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As of 12:20 this morning, I'm finished with the Crazy Shakespeare Project! More anon.

The Crazy Shakespeare Project: Close, No Cigar

There is a reason you've probably never seen a performance of Troilus and Cressida.

After my enthusiastic start last January, I never quite managed to read one play each month. Once my new job started in August, in fact, I hardly read any Shakespeare at all. Reading Shakespeare is much easier than it used to be, but it still requires concentration. It turns out that teaching graduate classes in an area outside my specialty also requires concentration, and so Shakespeare took a back seat to lecture prep for the whole of the fall semester.

I had hoped I could catch up in December since I wasn't prepping lectures, but the demands of finals plus the dreariness of the remaining plays meant that I couldn't pull it off. Bummer.

Still, I read 14.5 plays in 2011, and all but one of the poems.

Titus Andronicus 1/5/11	Coriolanus 12/4/11
Henry VI Part I 1/10/11	Two Gentlemen of Verona 7/4/11
Henry VI Part II 1/15/11	King John 5/30/11
Henry VI Part III 1/20/11	Twelfth Night 1/7/12
The Winter's Tale 4/3/11	Measure for Measure 7/18/11
Troilus & Cressida 1/1/12	Venus & Adonis 12/11/11
All's Well That Ends Well 1/4/12	The Rape of Lucrece 1/6/12
Richard III 1/25/11	The Passionate Pilgrim 12/2/11
Timon of Athens 12/21/11	The Phoenix and the Turtle 1/30/11
Pericles 1/29/11	A Lover's Complaint 4/17/11
Cymbeline 4/11/11	Sonnets 5/29/2011
Henry VIII 12/28/11

I've been saving Twelfth Night, which I've seen a couple of times but never read, for last. Perhaps I can finish Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night? After I'm finished I'd like to reread Hamlet and Othello, both of which I sped through too inattentively as a sophomore in college. I asked for and was given a copy of The Two Noble Kinsmen for Christmas -- it's not in my Complete Works -- and I think I'll tackle it this year too (she said a little wearily, hoping it's more like Macbeth (did you know Macbeth is thought to have been co-authored? Wikipedia says so and that means it must be true) than Pericles or Timon of Athens).

Boy, this is kind of a gloomy post. (This is kind of a gloomy blog lately. December/January at Light & Momentary: brought to you by Seasonal Affective Disorder.) I'll try to do a cheerier wrap-up post when I've actually wrapped up the project.

Mother Power

I spent about a month avoiding Coriolanus, because Acts I and II are not what you'd call transcendent. In fact, I have a note in the margin somewhere in Act II that says something like, "This is like watching CHEESE MELT in iambic pentameter" -- it was that dull. (Remember my post about notes in the margins? Did you think they were clever notes, like "lovely chiasmus!" or "echoes of Ovid"? Because they are not.) But I am here to tell you that it gets much better after Act II has dragged to its soporific close.

From the get-go, Coriolanus has no truck with the commoners. When he returns victorious from battle he is supposed to let them admire him so he can be consul, but he just can't hack it. One of his companions extracts a promise from him to try it again, mildly, but a few dozen lines later Coriolanus is howling. "Nay, temperately, your promise," urges Menenius. Coriolanus spits back: "The fires i' the lowest Hell fold in the people."

Not so much with the populism. In consequence he is exiled. In a twist whose plausibility I am still debating, he surfaces next at his arch-enemy's house and says, "Hey! How about if I help you conquer Rome?" The arch-enemy thinks this is an awesome idea. They march on Rome.

The most interesting character in the play is Volumnia, Coriolanus' mother. She is a force to be reckoned with: "Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me," she tells him. (A little-known advantage of breastfeeding.) When the enemy army is at the gates of Rome and Menenius has been unable to dissuade Coriolanus from proceeding with the attack, she goes out with his wife and son. He had steeled himself against their supplication but he cannot resist. "I prate, / And the most noble mother of the world / Leave unsaluted," Coriolanus says as he kneels before his mother and reneges on his promise to fight with the Volsces. He was willing to abandon his obligations as a Roman citizen and soldier, but not his obligations as a son. I'm still chewing on that one.

