Yesterday the only bit of Shakespeare I managed was the first 20 minutes of King John on DVD. I did read the allotted section of Proust, but have decided to give Marcel up for the duration of the Shakespeare project, on the grounds that I can catch up with him later – I probably need less external incentive to read him than to read Shakespeare.
Ingrid, initiator of this wild idea, is offering resources on her blog. I know I wouldn’t find the time to read anything else beside the plays and in any case am holding on to the idea that I’m doing this for fun. That includes expressing my own naive responses to the plays unknown to me, uncoloured by ‘reading around’.
Having said that, I got the RSC Shakespeare yesterday. It looks wonderful. I was previously reading from an edition that I got as a school prize in 1963. The RSC version has short introductions to each play that seem, as far as I’ve looked into them (not very), elegant and useful. It’s also much easier to read, and the characters’ names are given in full. When that concerns for instance Antipholus of Ephesus, it makes quite a difference.
