I’m reading a Shakespeare play a week.
Not just reading.
Watching either in the theatre or a film version or listening to a radio stage play.
That’s how the Bard is supposed to be experienced.
Many argue, myself included, that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would not be writing for the stage.
Every single one of Old Will’s plays are bursting at the seams with frustration over the limitations of the stage.
He wants you to SEE the battlefields in Henry V, the Cliffs of Dover in King Lear, the raging storm in The Tempest.
Shakespeare would be in fine company alongside Hitchcock, Scorsese, Kubrick, Welles, and Coppola were he alive today.
You can read the entire Shakespeare canon in a year (38 plays and a bunch of poems).
I’ve read everything Shakespeare wrote before.
“Shakespeare” was an entire paper in my final year at Oxford and it was hands-down my favourite.
No other writer in the history of English literature crams as much understanding of the human condition into their oeuvre.
So I decided to set myself the enjoyable challenge of doing it all over again.
Only this time I have a new philosophy to guide my reading:
We’ll be reading Shakespeare as though he were great non-fiction.
We’re reading Shakespeare as though he has insightful life advice that we can glean and apply immediately to our own lives.
Shakespeare can teach us how to love, laugh, lust, and live.
If you want dull(ard) commentary that breaks down the minutiae of Shakespeare and tries to retroactively apply feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theory, you can go someplace else.
You won’t find mental masturbation here.
Shakespeare is our guide to life.
Shakespeare’s works are living, breathing beacons of hope, wonder, curiosity.
And they contain practical life lessons if you just know how to extract them!
So that’s what we’re going to do.
Won’t you join me?
Read and watch the Shakespeare plays alongside me and add to the conversation where you see fit.
All comments welcome, but particularly those that show Shakespeare teaching us how to live.
Of course, if you want to comment upon some delightful wordplay or you have some fleeting musing that tickles you in some way, please feel free to lovingly contribute those too.
Need more reasons why you should read Shakespeare?
Here are 10 quick ones:
- Shakespeare taught Tarantino how to write bloody massacre.
- Shakespeare pushed the boundaries of the socially acceptable (interracial love tragedy anyone?)
- Shakespeare invented almost 2,000 modern English words and idioms – you already speak Shakespeare every day of your life.
- Shakespeare knew more about the human condition – love, loss, life – than any other writer known to mankind.
- Shakespeare was one of the first women’s rights advocates, giving the strongest roles in literary history to women (Lady Macbeth being one prime example to get you started).
- Shakespeare crafted some of the most beautiful poetry ever put to paper. Reading Shakespeare is like sipping a fine malt whiskey on a winter’s day.
- Shakespeare gives expression to the deepest most nuanced emotions a human is capable of.
- Shakespeare’s comedies, and his tragedies, are some of the most riotously funny stories in literature.
- Shakespeare is so compelling that the greatest filmmakers will continue to adapt him and the greatest actors will be drawn to him forever.
- Shakespeare gives you something different every time you experience him.
Now let’s get reading some Shakespeare.
We’ll kick things off with Romeo and Juliet.