I'm also launching into Timon of Athens, which Wikipedia tells me is "generally regarded as one of his most obscure and difficult works." Onward.

Is this an omen?

I ought to be grading papers and balancing the checkbook while Stella is napping, but I took a minute to add up the number of lines of Shakespeare I'd need to read between now and December 31 to finish my project. It's just about 20,000, which means that I can finish if I read 666 lines per day.

That's doable, if I keep at it. But -- does it bode ill for the Crazy Shakespeare Project if my daily allotment is the number of the Beast?

Hey, look, I am posting on December 1 after all

I am still holding out hope that I will finish my Crazy Shakespeare Project by year's end, but it will take some determination. I have 4.7 plays and a couple of the longer poems to go.

I've been stuck on Coriolanus -- by far my least favorite of the plays I've read so far this year. The thing about Shakespeare is that you have to keep moving forward through the parts you don't like. They never last all that long, and if you set it aside to come back to it later, you have to retrace your steps through those parts so you can remember what was happening. This is a lesson I first learned in 2004 while reading Merry Wives of Windsor, which might be Item #1 on the List of Works Demonstrating That Sometimes Shakespeare Totally Phoned It In. Maybe not #1. But it surely did feel that way in 2004.

Anyway, I am plowing through Coriolanus. I am finding, as I had hoped, that Shakespeare becomes easier reading the more Shakespeare I read. Whether or not I finish the complete works this year, Coriolanus will be the dozenth play I've read in 2011. It was a fun idea, even if it takes me until 2012 to accomplish.

In which I acquire a new wardrobe

So I hate Shakespeare's sonnets. Perhaps only a cretin would admit in public that she hates Shakespeare's sonnets; if so, then pass me my cretin hat. I have 25 to go (hey! that's only 350 lines!) and I am going to do a celebratory dance when I finish the last one. I hope the cretin hat has sturdy straps so it won't fall off.

I had read perhaps a dozen of the sonnets before now. I made my son memorize "That time of year thou may'st in me behold" when we were homeschooling. I expected to like the sonnets, because they have a reputation for sublimity, for unsurpassed wordsmithery.

Maybe I need a cretin T-shirt too. Or should that be a cretin doublet?

I find them contrived, repetitive, hard to parse, and generally not worth the effort. (Cretin pants, right here!) I know it is a little silly to complain about contrivance in Shakespeare, given that I have enjoyed plays in which two pairs of separated-at-birth twins cause havoc, a statue comes to life, and a person sprouts (for heaven's sake) a donkey's head. That's not even considering all those happy last-minute marriages born of verbal sparring matches between cross-dressed minor nobles. Maybe it's because the comedies are fun, and funny, whereas the sonnets are so dang earnest that I have to roll my eyes. (Cretin socks? Those are for me.)

I also hate the meta flavor of the sonnets, the reminders ad nauseam that the youth is going to die but he'll live on in these poems. It reminds me of bad hip-hop: yo, my baby's hot and my rhymes are dope. (Now the hip-hop lovers are tossing me a cretin scarf.)

Do you remember the scene in That Hideous Strength where Jane is tortured by thugs but escapes to safety? As she is recuperating she requests a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets. I always thought that reading the sonnets all in a row must induce transports of delight. But now I wonder if Jane just knew she needed a nap.

(Yeah, yeah, pass me the cretin mittens and I'll be going.)

A Bard & Hack Production

Pericles was the last play I read in January, and I was not enthusiastic. It starts out with our hero sussing out the truth about a father-daughter incestuous couple, which made me sigh heavily because Room is still thrusting itself into my brain at inopportune moments. I didn't want to read about any more sex slavery, thanks.

