After almost 34 years, I've finally read the entire extant corpus of Shakespearean drama (plus the Sonnets, Rape of Lucrece, Venus & Adonis, and the Turtle and the Phoenix).
One would think I needed to have read all of Shakespeare to qualify for a PhD in Renaissance literature, but this was evidently not the case.
In case you were curious, the last holdouts from the bard were: Henry VIII or All is True, King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor, the first two Henry VI plays. Knocked them all out this summer.
Of course, it's not like I wasn't already mostly aware of the plays at this point or what they contained. Perhaps the biggest surprise was getting through 1 Henry VI and actually seeing just how negative Shakespeare's portrayal of Joan of Arc was. She was a bad, bad lady in Shakespeare's rendition.
What I learned the most, however, was how my own tastes have changed.
I tried to take out Merry Wives several years ago...got about three scenes into it...and dropped it from sheer boredom. This time, I was hooked most of the way through. Likewise, the histories have always been something of a bane to me...hence why they were the remaining obstacles. In my old age, however, I got into the almost melodramatic, soap opera quality of the early histories. Each part of the first tetrology has the equivalent plot development of an entire season of an HBO series.
So now I'm moving on to Shakespeare apocrypha. The Arden book series has just published Cardenio, which claims to be based on a no longer extant manuscript of a lost play; Isabel and I plan on working our way through it soon. And I gobbled up Mucedorus and The Birth of Merlin. Both are exceedingly dreadful. I had thought maybe I would teach a course just on the plays that have been erroneously attributed to Shakespeare, but those two have convinced me that it would only work as an advanced graduate seminar.
Comments