Play 1: Two Gentlemen of Verona
The first play on my 2012 Shakespeare reading list was "The Two Gentlemen of Veron", which I finished reading this evening. According to my sources (which, in this case, include but are not limited to Wikipedia), it is one of Shakespeare's less popular plays. The only theatrical adaptation of it is a Chinese silent film from the 1930s
I could see why after reading it. The play itself is a comedy, quite short, with the smallest cast of any of Shakespeare's plays. While it was funny, it was no Hamlet. The plot can be fairly easily summed up. Proteus and Valentine are the namesake young gentlemen of Verona, who go away to live in the court of the Duke of Milan. Valentine is a good friend and faithful lover, while Proteus, despite pledging faithfulness to Julia at the start of the play, winds up going bat-shit crazy over Valentine's love Silvia, and betrays Julia, Valentine, Silvia, and lies to just about everyone in the play in an attempt to win her over. A completely unsuccessful attempt, because Silvia knows how much of a liar he is and wants nothing to do with him. The play ends up with Proteus repenting, the friends reconciling, and Proteus & Julia and Valentine & Silvia back together.
The scholars say the play may be short because the version we have today is missing some sections. You can kind of see this in the play, with some parts seeming undeveloped. For instance, there's a subplot about Julia, when she stops getting letters from Proteus, dressing up as a young man and going down to Milan to check on him, but she's in barely three scenes after getting down there. And the ending is fairly abrupt. Despite Proteus putting Valentine through hell and proving himself to be utterly untrustworthy, Valentine completely forgives Proteus after a very short repentant monologue. There's also some controversy about the fact that, after reconciling, Valentine apparently offers to give Silvia to Proteus ("All that was mine in Silvia I give to thee") as a sign of their renewed friendship, which is controversial not just because it's a bit misogynistic (since Silvia has no say in it) but because it makes no sense since they were fighting over her just previous. I prefer the interpretation that the play is meant to be taken as a farce, with not just Proteus but all the young lovers switching their affections around at the slightest breeze.
In reading this first play, I've worked out a bit of my method for how to read the plays. The earlier plays I've read on my own, I simply read straight through on their own, maybe going to a dictionary occasionally. But then a couple of years ago I read Hamlet's soliloquy next to a modern English translation of it, and I realized just how much of the language I was misunderstanding by trying to just power through it. "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered", I took to mean something along the lines of "my sins are reflected in you, Ophelia". Which it turns out is utterly incorrect. "Orison" means "prayer", and the line really means, effectively, "Pretty girl, pray for me."
So this time I decided I wanted to try reading a version of Shakespeare with either a side-by-side modern gloss, or annotations to explain the more obscure wording to me. I was also hoping to read it on my Kindle, but the need for annotations meant I'd need to buy the plays rather than just read the Gutenberg editions.
It turns out there are a lot of really crappy editions of Shakespeare out there for Kindle. Paradoxically, it's true in general that it is hard to find good versions of public domain works, in the Kindle store. I think this is because it's so low-cost to go on Project Gutenberg, download the public domain text, and then format it for Kindle and slap a price on it, that the marketplace gets flooded with versions like this. A lot of them are shockingly badly formatted; I suspect someone just wrote a batch conversion program and didn't review them by eye. And, of course, it's difficult to format poetry and plays for Kindle in the first place, and Shakespeare, being written in blank verse, is uniquely both a play and a poem at the same time. Thankfully the Kindle store lets you download a sample chapter; I downloaded about a dozen sample chapters of Gentlemen of Verona and reviewed them. Most of them were really bad. Almost all had the dialogue indented a few tabs over, which made the lines all the more likely to wrap, making it hard to pick out the individual lines of dialogue. Quite a few were actually lacking in line breaks after each line of dialogue. Some of these had the temerity to charge over $5 for their ebook!
I wound up buying the Penguin Shakespeare edition. The sample chapter wasn't long enough to include the footnotes, so I was taking it on faith that they'd be decent. It turns out, content-wise, they were quite helpful. On the other hand, they were linked backward. Which is to say, it would have been helpful to have superscript numbers in the play text, hyperlinked to the end notes. But there were no marks in the play text telling you where the end notes were. Instead, the end notes listed the lines of dialogue they referred to, and were hyperlinked to those lines. So if you wanted to read the end notes through from start to finish, check out each line that each referred to, you'd be set, but if you wanted to read it in a more human way, reading the play from start to finish occasionally checking the end notes, well, that was harder. I wound up loading up the ebook on my phone and my Kindle side by side, with the play text on the Kindle and the end notes on my phone.
I did find that the notes were helpful, illuminating sections of the dialogue that I would have otherwise read quite backwards or just mentally skipped over. By the end of the play, I had memorized some of the Shakespearean language so that I was surprised less often by the endnotes, so I'm hoping that after reading a few more plays I won't need the end notes at all.