Their relationship turns out to be a very small part of the play, which is good, but my anticipation of better things to come was dampened (dampened is an understatement here -- dampened like a tsunami might dampen something) by the writing in the first two acts. Pericles is one of Shakespeare's collaborative projects. His co-author is unknown but I think his name might have been Poetaster The Hack, or PT for short. The first act prompted this exasperated tweet, and the second wasn't any better.

Two good things came out of the Hack-Bard collaboration for me, though. The first was a keener appreciation for what Shakespeare does: he makes blank verse look easy. Sure, Shakespeare wrote plenty of lines that don't scan and lines that are hard to parse, but our friend PT produced a limping affront to scansion and syntax. It's like Yoda meets Bill Peet. (Bill Peet in his rhyming stage -- goodness, I dislike those books.)

The second thing was a fun surprise for me: I think my ear for Shakespeare's voice is developing. I skimmed the introduction and took away the idea that Shakespeare didn't jump in until Act IV. Imagine my astonishment, then, to find myself actually...enjoying Act III. There were bits I wanted to underline. There were turns of phrase I admired. It sounded more like the Bard than the hack, but it was still too early for that, wasn't it?

I flipped back to the introduction and discovered that I'd misremembered: Act III is exactly where Shakespeare comes in. Kind of nifty, huh?

Even though he was light-years ahead of PT, Shakespeare was pretty much phoning it in for Pericles. Hidden identities, last-minute reunions, big happy ending, blah blah blah. He'd done the same thing at least a half-dozen times by then. There are also scenes in which I imagine PT grabbing the quill and saying, "No, it's my turn now" -- the writing is uneven. I will remember it happily, though, as the play in which I saw Shakespeare's craft more clearly, and in which I hit a target I wasn't sure I'd make: 1 month, 6 plays.

My updated intro post for the Crazy Shakespeare Project is here, if you're curious about how it's going. For February I am going to post about Richard III, and read The Winter's Tale, The Lover's Complaint, and about half of the sonnets. Getting there!

Henry and Margaret

Henry VI is an infant in the opening scene of the trilogy named for him; in its closing scene he dies. From his first appearance on the stage he is bookish and pious. "Marriage, Uncle! Alas, my years are young! / And fitter is my study and my books / Than wanton dalliance with a paramour." His nobles choke and splutter at the news of England's shrinking authority in France; Henry shrugs and says they must accept God's will.

These are not, as you might imagine, traits they find very kingly. "Be patient," Henry counsels Lord Clifford. "Patience is for poltroons," Clifford retorts. When the sparks of discontent ignite a civil war, Henry is even more ill-suited to lead.

Shakespeare Miscellany

You guys, do you know what would be fantastic? I think my local theater department needs to stage a Henry VI(-Edward IV-Richard III-Henry VII) marathon. The whole tetralogy, presented in a weekend. People can vote on their favorite play. They can give it a catchy name like "The (Wars of the) Roses Bowl." People would flock to it, right?

Right?

The coolest thing about reading the four plays back to back to back was watching the characters develop. It's no wonder I hated Richard III before -- it was a little like attending somebody else's high school reunion and wondering why I didn't get any of the jokes. Now I understand why it's so unexpected for the outcast (that'd be Richard) to take the cheerleader (that'd be Anne) to the prom.

I am going to keep trying to do a post on every play, which should get less onerous once I'm done with the big January push. Perhaps I shouldn't be complaining about onerous, given that a blog like this one exists. She's reading the complete works of Shakespeare this year and blogging all the way through it. I might have to rename this category: the Really Fairly Sane, Comparatively Speaking, Shakespeare Project.

A couple of bits and pieces I wanted to remember: Shakespeare refers repeatedly to people who are insane as "brain-sick." In view of the current emphasis on mental illness as a problem with physical roots, an organic problem based in the brain, it seems prescient of him. Of course, there's also plenty of talk about the influences of opposing planets &c., but it's interesting to see a little nugget of truth like that.

