"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

Hamlet and His Problems

I know we haven't gotten to that good juicy reading of the plays yet, but I wanted to first explain as briefly as I can why I like Hamlet, and why I think that Hamlet is valuable or interesting enough to be used as an angle to look at all of Shakespeare.

First, I think that the language of Hamlet is peerless. It's just as beautifully and cleverly written a play as anything. Secondly, I like the play for a couple of the so-called problems with it that T. S. Eliot highlights in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems." In the essay, Eliot responds contrary to the current wave of criticism about Hamlet and goes on to declare Hamlet an artistic failure. He explains:

Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy d' Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.

And that's what I like about Hamlet. I like that's its maddeningly difficult to pin down. I like that it's tonal. This isn't a failure, this is uniquely elevated above Shakespeare's other plays. In the essay Eliot goes on to stress that Hamlet is a play that is not contained. It is problematic and possibly without solution. He says,

We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.

This is, in short, one of my primary reasons for undertaking this project. I don't think we have to admit defeat, and I do think that if we poke at Hamlet hard enough that there are plenty of interesting insights still available. That's the beauty of the maddening problem of Hamlet. It keeps yielding interesting questions and incomplete answers.

So I hope that made sense. I'm going to return to the issue of Eliot's relationship with Shakespeare more than a few times I supsect. The Wasteland has about thirty Shakespeare references, mostly to Hamlet and the Tempest, and I just feel I would be totally remiss to not hammer at those a little bit. Finally, the more I think about "Hamlet and His Problems," the less sure I am that Eliot was even being sincere about what he said. After all, what's a more maddeningly un-self-contained work than The Wasteland?

Anyway, enough with Hamlet for now. I've started the Comedy of Errors and well into trying to remember how many movies or television episodes I've seen that ape the basic premise... which, itself, is apparently a blend of two Plautus plays. I guess there's nothing new under the sun.

Someone else say something so I don't seem like a crazy person talking to himself.

What We're All About

Hello there. If you don't mind, I'd like to take a moment to let you know what we are all about. This blog is a repository for a sort of collective journaling from a few people as they endeavor to read the entire works of William Shakespeare over the course of the summer. So, in stupid invitation form:

What? The entire works of William Shakespeare and ancilliary materials.

Where? Here.

When? This summer.

Who? Me and some others who will introduce themselves shortly.

Why? That's a good question. I'll explain my reasons and let the others explain theirs.

My name is Kellen. I graduated college about one year ago and now work at a psycholinguistics lab helping to devise and run various experiments. I have apparently decided that I want to spend my free time reading and rereading Shakespeare. I'm doing this because I like silly projects and I do, really, earnestly like Shakespeare.

Actually, that's not true.

I like Hamlet. I love Hamlet. I've read tons and tons of plays, and I like none of them as much as I like Hamlet. In fact, some of my greatest disappointments have been the other Shakespeare plays I've read. None of them match up to Hamlet, by my estimation.

So why read Shakespeare, again? Because I want Hamlet in its context. I want to situate it in the author's wider work.  If I can understand Shakespeare better, I'll understand and like Hamlet better. This means not just reading Billy's texts, but reading his sources and his contemporaries. I have made peace with the fact that I will be reading The Spanish Tragedy at best, and at worst, Greek "comedy" that I don't care for one bit. Or even worse, Shakespeare's own comedies. FIRST POST BURN!

In any case, let me lay out the ways I plan to approach our dear Billy Boy.

1. Desperately searching for relevance to Hamlet.

2. Desperately examining source texts and scope of influence, allusions, etc.

3. Looking for a linguistic angle on things. That's what I'm trained to do.

4. Heavy discussion of any movie based on the play. However loosely. This is the "10 Things I Hate About You" approach. I expect I will fall back on it often.

5. Loose, loose connection between Shakespeare and something else in my life. For example, right now I'm watching a lot of playoff basketball: BAM! Done.

In any case, that's how I'm going to do this thing. I'll let the others lay out their approach. My next post will be a little more about Hamlet and why it fascinates me so much and then after that I will finally start reading and writing about some plays. First up: The Comedy of Errors. Why? Because it's one of Shakespeare's earliest, least sophisticated, and shortest. It won't know what hit it.