Day One - Project 5 (Ten Shakespeare Plays in Ten Days)

  Days late.  Again.  I never said I would post every day (or make a post for each day), but it has become the mode for the bjournal, or at least the exception that tests the rule.  Rule fails.

  I chose this project for a number of reasons.  The first is the same reason that all the "Read the works of [FamousDeadLiteraryFigureHere]" are attempted.  It's Edmund Hillary's "Because it's there."  The IT is not the works of said notables.  The IT in question is the glaring gaping hole in my reading as a supposed English Language Arts teacher.  I'm good at grammar, and I owned a lot of classics of literature as a pretentious teenager.  I haven't actually read that much.  When I talk to real well-read personages (see reason 2), a cold wind blows through the part of my brain inhabited by my IT.  Reading some more Shakespeare is probably not a bad thing for me.

  The second reason is I fell behind in reading Shakespeare a month ago.  My partner has a blog (one of many) describing her attempt to read all of Shakespeare's plays in a year.  I've mentioned this before.  And when she started it in the new year, I figured (given my IT of previous reason) sure, why not, I've got no other demands on my time.  One Shakespeare play a week - it seemed doable.  I read (as previously bjournaled) The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, Macbeth, and Racists Merchant of Venice.  Yeah, Merchant of Venice did my head in.  I just couldn't deal with the constant hatefulness of it.  It's kind of funny that What I started focusing on in my project at the time was Mark Twain's books, and specifically Huckleberry Finn.  But I do believe there was more social commentary in Twain's usage of the "N" word than Shakespeare's stage direction "Exit Jew" and the like.

  So I've read Othello.  Of my spoils, I do anow alert thee.  It's got racism, it's got sad unfairness, it's got violence against women.  But it's got heart.  It's got strong emotional believability.  O man, it's got Iago.  I still love my man Oberon (Midsummer Night's Dream), the selfish, debonair, thoughtless villian unleashing chaos (Puck) on the world because he didn't get his way, but Oberon lives in a romantic comedy world.  Iago lives in Venice - not the stupid, I-need-you-to-get-me-money-so-I-can-pick-a-box-and-try-to-reality-show-win-the-rich-lady-of-Belmont Venice, but a darker, harsher Venice under threat of war.  Iago is like hate for hate's sake.  When he kneels down with Othello to swear an oath to help him, I shivered.  Back when my hometown of Halifax, NS (I love how I still write as if the people who read this aren't almost entirely my family) had an artsy, indy movie theatre, I saw Othello, starring Lawrence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh.  I remember thinking it was awesome.  I have loved Lawrence Fishburne in everything he's done.  Even if the movie sucked, he didn't.  I watched The Matrix Strikes Back and Return of the Matrix for him, no one else.  Come on, Mr. Clean!  Apocalypse Now, when he was "Larry" Fishburne!  Okay, my revels now are ended.

  Othello is good.  It is sad.  Read it.

  For those of you interested in my Shakespearean itinerary, it is actually at the whim of my good lady partner.  Mary decided on the order of the plays for her yearlong task.  This project is a chance for me to get back in her game.


1. Othello
2. Romeo and Juliet
3. King Lear
4. The Comedy of Errors
5. Love's Labour's Lost
6. Julius Caesar
7. Antony and Cleopatra
8. Coriolanus
9. Titus Andronicus
10. The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  It was fun, before I got sidetracked, discussing each play as we read them.  I have taken the advice of friends, coworkers, distant relatives, students, and strangers who heard me talking about the projects.  Mary had asked if I wanted to read the plays with her before I got the idea for my One Thousand Days.  It was fun, and it was nice to feel like I had this format for bettering myself.

  And that's how I started thinking about my own thing.  So this project, hot on the heels of another reading project (well, one heels back), is just cuz.  Just cuz I like talking to Mary about this stuff.

  I love you, Mary.

-Mike

http://shakespearethisyear.blogspot.ca/