026 and a bit of 2027. So 3+ years. So far I have read:
Macbeth
Twelfth Night
Hamlet
King Lear
Much Ado About Nothing
Romeo and Juliet
Othello
The Tempest
In that order.
And thus far, I was familiar with all the plays, and that surely made the going “easier”…no?
I mean, I knew already what was happening in the play at some basic level. So I could focus on dealing with the language, the references, the dynamics between, and within, the characters (that’s a long enough list to deal with!).
But the next play that I am to read for the month of September, is completely alien to me.
I have no idea what the premise or the story line of the play is.
I have heard of it.
I know it’s one Shakespeare’s historical plays.
But, outside of that…
Nothing.
So I am curious to see how I will fare. Reading a Shakespeare play without having any idea of it, should be an interesting experience for two reasons:
- Will I be able to follow the story in the older English that is itself a challenge to read?
- What will I think of a story, with Shakespeare’s usual complexity, without having the world and media coloured my sense of how I should be seeing it?
The play in question is Richard II.
I know it’s one of his major plays. But I am so happy to be coming to it fresh and ignorant. I hope to write about my experience here after having read it and assimilated it later in the month.
When I started this reading project, I figured I want to dive deeper into the plays to get more juice out of it than I can just on my own. So I have been enhancing my experience of them by listening to some Great Courses lectures by Shakespeare scholars on the specific plays.
I have also been reading an essay on each of the plays after reading them from Harold Bloom’s collection called “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”.
And if ”In Our Time” podcast by BBC has a discussion by some of the academic experts on that specific play, I have been devouring those too.
And all the fun stuff!
Besides all the academic stuff, aren’t we lucky, that Shakespeare is actually of the real world?
All the movies and plays and ballets and other art forms that are inspired by his work are more than enough for anyone to partake in one lifetime!
I am choosing movies to watch based on some of the plays- I watched the Bollywood trilogy versions of Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet made by one inspired director Vishal Bhardwaj, and they were FANTASTIC!
Watching Hamlet as a Shakespeare in High Park Production by Canadian Stage, as well as a ballet production called “The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark” by choreographer Guillaume Côté and stage director Robert Lepage, has been especially enriching. Some of the scenes from the dance show are imprinted in my mind’s eye months after watching the show!
So all in all, it has been a great learning and growing experience in the past few months of delving into Shakespeare.
I am having fun with it, and always looking forward to the next play on my list (a list that I got from this blog).
And the best part is, that once I finish reading a play and learning something about it, I feel richer! Richer in having a few more pearls of wisdom, knowledge, and deeper understanding of this world and its people. Richer in my own inner world.
With this richness, I walk with my head held a tiny bit higher every single time.