In case anyone needed a demonstration that mother blame is nothing new, I present the Duchess of York. "O my accursed womb, the bed of death!" she wails. "A cockatrice hast thou hatch'd to the world." The deposed Queen Margaret agrees: "From forth the kennel of thy womb has crept / A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death."

And on that cheery note, I'm wrapping it up for now.

Seven Quick Takes: Crazy Shakespeare Project Edition

1. I am banging right along on the Crazy Shakespeare Project: twenty days, twenty acts. Even if I get sick of it in April, this was absolutely the way to read the Henry VI trilogy. It would have been so painful to read those plays at my previous one-per-year pace. I would have been all "Wait, is it Suffolk or Somerset who's having an affair with Margaret? I know it's one of those Suh-something guys. And hold on, I thought Gloucester used to be a good guy!" [Yeah, that would be because the previous Gloucester died and the title (not a name) was given to Richard of the shriveled soul.]

2. I am not much of a Shakespeare scholar -- I didn't know that the three Henry VI plays and Richard III were written as a tetralogy. Yesterday in Act V of 3 Henry VI I realized that of course I had to read Richard III next. Of course. Gulp.

3. This is the fourth time I have started Richard III. It is one of the longest plays Shakespeare wrote, and in years past I have read about half of the first scene and said, "You know, I think this is a good play to read another year." This time, dernit, I'm getting out of the first scene. My husband and I saw a performance of it in '92 or '93 and neither of us can recall anything but vague impressions: long, slow, with a diminutive ranty king and Elwood's sister in a crazy wig.

4. I've been asked a few questions about the specifics of the project. Electriclady raised the question of reading on her Nook vs. her physical Complete Works. I have been rotating from Kindle to iTouch Kindle app to physical book. The electronic versions of the plays are really cheap, ranging from free to $0.99 -- at least for the plays I've priced so far. I got all three Henry VI plays for $0.89, total. (I think it's imperative to buy an edition that lets you go right to the scene of your choosing; not all of them do.) The disadvantage to the electronic versions I've bought is that they have no footnotes, and sometimes footnotes are indispensable. I usually read on a gadget until I begin to feel frustrated by the lack of footnotes. Then I skim all the footnotes from that stretch of Kindle reading in my Complete Works, and keep going in the book until I get interrupted. I keep the iTouch in my pocket so I can read while I'm nursing the toddler or even while I'm waiting for the onion to brown. (It's caramelized, kids! Not burned [because I was trying to finish the scene], just caramelized!)

5. Speaking of interruptions and reading around a  houseful of children, another question was whether I have a set time for reading each week. I squeeze in bits wherever I can throughout the day, and usually finish up the day's act before I go to sleep. With the Kindle I can read a fair amount while I'm getting Stella settled at naptime and bedtime.

6. A couple of people have asked me about the selection of plays and their sequencing. The selection is completely idiosyncratic: the plays on my list are the ones I haven't read yet. I put them in that table in fairly random order, so I expect to jump around quite a bit.

7. Three people so far have said, "This makes me want to read Shakespeare!" To each of them I have said, "Yes! Do! Tell me all about it!" I'm having a blast with this project so far. If you're interested in reading four or more plays, you can still sign up for the Shakespeare Reading Challenge. If you just want to read a little bit of Shakespeare, I'd love to hear about it here.

Thanks to Jen for hosting Quick Takes!

Fit to Rule

The middle play of the Henry VI trilogy is all about the jostling for power that takes place in the run-up to civil war and in its early days. Some bits of the first half were the kind of Shakespeare I like least, in which the Earl of Whatsit and the Duke of Wherever go on and on in I'm-especially-good-at-expostulating fashion.

