"Brush up on your Shakespeare. . ."

Normally I'd try and sound sophisticated, but I'm from the southern Piedmont of NC, so I'll just say "Sup y'all?"

Who else is reading this? We need publicity. Facebook pages, word of mouf, emailed links, posters, sky messages over beaches or athletic venues. . .

I just graduated college on Sunday. I'm working at a wine store before entering grad school for my Ph.D. in Early Modern literature. Kellen's pretty much my boy, and I get down with the British Renaissance. . .so I'm along for the ride. I've got my own reading list of Renaissance texts before grad school, and I hope that will provide some intellectual context for Shakespeare.

As to my own reading schedule. . .hmm. There is value to a chronological approach, which would allow me to see the development of an artist into the Bard. But K-man's forging ahead with that one, so I'll give him some respect. Then there's the block approach, as in reading all the tragedies, comedies, and histories in a group according to genre. . .but that leads to the possibility of reading Hamlet, Lear, and Othello back-to-back-to-back, and that would mess anyone up. But then where do the sonnets and other poems fit in? They are problematic for both the chronological and genre-based approaches since we don't know when they were composed and because they're their own thing. . .

So I guess what I'm going to do is read a comedy, a tragedy, a history, and pepper some sonnets in between, and go in a cyclical fashion from there until I run out of things to read. I won't split up historical sequences, like Henry IV1,IV2, and V, or the Richard (I and II) plays. . .I'm looking at a list of the plays now:

Troilus and Cressida: got to be better than Chaucer's interpretation of the same story. . .ugh

Merchant of Venice: listed as a comedy. . .I mean, it has comedic elements, but tell that to Shylock

Venus and Adonis: heard it's terrible, but I'll see

Titus Andronicus: heard it's violent as hell. . .but I don't know if it can top the Gloucester scene in "Lear," holla if you know what I mean.

So what to start with? I've actually never read the "Tempest." So we'll go with that. Catch y'all later, TH