Let's Talk About Shakespeare

I love to talk about Shakespeare, don't you? I focused a lot of my studies on his work in college, and still sometimes dream about being a professor of Shakespeare's tragedies at some point in my life (tweed smoking jacket with elbow pads, perhaps?). Here I've compiled a list of the questions people most commonly ask me whenever I somehow manage to turn regular conversations at dive bars into discussions of Shakespeare (which is more challenging than you'd think, actually). 

Favorite Shakespeare ________?

Comedy: As You Like It.

Tragedy: Antony and Cleopatra.

Character: Horatio, from Hamlet.  

Sonnet:#137 (he's so mean!)

Have you read them all?

Hah. No. At last count, I had read 11/14 comedies; 7/11 histories; and 10/12 tragedies.

Biggest Shakespearean pet peeve?

All the misquoting and poor attribution aside, I can't help but ask -- Why, oh why, is Hamlet always holding Yorick's skull in drawings/renderings of the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy? He holds up the skull during "Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio," which comes way after he gives his famous emo-kid speech.

 Have you seen so-and-so do this-or-that?

Probably not. I'm not a huge fan of the "re-imaginings" of any writer's work (leave Jane Austen alone!), and I prefer to read the plays so I can take my time and enjoy the craftsmanship and wordplay. That said, I do love Kiss Me Kate (Taming of the Shrew), which I discovered during my young Fosse-obsessed phase, and I once went on a class trip to see Midsummer Night's Dream that made my best friend laugh so hard she had an asthma attack in the audience. Also, Gerard Butler and Voldemort (ahem, I mean Ralph Fiennes) in the recent film version of Coriolanus were pretty spectacular. 
  

Do you use the "third" genre of classification for his plays?

Sadly, my nerishness has led to several debates over cocktails on whether we can break down Shakespeare's plays into just Comedies and Tragedies, or if we should also denote certain titles as Histories. Short answer: I do like the distinction, but I rarely use it. To explain: in a way, most of Shakespeare's work is based in history and/or folklore, right? There are all those names and faces ripped straight out of Plutarch's Lives, and you could spend years studying all his sources. So, do we say some are more historical than others and therefore those are the histories? Or just the ones with a real-life dude's name in the title? Sometimes I think it's just an arbitrary distinction, but then, aren't most genre titles and categories?

 

Least favorite Shakespeare play?

Totally, definitely, without-a-doubt All's Well That Ends Well, because seriously, ALL IS NOT WELL at the end (nor is it well at the beginning and middle). Helena, the young daughter of a late doctor is madly in love with Count Bertram, a class-A douche who pretty much equates Helena with the Elizabethan muck on the bottom of his noble boots. When Bertram's father gets sick, Helena attends to him with the stipulation that, should he be cured, she gets her pick of any man in court for a husband. Lo! she chooses Bertram, who still doesn't like her even a little bit so why does she want this guy anyway? A whole host of awful, cruel, deceitful, low-down, dirty escapades ensue (bed tricks included!), painting neither Helena nor Bertram in a very pretty light. Everyone sucks and nobody is happy. The end.

My honorable mention for least favorite is Troilus and Cressida, because Cressida is just so whiny.

Why is Shakespeare so hard to understand?

Probably because your high school English teacher did not do a good enough job teaching you how to read it! Seriously. Shakespeare needs to be read intently, but without over-thinking it. You've got to allow for plays-on-words, double entendres, and the notion that, even while playwrighting, he was a poet at heart. Mostly I find that people are so sure they won't get it that they're too nervous/close-minded/et al to try, and the words get all tangled up in their heads. Chances are, you already know what's going to happen because the stories are so ingrained in us already, so just let go of the intimidation and read the words in front of you. 
   

And, honestly, it always helps to get a good copy of the play, one with well-developed footnotes or annotations. There are going to be archaic words in there that even the best use of context clues won't decipher, or words that had a different meaning to Shakespeare than they do to us. Look them up, or you may miss out on some pretty hysterical jokes.

I haven't read Shakespeare since high school; which one should I pick now?