Act IV, though, was something completely different. John Cade first appears on the stage in Act IV, ushering in a sequence that reminded me of nothing so much as, again, the Coen Brothers. It's not unusual for Shakespeare to sprinkle funny scenes into a tragedy, like this bit in Macbeth where the porter complains about the way that drinking boosts desire and impairs performance. In my experience, though, those episodes are usually extraneous and are often excised. (I have that example at the ready because I still remember my astonishment on discovering it. As a high school senior I read Act III at home in my dad's Complete Works, and then learned the next day that the porter's scene had been edited right out of my English text. Bowdlerization! I couldn't believe it!)

John Cade is like nothing I remember seeing in Shakespeare: every bit as bumbling as Dogberry and his ilk, but loaded for bear with an army of commoners at his back. His scenes are hilarious, but it's black, black humor. Although these events date from more than 500 years ago, they spark timely questions given our current political climate -- in particular, what equips a person to govern? Shakespeare derides the idea that an unlettered man could lead. (2 Henry VI is the source of the quote "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"; it's a proposal from one of Cade's followers, all of whom view education with suspicion.) On the other hand, in scenes reminiscent of modern-day debates about the "liberal elite," Henry is described as overly fond of books and is clearly ineffectual. He is too passive, the grasping Richard too vulpine.

Shakespeare doesn't offer an easy answer to the questions he raises. Henry's uncle, the good Lord Protector who has served in that office since Henry was a baby, yields up his staff of authority. His wife is worried; he dismisses her fears. He tells her "And had I twenty times so many foes, / And each of them had twenty times their power, / All these could not procure me any scathe / So long as I am loyal, true, and crimeless." His reward for decades of faithful service? He is murdered in his bed. It's a troubled place, 15th-century England.

Joan of Arc: The Unauthorized Biography

I mentioned that I'd been dreading Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth trilogy. I expected it to be a slogfest, full of interchangeable nobles and soporific speechifying. My apologies to Mr. Shakespeare: I'm two plays in and finding it engaging, moving, laugh-out-loud funny in spots, and reasonably easy to follow despite the York-Lancaster machinations.

Tonight, some quick thoughts on Part One. I loved Shakespeare's treatment of Joan of Arc in Act I. Particularly memorable: a nobleman named Talbot swaggers in, full of bombast and braggadocio. You almost expect him to burst into song -- "I'm especially good at expectorating!" -- and then he meets Joan. She leaves him quaking in his boots, saying, "They called us for our fierceness English dogs; / Now, like to whelps, we crying run away."

It was a bit of a shock, then, to see her in Act V. She summons demons (!) and offers them her blood, her body (!!), her soul (!!!). They reject her offers (!!!!); the tide turns against the French. I didn't realize until I read this play that Joan of Arc wasn't canonized until 1920. I thought at first that Shakespeare was giving precedence to jingoism over accurate biography, but I suppose I don't know how long it takes to have one's reputation rehabilitated after being executed for heresy.

Talbot reappears in Act IV with his son. The two of them are fighting a doomed battle -- doomed by infighting among two other nobles whom the naive king has instructed to stop fighting and get along already. The whole segment is well done, with the well-meaning king and the squabbling dukes, but I especially enjoyed the father-son dialogue in which each encourages the other to flee and live. In the end, though, they both die in the battle. Talbot says, "If thou wilt fight, fight by thy father's side, / And commendable proved, let's die in pride."

I launched into the trilogy thinking, "Three plays? Was that really necessary? Who would ever watch THREE PLAYS about HENRY THE SIXTH?" I was pleasantly surprised, again, by the end of Part One. The Earl of Suffolk (cue booing and hissing) persuades Henry that he should marry Margaret, breaking his more politically advantageous engagement. The pliant Henry acquiesces over the objections of his uncle, the Lord Protector. We can already smell the trouble brewing in Part Two -- about which more soon.

The Bard and the Coen Brothers

Can we still be friends if I tell you that I refuse to see another Coen Brothers movie? I know that all the cool people love the Coen Brothers, but I don't care: not gonna do it. Their images get under my skin and stay there, and really I like the underside of my skin just fine without any mangled dead bodies lurking there. I don't mind the quirky (I'd be in a world of trouble if I hated quirky, since quirky is practically my middle name). I mind the blood, I mind the improbably motivated killings, I mind the characters whose inner workings I just cannot fathom -- all of which brings me to Titus Andronicus.