Next up is the much more widely known "The Taming of the Shrew". I may try reading the "No Fear Shakespeare" version of the play, which has the full modern English text parallel to the original. We'll see how that goes.
I could see why after reading it. The play itself is a comedy, quite short, with the smallest cast of any of Shakespeare's plays. While it was funny, it was no Hamlet. The plot can be fairly easily summed up. Proteus and Valentine are the namesake young gentlemen of Verona, who go away to live in the court of the Duke of Milan. Valentine is a good friend and faithful lover, while Proteus, despite pledging faithfulness to Julia at the start of the play, winds up going bat-shit crazy over Valentine's love Silvia, and betrays Julia, Valentine, Silvia, and lies to just about everyone in the play in an attempt to win her over. A completely unsuccessful attempt, because Silvia knows how much of a liar he is and wants nothing to do with him. The play ends up with Proteus repenting, the friends reconciling, and Proteus & Julia and Valentine & Silvia back together.
The scholars say the play may be short because the version we have today is missing some sections. You can kind of see this in the play, with some parts seeming undeveloped. For instance, there's a subplot about Julia, when she stops getting letters from Proteus, dressing up as a young man and going down to Milan to check on him, but she's in barely three scenes after getting down there. And the ending is fairly abrupt. Despite Proteus putting Valentine through hell and proving himself to be utterly untrustworthy, Valentine completely forgives Proteus after a very short repentant monologue. There's also some controversy about the fact that, after reconciling, Valentine apparently offers to give Silvia to Proteus ("All that was mine in Silvia I give to thee") as a sign of their renewed friendship, which is controversial not just because it's a bit misogynistic (since Silvia has no say in it) but because it makes no sense since they were fighting over her just previous. I prefer the interpretation that the play is meant to be taken as a farce, with not just Proteus but all the young lovers switching their affections around at the slightest breeze.
In reading this first play, I've worked out a bit of my method for how to read the plays. The earlier plays I've read on my own, I simply read straight through on their own, maybe going to a dictionary occasionally. But then a couple of years ago I read Hamlet's soliloquy next to a modern English translation of it, and I realized just how much of the language I was misunderstanding by trying to just power through it. "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered", I took to mean something along the lines of "my sins are reflected in you, Ophelia". Which it turns out is utterly incorrect. "Orison" means "prayer", and the line really means, effectively, "Pretty girl, pray for me."
So this time I decided I wanted to try reading a version of Shakespeare with either a side-by-side modern gloss, or annotations to explain the more obscure wording to me. I was also hoping to read it on my Kindle, but the need for annotations meant I'd need to buy the plays rather than just read the Gutenberg editions.
It turns out there are a lot of really crappy editions of Shakespeare out there for Kindle. Paradoxically, it's true in general that it is hard to find good versions of public domain works, in the Kindle store. I think this is because it's so low-cost to go on Project Gutenberg, download the public domain text, and then format it for Kindle and slap a price on it, that the marketplace gets flooded with versions like this. A lot of them are shockingly badly formatted; I suspect someone just wrote a batch conversion program and didn't review them by eye. And, of course, it's difficult to format poetry and plays for Kindle in the first place, and Shakespeare, being written in blank verse, is uniquely both a play and a poem at the same time. Thankfully the Kindle store lets you download a sample chapter; I downloaded about a dozen sample chapters of Gentlemen of Verona and reviewed them. Most of them were really bad. Almost all had the dialogue indented a few tabs over, which made the lines all the more likely to wrap, making it hard to pick out the individual lines of dialogue. Quite a few were actually lacking in line breaks after each line of dialogue. Some of these had the temerity to charge over $5 for their ebook!
I wound up buying the Penguin Shakespeare edition. The sample chapter wasn't long enough to include the footnotes, so I was taking it on faith that they'd be decent. It turns out, content-wise, they were quite helpful. On the other hand, they were linked backward. Which is to say, it would have been helpful to have superscript numbers in the play text, hyperlinked to the end notes. But there were no marks in the play text telling you where the end notes were. Instead, the end notes listed the lines of dialogue they referred to, and were hyperlinked to those lines. So if you wanted to read the end notes through from start to finish, check out each line that each referred to, you'd be set, but if you wanted to read it in a more human way, reading the play from start to finish occasionally checking the end notes, well, that was harder. I wound up loading up the ebook on my phone and my Kindle side by side, with the play text on the Kindle and the end notes on my phone.
I did find that the notes were helpful, illuminating sections of the dialogue that I would have otherwise read quite backwards or just mentally skipped over. By the end of the play, I had memorized some of the Shakespearean language so that I was surprised less often by the endnotes, so I'm hoping that after reading a few more plays I won't need the end notes at all.
Next up is the much more widely known "The Taming of the Shrew". I may try reading the "No Fear Shakespeare" version of the play, which has the full modern English text parallel to the original. We'll see how that goes.