Shakesyear: The Introduction!

(This is the first draft of the introduction to the book. No doubt it will change not once but many times as we proceed . . . .)

This is the story of how I read the works of William Shakespeare within a year. “But why?” I hear you ask. “Why read all of Shakespeare in a year? And why, oh why inflict a book about it on the rest of us?”

You have a point. First, of course, there was the girl who blogged about cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook in one year. Then there was the guy who wrote a book about reading the whole Encyclopedia Britannica in one year. The girl who lived according to Oprah’s advice for a year. The guy who didn’t shop for anything but food, including toilet paper, for a year. The guy who read the whole Oxford English Dictionary in a year. The girl who knitted a sweater—one sweater—for a year. The guy who lived according to the precepts of the Old Testament for a year (oops, hold on, that’s Britannica Guy again). The girl who passed as a guy for a year. The guy who read the Harvard Classics in a year (there’s a lot of this Extreme Reading, as I call it, going around). By the time you get to the girl—hot, blonde, and British—who went without sex for a year, the shark is pleading “Don’t jump me again!” only to be jumped by Dave Holmes, the guy who was blogging about his year of reading books by people who spend a year doing something, until the girl who went without sex for a year finished him off. Your questions deserve an answer.

The answer to “Why Shakespeare” is easy: shame. I was living in New York. I went to museums, theater, and concerts. I listened to National Public Radio. I’d seen numerous Shakespeare productions. I thought I was a pretty cultured guy.

And then, I lost my job. To help ward off depression, I turned to P.G. Wodehouse. (Hey, it worked for Hugh Laurie. Has anybody ever gone wrong following Dr. House’s advice?) The exploits of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster made me laugh as always, but they also reminded me that Wodehouse is supposed to have read all of Shakespeare every year. Every year? How did he find the time in the middle of writing ninety-six books? I took my Shakespeare down from the shelf and counted up. I had read about half the plays, without managing to write even one book. I thought I was literate; in truth I was a schlub. There was only one solution: I too would read all of Shakespeare in a year.

But reading wasn’t enough for Wodehouse, so it couldn’t be enough for me. A book about an ordinary guy reading Shakespeare would meet a need. So many people think they hate Shakespeare, when really they hate the high school—and college—teachers who taught him badly. I used to be one of those people and it took decades before I realized the truth. So many more, even NPR listeners, need convincing that Shakespeare isn’t homework. Was there really not a book that would speak to both these audiences? That would show how Shakespeare isn’t just a bunch of half-remembered quotes from high school (friends, Romans, countrymen, to be or not to be by any other name, yadda yadda yadda forsooth), how vital he remains in the age of 140 characters? Where was the book the guy in Dead Poets Society would have used, the one that could kindle a love of Shakespeare to last a lifetime, the one I wish somebody had given me in high school?

It was waiting to be written. And I was the one to write it because I had a foot in both camps. Reading all the plays in a year seemed the perfect hook. Yes, this was Extreme Reading, but with a big difference. All the other Extreme Reading books struck me as the intellectual equivalent of a hot-dog eating contest. They weren’t books you would read if you actually wanted to learn something, and their task was emphatically not something you might actually want to do. A book about all of Shakespeare’s plays would be another story.

I felt like Saul on the road to Tarsus. Like him, I would answer this call to duty. I would tell how I read the plays against the backdrop of my life, its triumphs, its disasters, its comic misadventures. There could even be an exciting race against the clock to provide narrative tension. Even better, by the work’s very nature, Shakespeare promised to be an inexhaustible fount of the life lessons so essential to Extreme Reading books, so that at the end of the process I could reflect on how profoundly my task had changed me. Julie Powell had her Julie-Julia Project. I would have the Shakespeare Project!

