When a man realizes that there are only so many days left in his life to make happen the hopes and dreams for which there was so much time in his salad days, it’s time to look honestly inside himself, admit his shortcomings, and make amends. So you can imagine my chagrin, not to mention embarrassment, when I made a list of the Shakespeare plays I still needed to read and was forced to come to grips with the fact that I’ve only read 12 of the 41 recognized plays (assuming you agree with the recent addition of Double Falsehood into the oeuvre, which I do). Only twelve plays? I haven’t read Othello? On the bright side, there are still 29 Shakespeare plays yet to discover and enjoy, and I’m tackling the “histories,” starting with Richard III.
I recommend the paperback versions of the plays from the Folger library. Each play has an introduction that puts the drama in context of Shakespeare’s life and work, describes the importance of the play, and notes famous lines that have become entrenched into the English vernacular. Most useful are the running explanations and “translations” of bits of arcane English which allow the reader to keep the narrative flow.
After reading Julius Caesar in high school, I gave Shakespeare scant attention until, while killing an afternoon in Los Angeles’ Huntington Library before an evening flight to Asia, I saw a First Folio for the first time – the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, published in 1623. Only a little over 200 copies are still known to exist. (A great new book by Eric Rasmussen, The Shakespeare Thefts, tells the stories of how some of these copies have made their way, legitimately and otherwise, through galleries, book collections and attics around the globe.) The Huntington visit spurred me to pick up the plays and read, and the comedies have been my favorite. Clearly, I need to pick up the pace.
My dream is to own a quarto, one of the early publications of the plays that were printed on paper folded twice (into fourths, giving the format its name) before printing. It’s likely to remain a dream, as even these volumes, created originally as affordable copies of the plays, run into the stratosphere at auction today. Nonetheless, there’s room for a quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost on my book shelf, the play that features one of my favorite Shakespearean characters, Berowne.
berowne.com 