A Year of Shakespeare

Set your DVRs, boys and girls, there’s been a syllabus change! Due to a certain saint’s day (No, not those Saints. Congratulations, New Orleans!) but rather a saint dedicated to amour each February 14, I’ve decided to break up the monotony excitement of the Greek and Roman historical plays with an ode to love: The Sonnets!

There are 154 of the little buggers, which means that I’ll have to churn through savor 17 per day in order to finish in the allotted nine days and stay on schedule. Which seems a tad o’er hasty to me, like traveling through Florence, Venice and Rome by tour bus over a weekend. So I won’t. (Unless all the sonnets are about a seasoned man giving advice to a winsome, dallying young fellow to crank out babies like in the first six — okay, I peeked at those too. What, you thought I just watched football all Sunday?)

Depending on the pace of the sonnets, it will mean having to trim a little of the luxury around a few of the other works. We’ll see how it goes. I also have five floating “holidays” I can spend according to need as well, but just like accrued vacation time at work, I’d prefer to keep those in the bank for a future crisis. Like Titus Andronicus.

It’s all flying seat-of-the pants, I’ll admit. But that’s why it’s so important to have an itinerary: so you can spontaneously break away from it and yet not feel utterly, shamelessly lost. And need to ask for directions. Or an excuse better than a Slurpee to pull into that 7-11.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

Just remember as you gripe, ladies: it’s all (ahem) in the name of love.

This entry was posted on 2010/02/08 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Syllabi with tags Florence, Rome, Slurpee, St. Valentine, Venice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.