01-27-2026, 07:04 PM
I finished reading Dante's Comedia last year, after a long pause. I started reading Inferno during the pandemic, finishing Purgatorio just as I ended a sort of quarantine, but then for a couple of years I took the time to learn the language. Instead of reading an English translation while listening to the original Italian, I sounded out the original Italian while reading a modern Italian paraphrase, once I reached Paradiso.
Betwen either part of the Comedia, however, the classics I engaged with were Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, or at least the first third of his career. I assembled a mostly chronological reading list of the works of the author and his contemporaries, then I read each play. After reading each of Shakespeare's plays, I read some of his critics, with the critics I read being assembled largely from Harold Bloom's "school": besides Bloom himself, through his 1998 The Invention of the Human, there's Samuel Johnson's 1778 annotations, Hazlitt's 1817 Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Goddard's 1951 The Meaning of Shakespeare, Kermode's 2000 Shakespeare's Language, and Garber's 2004 Shakespeare After All.
At the moment, rather than continuing with Shakespeare, I've elected to read some 17th to 18th century translations of the Greco-Roman classics. But whenever I'm not doing anything else, I've also been giving Mozart's late operas a listen, and I suppose the connection is that it's best to consider these greats in context---read about them as much as one reads or hears them, also try to read or hear their contemporaries---and in even rough chronological order, watching carefully how they develop as voices. Early Shakespeare, for instance, is truly crap, more intolerable to read than Kyd or Marlowe (whom he was probably aping).
The list:
But more directly,
"Why do we read Shakespeare? His plots are contrived, and theatrical dialogue is the opposite of real life."
His plots were rarely his own. I believe only A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest weren't based on preexisting texts---Romeo and Juliet, for instance, was based on an Italian novella---so the blame for the plots being contrived probably doesn't rest on himself. But as for the note on "theatrical dialogue", it seems rather paradoxical. Is it so bad a thing that we go to the theatre to listen to an enhanced version of life, instead of sitting there watching someone scroll through Reddit while picking their nose for two hours? At the same time, my memory better serves me with Hamlet or Love's Labour's Lost, where there are instances that are very naturalistic (at least for metered text from four centuries ago):
Ber. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
Or else there are instances where characters spout rather tired poetry, if they spout poetry at all, but it's perfectly in keeping with their character, and thus is very true to life:
Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!
"I personally read Shakespeare for the poetry, and skip over the boring bits. But that brings to mind another question - how many Shakespeares have we not read?"
In this case, probably all of them, because the "poetry" cannot exist without the "boring bits" xP Not that I would recommend The Two Gentlemen of Verona to anyone....
And maybe that's my answer to the larger sense of the question, too. Few of us so barely read Shakespeare, we barely consider his works as an organic whole, or his works in the context of other works of the era, or his works as carefully read by others. We read his four hundred year old plays once or twice and think, "Well, I've read him", immediately moving on, if we even bother to read each play in its entirety, so that the question of other Shakespeares ends up reading like an excuse for idleness. Hand over the care for those lost Shakespeares to those who actually know Shakespeare, who in habitually trudging through the boring bits find his poetry all the more poetic: that we can't recognize even our one Shakespeare now means we're not at all equipped to recognize his potential peers. Not that my goal is not to be an idler.
Betwen either part of the Comedia, however, the classics I engaged with were Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, or at least the first third of his career. I assembled a mostly chronological reading list of the works of the author and his contemporaries, then I read each play. After reading each of Shakespeare's plays, I read some of his critics, with the critics I read being assembled largely from Harold Bloom's "school": besides Bloom himself, through his 1998 The Invention of the Human, there's Samuel Johnson's 1778 annotations, Hazlitt's 1817 Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Goddard's 1951 The Meaning of Shakespeare, Kermode's 2000 Shakespeare's Language, and Garber's 2004 Shakespeare After All.
At the moment, rather than continuing with Shakespeare, I've elected to read some 17th to 18th century translations of the Greco-Roman classics. But whenever I'm not doing anything else, I've also been giving Mozart's late operas a listen, and I suppose the connection is that it's best to consider these greats in context---read about them as much as one reads or hears them, also try to read or hear their contemporaries---and in even rough chronological order, watching carefully how they develop as voices. Early Shakespeare, for instance, is truly crap, more intolerable to read than Kyd or Marlowe (whom he was probably aping).
The list:
But more directly,
"Why do we read Shakespeare? His plots are contrived, and theatrical dialogue is the opposite of real life."
His plots were rarely his own. I believe only A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest weren't based on preexisting texts---Romeo and Juliet, for instance, was based on an Italian novella---so the blame for the plots being contrived probably doesn't rest on himself. But as for the note on "theatrical dialogue", it seems rather paradoxical. Is it so bad a thing that we go to the theatre to listen to an enhanced version of life, instead of sitting there watching someone scroll through Reddit while picking their nose for two hours? At the same time, my memory better serves me with Hamlet or Love's Labour's Lost, where there are instances that are very naturalistic (at least for metered text from four centuries ago):
Ber. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
Ros. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
Ber. I know you did.
Ros. How needless was it then
To ask the question!
To ask the question!
Ber. You must not be so quick.
Ros. 'Tis 'long of you that spur me with such questions.
Ber. Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.
Ros. Not till it leave the rider in the mire.Or else there are instances where characters spout rather tired poetry, if they spout poetry at all, but it's perfectly in keeping with their character, and thus is very true to life:
Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!
"I personally read Shakespeare for the poetry, and skip over the boring bits. But that brings to mind another question - how many Shakespeares have we not read?"
In this case, probably all of them, because the "poetry" cannot exist without the "boring bits" xP Not that I would recommend The Two Gentlemen of Verona to anyone....
And maybe that's my answer to the larger sense of the question, too. Few of us so barely read Shakespeare, we barely consider his works as an organic whole, or his works in the context of other works of the era, or his works as carefully read by others. We read his four hundred year old plays once or twice and think, "Well, I've read him", immediately moving on, if we even bother to read each play in its entirety, so that the question of other Shakespeares ends up reading like an excuse for idleness. Hand over the care for those lost Shakespeares to those who actually know Shakespeare, who in habitually trudging through the boring bits find his poetry all the more poetic: that we can't recognize even our one Shakespeare now means we're not at all equipped to recognize his potential peers. Not that my goal is not to be an idler.