Titus Andronicus is awash in blood. It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon that came out when The Passion of Christ was in theaters, with Mel Gibson shouting into a director's megaphone "More blood!" Titus Andronicus is widely held to be Shakespeare's worst play, and I am here to tell you the reputation is not undeserved.

It is so alarming that it kept me pretty much rapt, waiting to see what awful thing would happen next. In the final act Titus kills his daughter, his beloved broken daughter, a deed that made me say out loud, "Oh, no, you didn't!" That's the moment I keep puzzling over in my head, telling myself things like "paterfamilias" and "death before dishonor." But mostly I just keep telling myself, "That is deeply wrong."

It's not just that it's excessively bloody and set in a time when fathers ruled absolutely over their families. The characters don't even make sense. Tamora, the captured queen of the Goths, appears first in Act I pleading for the life of her son. "And if thy sons were ever dear to me, / O think my son to be as dear to me," she implores. "Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?" she asks. "Draw near them then in being merciful. / Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge." And yet when she gives birth to her lover's child she sends the baby to him with instructions to kill it, to "christen it with thy dagger's point." Really, Tamora? Really? And oh, her lover Aaron is a piece of work -- a Moor (cue the blackness cliches) with not an iota of goodness in him. In his last appearance on stage he asserts: "Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly, / And nothing grieves me heartily indeed, / But that I cannot do ten thousand more."

I don't buy it. Shakespeare's later villains are much more persuasive.

Still, in the years I have spent reading Shakespeare, the moments I have disliked most are the sloggy moments, spent counting down the lines until an act is over. Titus Andronicus has many flaws, but it is certainly not boring. And it also means that this year of Shakespeare can only get better.

My Crazy Shakespeare Project

So I am resolved to finish the works of Shakespeare this year, which means reading 17 plays and most of the poetry. That, my friends, is a lot of Shakespeare. You will probably not be surprised to hear that I have a Plan.

This month I am aiming to read six plays, one act per day. An act a day is a great pace for me -- it feels like headway without actually taking too much time. I started with Titus Andronicus, to get it out of the way, and I have moved on to the Henry VI trilogy. I expected to be counting down the lines until the end, but I was surprised to find I really enjoyed the first act -- so much so that I made my husband stop reading his own stuff so I could read my favorite bits aloud to him.

After the Henry VI trilogy I will probably read Pericles and Timon of Athens, in order to get the most dreaded plays out of the way. That will leave me with 11 plays, or one for each remaining month. That should leave me plenty of time to cover the poetry, right?

Here's my list:

Titus Andronicus 1/5/11	Coriolanus 12/4/11
Henry VI Part I 1/10/11	Two Gentlemen of Verona 7/4/11
Henry VI Part II 1/15/11	King John 5/30/11
Henry VI Part III 1/20/11	Twelfth Night 1/7/12
The Winter's Tale 4/3/11	Measure for Measure 7/18/11
Troilus & Cressida 1/1/12	Venus & Adonis 12/11/11
All's Well That Ends Well 1/4/12	The Rape of Lucrece 1/6/12
Richard III 1/25/11	The Passionate Pilgrim 12/2/11
Timon of Athens 12/21/11	The Phoenix and the Turtle 1/30/11
Pericles 1/29/11	A Lover's Complaint 4/17/11
Cymbeline 4/11/11	Sonnets 5/29/2011
Henry VIII 12/28/11

I'm feeling optimistic -- even if I bail in July, I'll read more Shakespeare than I would have otherwise. If I were a Shakespeare scholar, or even a less distracted googler, I would end with a suitable Shakespeare quote. Maybe by this time next year I'll have found one that's exactly right. Watch this space!