When I started the Crazy Shakespeare Project, I planned to read everything in my Complete Works that I'd never read before. At some point that year I found out about Two Noble Kinsmen, and decided I should add it to my list. I also wanted to go back to Othello and Hamlet. Both of them were assigned to me during my sophomore year of college, but I read them in haste and they deserve more attention.
The bad thing about the Crazy Shakespeare Project was that I was mostly reading the dregs. There is a reason you don't see Henry VIII staged very often, my friends. Shakespeare's dregs hold more treasures than most people's first pressings, or whatever the opposite of dregs might be, but still: it took me a long time to tackle Two Noble Kinsmen. A co-authored version of the Knight's Tale sounded like a snore.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed it. Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together much more smoothly than Shakespeare and P.T. Hack. Sometimes you can hear their voices interleaving, but it's a much more pleasant experience than Pericles, in which the scribblings of Mr. Hack made me want to say, "Put down your pen and get back to your day job! Enough!" Parts of Two Noble Kinsmen are fairly direct about sex, which surprised me. Shakespeare is full of innuendo, but this isn't subtle. I checked the table in the intro and found that sure enough, those scenes are Fletcher's.
That's the best thing about these long-haul read-it-all-warts-and-all projects: getting to know an author's voice across his writing life, seeing the connections across works. As I was nearing the end of the project I came across the same image in two very different works -- Venus & Adonis and Coriolanus. In each of them Shakespeare describes a snail, shyly and curiously making its way about the world, unfurling a tentative horn after a fright. I imagine Shakespeare at home, watching the snails slowly oozing their way across his garden and remembering the sight when he sat down to write. I think of it whenever I see slugs waving their miniature horns in my own garden these days (and that alone, you guys, is reason enough to undertake a Crazy Shakespeare Project, because I used to think UGH and SHUDDER and nothing else). Almost 400 years after his death, Shakespeare's voice echoes in my head when I look out at the world. How cool is that?
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