Shakespeare Over a Year

There are at least three things I’m planning on doing if I ever become financially independent. (Or once the children move out, about two decades from now, if it starts looking like I’ll be working for the Man until I die.)

The first thing is to see the country. I enjoy threatening my wife that I plan on renting an RV, grabbing her and either of the children if they’re so willing, and hitting the open road. I have a master plan, sort of. Whether I follow it or not, the Great USA Winnebago Tour of 2032 will most assuredly be fraught with danger. Mostly for me.

I wrote about this a while ago, here.

Another thing I want to do is really, really, really get deep into mathematics. Okay, okay, I know, stop putting the “L” finger shape to your forehead. I want to do this for several reasons. First, I find numbers and number theory fascinating, on a whole variety of levels. I’m a very curious sort of fellow and there’s so much to explore in this field. I also find mathematics much more interesting when there aren’t so many tests and quizzes and finals attached to it.

It will also offset the onset of mental decline. I wrote about that, here.

The third thing I’d like to do once I have the time, the inclination, and the security to do so, is read through all the works of Shakespeare.

Yes, back in high school, I read my share of him. The usual stuff. Romeo and Juliet. King Lear. Macbeth. I don’t recall any others. For a college class on public speaking I bought a copy of Hamlet and did the famous soliloquy at the podium, but I never read the entire thing. A relative gave me his set of the Great Books, and I cracked open one of the Henry plays but only got two or three (long, small-print) pages in.

So I am hardly an expert, and barely a fan. In fact, the biggest stumbling block to tackling Shakespeare as an adult is that I just don’t get him. Which irks me to no end. I love language, I love words, I love poetry, I love the drama of the written page. Shakespeare seems custom made for me.

About a week or ten days ago I picked up the The Essential Shakespeare Handbook. I was hooked. I love books like these – informative, interesting, books you can browse and skip around the contents in no particular order. Lots of trivia. Quotes, vocabularies of made up words (by Shakespeare, I mean). Even technical data like chronological dates for plays, length of plays in lines, percentages of prose versus verse in each play.

It’s a great book, and it inspired me to take a fourteenth or fifteenth crack at the Bard.

So I picked up the Folger Library version of The Tempest and … I can’t put it down! Yes, I have an excellent SF paperback I’m a third of the way in. I have a worthy spiritual tome I’ve just entered. But I am also, now, on the shores of that island with Prospero and Miranda and Caliban and Ariel and those shipwrecked sailors, an Act and a half into the play, and I can’t wait to see how things transpire.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with Shakespeare after Tempest. That whole Shakespeare-in-a-year thing will have to wait. But I’m looking forward to reading other plays and posting my admittedly amateurish thoughts on his works as well as my actual experiences of the journey through them.

By the way, an excellent blog for this very thing is Shakespeareinayear.com. The nice lady is reading her way through Shakespeare’s 39 plays over the course of twelve months, ending this June. I corresponded with her briefly almost a year ago, and was quite tempted to join her and her compatriots on the journey. But being a Hopper, I knew I lacked the discipline to stick with it for 365 days.

But once I gain financial independence …