My Competitors, #3: Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet

Christopher R. Beha’s The Whole Five Feet follows in the Extreme Reading tradition of A.J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All or Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED. Unlike its precedessors, it isn’t an excuse for lame schtick; in fact it’s far too serious for its own good, completely humorless once you open the book (I suppose an editor supplied the title). Beha is a young man who decided to read the Harvard Classics straight through in one year, starting at 12 am on January 1. At 22,000 pages, his task works out to a manageable 60 pages per day, so even though he did not read every day, unlike Jacobs and Shea it’s not impossible to believe he really did what he says he did. The question is why. The answer boils down to: because they were there—in his parents’ library and at the family summer house.

If you’ve never heard of the Harvard Classics, don’t feel ashamed. It’s a set of fifty volumes assembled by one Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for many years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, meant to make good on his claim that anybody–and specifically the working classes–could acquire a liberal education through fifteen minutes’ reading per day from a “five-foot shelf of books.” Needless to say, then as now this was a marketing ploy (on the publisher’s part, not that of the high-minded Eliot): the Harvard Classics were a huge commercial success in their day. Inevitably, the suspicion arises that most purchases were for show, and Beha’s anecdotes about his grandmother’s allusions to the five-foot shelf are thin evidence to the contrary. (They do make me wish we’d seen much more of the grandmother, a working-class woman who became a friend of Lionel and Diana Trilling and then a model for Christian Dior; she’s by far the most interesting thing in the book).

Alas, the Harvard Classics’ day is long over. Nobody today wants the kind of education Eliot promised, and even if you did you would scarcely think his rather eccentric selection was the way to acquire it. Beha looks silly in his attempts to take Eliot at his word. Although he discovers some gems, he’s constantly apologizing for the inclusion of this or that work. More importantly, acquiring what a late-nineteenth-century elitist would have considered a liberal education seems a singularly pointless thing to do in the twenty-first century. The dead hand of the “genteel” tradition typified by Emerson and Thoreau is still wrapped around the throat of the American literary establishment, but to most North Americans today, even most readers, those dead white American males are as alien as Thomas Aquinas. The Harvard Classics all too clearly bear the stamp of their time, place, and class; not only is there hardly any Shakespeare in the collection (the publisher, Collier, originally excluded Shakespeare and the Bible because potential customers were likely to own them already, but relented when Eliot bridled at the resulting unfavorable publicity) , there’s no Marx. That economic and social thought, for the Harvard Classics, ends with Adam Smith tells you everything you need to know about the worldview readers are supposed to be absorbing (except that there’s virtually no fiction on the Five-Foot Shelf).

The problem with Beha’s project is summed up in three little words: World War I. It’s a cliché to say that the Great War killed off the Enlightenment, but if the Harvard Classics is anything it’s a selection of the writings a coterie of hyperprivileged Bostonians believed got them where they were, at what they believed was the highest stage of development of the Enlightenment. That worldview has proven as tenacious as a zombie, but it died just a few years later in the trenches of the Somme. Add Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to Shakespeare and Marx on the list of missing authors.

All this means that Beha has to  justify the readings themselves, not just his decision as an individual to read this particular collection at this particular time. Unfortunately he is far from up to the task. In truth, he’s rather ill educated. By his own account, he spent his undergraduate career—when he wasn’t being treated for Hodgkins’ lymphoma—memorizing lines from Caddyshack. You can get away with that at Princeton, as I know all too well from my time as a grad student TA there. Just don’t expect us to be bowled over by your opinions about literature. After a four-page discussion of “Tintern Abbey,” the longest single literary analysis in the book, Beha comments: “Much of what I’ve just written about ‘Tintern Abbey’ I could have put into a blue book then [in college] if asked.” Yes, you could have—and should have left it there.

The merit of his literary opinions aside, did Beha gain anything from his stunt?

“Blow Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks!” (second of three posts)

You’ll have noticed that in “Hamlet’s Raspberry” I didn’t actually discuss any of Shakespeare’s fart jokes. If he doesn’t lift a leg like Terrance and Philip on South Park, what does he do? The Two Gentlemen of Verona lays it all out for us. This is my least favorite Shakespeare play and probably Shakespeare’s least popular comedy, with good reason. It’s almost certainly one of his earliest plays; it strikes almost everyone, including me, as creaky in ways characteristic of a beginning writer. And something quite horrible happens in it that seems totally uncharacteristic of Shakespeare and cries out for explanation. In My Year with Shakespeare I’ll go into all of this in much more detail than you might think necessary. But here let’s look at the one thing everybody loves in this play, the two monologues of Launce and his dog Crab.

