I downloaded the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and I have been making my way through them. I started with the Sonnets, which I had studied very thoroughly when I was a graduate student, and The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, which I'd never read.
As for the plays, I just finished reading Hamlet (for at least the twentieth time, I imagine), after going through some plays I never had read: As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. I had read the Comedy of Errors once and vaguely remembered it, and I read A Midsummer Night's Dream out of sequence, because a production of it appeared in Jerusalem this summer.
Except for As You Like It, I don't think anyone who read the other plays would imagine that Shakespeare could have produced a work of such high genius as Hamlet. Even though I was very familiar with it (not that I had read it very recently), I was bowled over by it, noticing things in it that I didn't remember at all.
The main thing I noticed this time was the change in Hamlet's character in the fifth and final act. His near brush with death on the ship, when he discovers that he is going to be executed as soon as he reaches England, and then his capture by pirates, which proves to be his rescue -- a far-fetched plot device typical of romances -- transforms and empowers him. We suddenly learn that he is a skilled fencer, he proudly calls himself "Hamlet the Dane," when he leaps into Ophelia's grave after Laertes, and he no longer feigns madness (of course one never knows how mad he really was).
Why have I undertaken this project?
Partly to enrich my English. After all, writing/translating is my profession, and I have to keep my English alive.
Partly out of a sense of self-respect. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature, and one of my fields was English literature of the Renaissance, and I haven't read all of the greatest English author of all. That's a failing that called for a remedy.
But mainly, because it's simply superb.
Even the bad plays, the ones that are mainly of historical interest, are full of glorious poetry. I've also been noticing the political dimensions of the plays, which I hadn't paid attention to before. I'm not reading any explanatory notes, and when I don't understand a passage, after wrestling with it for a while, I just go on. The occasional obscure bits don't interfere with understanding of the plays.
As for the plays, I just finished reading Hamlet (for at least the twentieth time, I imagine), after going through some plays I never had read: As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. I had read the Comedy of Errors once and vaguely remembered it, and I read A Midsummer Night's Dream out of sequence, because a production of it appeared in Jerusalem this summer.
Except for As You Like It, I don't think anyone who read the other plays would imagine that Shakespeare could have produced a work of such high genius as Hamlet. Even though I was very familiar with it (not that I had read it very recently), I was bowled over by it, noticing things in it that I didn't remember at all.
The main thing I noticed this time was the change in Hamlet's character in the fifth and final act. His near brush with death on the ship, when he discovers that he is going to be executed as soon as he reaches England, and then his capture by pirates, which proves to be his rescue -- a far-fetched plot device typical of romances -- transforms and empowers him. We suddenly learn that he is a skilled fencer, he proudly calls himself "Hamlet the Dane," when he leaps into Ophelia's grave after Laertes, and he no longer feigns madness (of course one never knows how mad he really was).
Why have I undertaken this project?
Partly to enrich my English. After all, writing/translating is my profession, and I have to keep my English alive.
Partly out of a sense of self-respect. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature, and one of my fields was English literature of the Renaissance, and I haven't read all of the greatest English author of all. That's a failing that called for a remedy.
But mainly, because it's simply superb.
Even the bad plays, the ones that are mainly of historical interest, are full of glorious poetry. I've also been noticing the political dimensions of the plays, which I hadn't paid attention to before. I'm not reading any explanatory notes, and when I don't understand a passage, after wrestling with it for a while, I just go on. The occasional obscure bits don't interfere with understanding of the plays.
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