As tedious as a twice-told tale

Remember my happy Dickens project? It was conceived in a bleak Edinburgh winter as a way to keep the literature-loving corner of my brain humming in a season filled with soggy diapers and sibling squabbles. If you keep nibbling at something big, sooner or later you find you've chewed a sizable hole in it. I decided to read a Dickens novel and a Shakespeare play every year.

So in January of 2000 I started out.

(Parenthetically, isn't the Y2K hysteria a little funny in hindsight? Were you relieved on New Year's Eve, when the new year hit in the Far East and civilization did not collapse? And did you stockpile lentils etc. in preparation for the unknown?) I read King Lear first -- what a great way to kick it off! When I got to the "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks" monologue I read it aloud quietly. "Read that again, Mama," said little 3yo Alex when I had finished. "Now read it again! Read it one more time!" I love that memory -- the two of us sitting in the pale January sunshine with the baby sleeping nearby, my weathered Complete Works in my lap. He was too little to understand but not too little to thrill to the cadence and the words.

Perhaps it was inevitable that things would go downhill from there.

There's nothing like Shakespeare at his best, but King Lear and King John are leagues apart. Before I started this project, I had mostly read the greatest hits. There's a reason you don't see Merry Wives of Windsor produced as often as Midsummer Night's Dream. And the history plays? I find most of them a slog, she whispered, thinking that a really-for-true English major would find a way to love Richard II instead of thinking, "Wait, who's Berkeley again? And how many lines are left in this act?"

Two useful things I have learned are to read briskly and to pay some attention to the footnotes at the outset. If I spend two weeks or more reading a play that was meant to be performed in a few hours, I'm not going to enjoy it nearly as much as if I read an act or two each day. Likewise, if I am reading a volume that devotes reams of space to editorial questions -- "This semicolon is rendered as a virgule in the hallowed First Folio, and the resulting enjambment BLAH BLAH BLAH" when I just wanted to know what ventages were -- that drives me crazy. Better to pick up a different edition for cheap at the used book store.

I've been thinking about a few things that would make the project more fun:

1. I should pick up a guide to the history plays, so I have a plain English explanation of what those complicated Tudors were really up to. Perhaps I should know that already, but I do not.
2. It's always helpful to see a performance in addition to reading the words on the page. It's easier to keep track of the minor characters that way, easier to keep moving through some of the hard-to-parse lines. There are uncountable recordings of Shakespeare plays, so that's probably a reasonable plan.
3. Starting next year, I think I'm going to move to reading two plays per year. The more time you spend reading Elizabethan English, the easier it is to read. Also, Shakespeare wrote many more plays than Dickens wrote novels. I'm only a little past the halfway mark, which means I'm going to have to pick up the pace to get them finished by menopause.