Launce is the “clownish servant” to Proteus, the more obviously boorish of the Two Gentlemen. He has a fair amount to do in the play but he’s remembered because he twice comes on to the stage and addresses the audience directly about the misbehavior of his dog Crab, a kind of canine precursor to Falstaff. As I mentioned in “Hamlet’s Raspberry,” every acting company at the time had a resident clown. These two monologues are plainly showstoppers for the clown (in this case most likely the famous Will Kempe), and they work; they stop the show in its tracks. The first monologue achieves a level of comic surrealism it would take Monty Python to approach, and it has one superlative sex joke (using a pair of shoes to represent his parents, Launce says “this shoe with the hole in it is my mother”), but no fart jokes, so I won’t discuss it further here. But the second monologue in its entirety is below the fold:

A Justification for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games?

Shakespeare’s Globe announces a project that’s either brilliant or crazy or both: in 2012 it will present all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in 38 different languages. According to Londonist, this is the Globe’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad (although the Globe’s press release references the Cultural Olympiad, the Olympiad’s web page refers to an entirely different project by the Royal Shakespeare Company—multinational but not clearly multilinguistic), which looks like some small recompense for the looming catastrophe of the Olympics.

There’s a stunt aspect to this project, surely. And it looks to be so exhausting the Globe can’t seriously expect anybody to take it all in. (Six weeks is 42 days, so we’re talking a play a night for six weeks with only four days off.) I suppose the Globe is counting on native speakers of each language being in town for the Olympics (I wonder if Latin is one of the languages). But the results are sure to be challenging, exasperating, and exciting; sometimes bewildering, often enthralling. At least if the Royal Shakespeare Company’s eight-language production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I was lucky enough to see at Toronto’s Luminato festival in 2008, is anything to go by. A South Asian cast performed in English and seven other subcontinental languages. This polyglot approach was disconcerting, and frankly you have to be up for a spot of adventure to see any play in a language you don’t understand. But if you could put your cultural timidity to one side, this very physical mashup of Shakespeare’s world with Indian theater threw off sparks. The Dream was an inspired choice, too—probably Shakespeare’s most familiar play apart from the Big Four tragedies, offering recognizable action even when performed in an unknown language and translated into the theatrical traditions of an unfamiliar culture.

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the concept. Unlike the Globe productions to come, nobody could have understood the whole performance, making it hard not to feel that a scrim was being interposed between us and the words. And the words are always paramount. Still, it was impossible to be in the theater with these players in this particular production and not be bowled over by the energy inadequately captured in these two clips, the only ones I could find on YouTube. In truth, if you have any sense at all of Shakespeare as living theater, are you going to hesitate for even a second before choosing this over a popular but lifeless Dream like the one Toronto’s Dream in High Park series offered two summers in a row? We keep saying Shakespeare is universal, and if that’s not to be the hateful empty piety it is in so many mouths, it at least means that he has to offer enough to non-English-speaking cultures to be adaptable. He’s proven himself time and again (see perhaps the single best chapter in Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, about Shakespeare’s global influence), but to bring all the plays together at once as the Globe will do just might exceed critical mass.

I expect that in the resulting chain reaction, some productions will be disasters while others will achieve an even higher level than this Dream. Who wouldn’t at least want to take a flyer on an Urdu Taming of the Shrew, a Maori Troilus and Cressida, a musical Arabic Tempest “based on the Persian Gulf’s sea shanty tradition,” or a British Sign Language Love’s Labour’s Lost?  I certainly want to be part of it. If Around the World in 38 Plays, the TV version of My Year with Shakespeare, is in production by then, I wouldn’t have to stir from the South Bank to see all 38 plays in six weeks. UK TV producers, are you taking note?