That depends on what you want from it. 

Something simple to ease into? Hamlet. You can probably recite half of it already, and it's cut, dried, and wonderful.

Something fun? Midsummer Night's Dream, or As You Like It. Both make me laugh.

Something to impress your friends with obscure Shakespearean references? Coriolanus. It's a great one, and in my experience, no one knows it well enough to notice when you misquote it.

Something after which I will never want to read anything ever again? Henry IV, parts one or two.

  

Which play is [insert quote from Pinterest] from?

Most likely NONE of them! There are so very many quotes attributed to Shakespeare that are not actually his words. Some of them don't even sound like something he would say. Most notably, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," is by William Congreve; "How do I love thee; let me count the ways," is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and "When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew," is actually Arrigo Boito. Check before you get things tattooed on yourself...and probably take a look at the quote's context, too.

Nobody asks (but I wish they would):  

What's the deal with the bed trick?

I HATE the use of the bed trick! It is so...icky. It's an oft-used device in which someone tricks someone else into sleeping with him/her, usually using thin disguises that are as bafflingly successful at hiding his/her identity as Clark Kent's glasses. The resulting tryst is usually the means to the play's dramatic end, and for some strange reason leads to romance and weddings. Oh, and the bed trick almost always results in pregnancy. 

And the most common question I've ever been asked about Shakespeare--

Will you write this 7-10 page MLA-formatted paper on Shakespeare for me? 

Yes, but it'll cost ya. 

[ This post was inspired by The Classics Club's January Shakespeare Event, which you can find HERE. ]

Two Birds, Fifty-One Stones

It's a little late for New Years Resolutions (2014 calendars have already been price-slashed at Walmart), but I've been struggling to think of a self-inflicted, book-related challenge for myself for this year that would both expand my book knowledge and whittle down my To Be Read List. In researching this lovely cyber realm of book bloggers--of which I have been a part for exactly three days, huzzah!--I found The Classics Club. It's awesome, and perfect, and throws down a great bookish gauntlet I'd love to be a part of.

 

The idea is to set yourself a "living list" of literary classics, and read them within a five year time frame. It sounds simple, but a few notes in particular on their official site made me do a I Truly Appreciate You dance in my computer chair:

"There have been questions about what constitutes a 'classic'. As long as you feel it meets the guidelines for your list, include it! ... The Classics Club is not intended as a statement on what counts as a classic."

As someone who has taken part in many a "but can you ever really define literature?" debate, I love this idea-- I have my own personal parameters for what I think makes a classic, but I resent teachers/scholars/journalists/snooty kids sitting next to me in the lecture hall/my dad telling me that I am wrong or misinformed. The important thing is talking about books, not crafting arbitrary limitations.

 

My general focus for my Classics Club list is to finally get to all the books that have fallen between the cracks and slipped my attention all these years. I have often read classics for fun, and continue to re-read them often, mostly because I enjoy archaic wordplay and period-specific social commentary. There are so many that I've been meaning to read, ones that sit just next to the "big ones" on the library shelf, ones that I keep forgetting about until somebody says, "So, have you read --- " and I'm forced to say, "No, not yet."

 

I've got fifty-one planned novels, hopefully to be finished in just under three years. My original list was much longer, but I tried to stick to just the "Oh, I've always wanted to read that!" titles that have been haunting me for a while. There are so many by authors I've loved but haven't explored their work as much as I would like, and several I've started a whole bunch of times but never finished (ahem Satanic Verses ahem). Here's a link to my full list: 

 

There is something about stumbling around through lists of literary cannons and recommendations that makes me feel like I haven't really read all that much at all! Gee willickers, Batman, what have I been doing with my life if I haven't even read Anne of Green Gables yet?? On the plus side, it's given me an overwhelming determination to do right by my list, and get started as soon as I can check out the first one from the library....which, I think, will be Dickens's Hard Times, because I've been going through a Dickens withdrawal lately, complete with cold sweats and frequent outbursts of "tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

Link & Source: The Classics Club.