A Year of Shakespeare

After month two, I confessed to experiencing a bit of “Shakespeare fatigue.”  I had been hitting the material hard, coming at it from as many different angles as possible.  The downside? My own writing suffered and I felt conflicted, wanting to produce my best efforts on both fronts.

Now, at month three, I feel refreshed.  A major decision to pursue the historical plays in chronological order, rather than the order in which Shakespeare wrote them, has turned out to be transformational.  My eyes have been opened in particular to England in the middle ages and the development from feudalism to the Renaissance.

In the coming days, I will update my progress on Shakespeare’s biographies.  I’m excited about starting Henry IV and pushing on toward the sonnets, poems and major tragedies to come.  I’m only one quarter of the way through the year.  There is much work – as well as a major celebration – on the near horizon.

The biggest impact Shakespeare has had on me personally is to change the way I view drama, whether it be on stage, in movies or on TV.  I’m a lot harder to please, I think.  Some might even say cranky.  I can’t help but compare what I encounter to Shakespeare – and of course the majority of that will wind up lacking.  I have unwittingly set the bar ever higher, just because Shakespeare has become an everyday phenomenon in my life.  I brush my teeth thinking about Othello or Titus or Richard II.  I go to sleep with thoughts of Desdemona.  It’s hard to all of a sudden just let that go.

As I noted previously, Shakespearean language becomes more familiar even when the exact meaning of archaic expressions remains elusive.  I bother with footnotes less, depend on context to provide the gist and continue reading.  There are times when I need to parse a phrase or delve into research material to explicate a contextual reference; that’s because Shakespeare draws from such a wide pool of knowledge and employs a vaster working vocabulary than any other writer who ever lived.  He invents words, spins them in novel phrases with metaphorical and poetical panache.  I scramble to make sense of much of it.  But on the whole I feel freer to savor sounds as if basking in a foreign language or sitting by a babbling brook.  Somehow the overall meanings manage to trickle through.

I seldom doubt whether the project has personal significance, but I have become skeptical whether the blog makes any sort of difference to others.  That makes it hard sometimes to stake out the necessary time and space to give each entry my all.  I wanted the positive pressure of committing to a daily task with public accountability on a highly-visible blog…but I failed to grasp how even that might not prove incentive if nobody shows up to read what I’ve done.

That’s not the internet’s fault.  I simply haven’t produced content that people care about.  Maybe that means I need to rethink my strategy.  Or maybe it’s the format.  Or it could be my voice.  I don’t know exactly.  It’s another barrier I have to push through.

I care a lot.  Maybe I get too wrapped up on whether what I’m doing is connecting to others.  I get excited when people plug in and we share a virtual connection through Shakespeare’s words.  I wish sometimes that I had set the whole year aside for only Shakespeare.  That would be my advice to anybody considering a similar project: take the entire 365 days and turn it into a book or documentary or diary.  Don’t add it to whatever else you have going on or you may find yourself pressed from two many competing priorities.  Shakespeare demands the best of our intellect and our passion.  Doing this halfheartedly is almost worse than not bothering at all.

Here’s to the next quarter, I guess.  Spring has sprung.  One more month and I begin the sonnets, poems and Romeo and Juliet!

As month two comes to a close, I’m beginnning to experience my first bout of “Shakespeare fatigue.”  I have never concentrated so hard on one writer.  And though he’s well worth the time and effort, there are days when I feel overwhelmed.

I’m also slightly behind schedule.  I need to keep a three-play-per-month pace to have a chance at reading all 38 plays within the year.  As of today, I have barely begun my 6th.  Luckily, it happens to be a fairly breezy one: Two Gentlemen of Verona.

With two months now under my belt, I’m starting to get a better sense not only about what the project is taking out of me, but what it’s more than giving back.  For example, I am shocked by how much I have learned about English history in preparation for the history plays.  It feels like an education unto itself, over and above the associations with Shakespeare.  Now when I hear the names Alfred the Great or Richard Lionheart, I perk up and look forward to knowing more about them.  Beowulf, the Song of Roland, tales of King Arthur and courtly love poetry have a whole new context and meaning for me.  It may sound silly, but I feel wiser in the best sense that education provides.  If for no other reason, this decision has already proven worthwhile.

There are days when I realize that I’m writing to the wind – soliloquizing, essentially – by keeping this odd public diary.  But the discipline is having an effect on my other writing.  A daily blog forces me to be on point and a lot less fussy about getting my work out there.

As for Shakespeare himself, I have learned much about his personal life thanks to the biographies by Peter Ackroyd and Stephen Grenblatt.  I have read far less criticism than I anticipated.  Isaac Asimov remains my primary resource for background material and should prove crucial through the history stretch.

I understand that what I’m doing won’t interest Shakespeareans and has little interest for the public at large.  I stand utterly in no man’s land, a neophyte bumbling his way through the catalog of the greatest writer of all time.

Be that as it may.  I must steel myself for the down periods.  This adventure is akin to sailing solo around the world.  At times the thrill of the challenge holds me spellbound.  But in dark moments I wonder what possessed me to leave home on such a fool’s errand.

I stare into some of the later plays like Cymbeline and the Tempest and shudder.  I am still too green, too unworthy, too unready to ascend their towering peaks.  Maybe by then I’ll feel differently.  For now, there is the immediate work at hand.

In the end, the journey is all.  I won’t know how Shakespeare changed me until I have completed the trip.  And there’s still a long, long way left to go.

The histories are nigh.  One more comedy, then into the breach I go.