I am done with Shakespeare (for now)

A couple of days ago the child that would grow up to be Queen Elizabeth the first was born.

Or rather, I read the final scenes of Henry VIII, a play Bill Shakespeare co-wrote at the very end of his career, and QE1 was spat out by Anne Bullen…

This was the (anti?)climax of me having read 26 Shakespeare plays of which I had very patchy or zero knowledge as part of my “Bard to the Bone” project

At some point I may come back to some of these plays (Timon of Athens, for example) which are good to think with about capital accumulation, power and ecology (my main obsessions). Others, not so much.

What did I learn? I don’t quite know yet. But I started seeing allusions everywhere (especially in Ali Smith’s wondrous Seasons Quartet) that I wouldn’t have otherwise. On his good days (and there were plenty, the man could write. There were, inevitably, some stinkers – what is interesting is that there is very little agreement on which the stinkers are. Some people seem to love Cymbeline, or Pericles (I mean, wtaf man?) and others hate the aforementioned Timon (again, wtaf?)

Advice I would give my younger (by 4 months or so) self or anyone else setting out to do this.

Beyond “don’t” and “don’t do it alone”, the following.

a) try to set routines for when (I started out doing a play a weekend, then did more, then less, then more… so it goes). Don’t try and read the whole thing in one go (this is obvious, and mostly I stuck to it). Perhaps try to read Acts 1 and 2, and then 3-5 the next day.

b) be familiar with the plot before you read. You can do this via the Wikipedia page, but there are also some good podcasts out there that give detailed summaries. The best I found was the No Holds Bard podcast. I wish I’d listened to the first few minutes of their “so you’re going to see” episodes immediately before embarking

c) Ideally be reading a version that has footnotes for the words you are not familiar with, and the allusions you don’t get (there will be plenty)

d) keep lists of quotable lines and words you need to look up (I was pretty diligent at this) in an A4 exercise book that isn’t for anything else

e) write limericks or whatever to encapsulate the play (I did this for the first 18 or so, then got sloppy)

f) do write-ups as you go? This I was bad at – I built up backlogs and then had to clear them, and now have a 9 play backlog (the history plays). But it helps you consolidate

g) think about the plays in pairs (e.g. Richard III and Macbeth, Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Two Noble Kinsmen.)

I will move on to a bit of Marlowe, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Duchess of Malfi and then after a break to finish a writing project, Ovid’s Metamorphoses