The Crate-Diggings listed at the bottom of this post were come up with in response to a Quora question.

For those who’ve never heard of it, there’s a website called Quora where people ask questions and you can answer them; I have no idea how I ended up on their e-mail list. Anyway, I occasionally chime in with an answer when someone asks about something I’m interested in. This time: Shakespeare!

Q: How do I read Shakespeare’s works and where should I start/what books on Shakespearean or literary analysis should I read?

Well, I do have some recommendations, but you may wish to take these in stages, as they range from “what a beginner should do” to “what a Shakespeare obsessive/bonafied bardolater should read.”

 

Totally Newe to Shakespere (Get Thy Feet Wette)

s a complete beginner, I recommend watching any of the many great Shakespeare film adaptations, but do it with the captions on. Watch the words and use the actors’ body language to help you understand what’s going on.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of great characters, exciting action, hilarious dialogue, dastardly villains, and perplexing moral conundrums, on top of some of the greatest poetry of all time; in the beginning you may be frustrated because you are new and can’t always understand what’s going on. It’s as if you’ve never watched a single down of American football and now you’ve tuned in to the Superbowl. Relax! You won’t get it all at once. Just know that you are getting a front row seat to one of the greatest shows on planet earth. Comprehension and enjoyment will come in due time.

You can also find many plays performed on Youtube. (There’s a version of Hamlet performed at San Quentin prison that I’m partial to for some weird reason.) (I’m also a fan of this version of As You Like It: As You Like It play at Wolfe Park in St. Louis Park 7/19/13.) A caution, though: often times the acting in amateur productions of Shakespeare isn’t so good; the actors miss nuances of the language and do not fully dramatize what is being said with their acting.

The absolute gold standard for Shakespearean acting right now in my opinion is the modern Globe Theater productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). (I emphasize modern, as the RSC used to be one of the foremost instigators of the idea that Shakespeare should be performed in a stuffy Received Pronunciation, on which see Ben Crystal’s explanation.) They are available on DVD, and you might be able get them through your local library. RSC productions employ outstanding professionals (including, if history serves as any guide, a large number who will go on to have famous film and TV careers) but who are trained by the RSC how to capture every nuance of emotion and humor, which is helpful because Shakespeare packs in a lot of complex emotions, and many many jokes that are funny, but we just need to actor to help us understand what’s being said.

Once you watch some Shakespeare plays, now you’ll want to read Shakespeare. There are people who say Shakespeare’s plays aren’t meant to be read, they are meant to be seen performed. This, to me, is one of those well-intentioned nostrums that is also complete nonsense. The fact is, when you are a beginner watching a Shakespeare play gives you little opportunity to digest what it was you just saw, what you heard the characters saying and dramatizing with their acting.

The truth is we recommend people watch Shakespeare plays before reading so that they understand that actual people can talk this dialogue and act these emotions and do it convincingly; there is nothing dead about Shakespeare’s language. It is as alive today as it was 400 years ago. But if you only watch and never read, you are going to have difficulty understanding the sheer density and beauty and meaning of all these words.

People say that Shakespeare’s language is hard. The truth is, once you have 3–4 plays under your belt, you will begin to grok Shakespeare’s language and the difficulty will give way to profound pleasure.

For beginners, I recommend the Folger Shakespeare Library editions of his plays. They have explanatory notes and introductions that will help put the plays in context and generally beginner friendly.

The greatest one volume Shakespeare that I know of is The Riverside Shakespeare (though The Oxford Shakespeare is also worthy.)

If you want an edition of Shakespeare with over 600 illustrations, I recommend you google the “Henry Irving Shakespeare,” available for free from HathiTrust.

Deeper Cuts

For more enthusiastic Shakespeare lovers, here’s what I recommend reading.

Shakespeare’s Life and World by Katherine Duncan-Jones

Shakespeare was part of an entire Elizabethan world that is itself interesting and worth getting a better understanding of. Katherine Duncan-Jone’s book puts Shakespeare into context.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro

Shapiro likewise tries to restore a sense of historicity to the writer Ben Jonson called, “Not of an age, but for all time.” He describes 1599 as a pivotal year in English politics and Shakespeare as deeply enmeshed in the events of his time.

Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespear’s Plays

This preface is considered one of the greatest pieces of English criticism of all time. Samuel Johnson’s entire edition of Shakespeare’s plays is worth seeking out online; he was the first critic to go deep into the weeds of what all of Shakespeare’s various words mean in his fascinating notes. (And if anyone would know, it would be Johnson: he literally wrote the dictionary.) He also wrote very interesting prefaces for all of the plays. This meeting of two of the very greatest minds of English literature, the playwright and the critic, is not to be missed.

Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays and Lectures on the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth by William Hazlitt

The greatest essayist in the English language writing about the greatest poet and playwright? Sign me up.

What Hazlitt realized (along with his contemporaries Charles Lamb and Thomas de Quincey) is that Shakespeare was merely the tip of a very large iceberg, a giant among giants as Hazlitt puts it. Once you have read Shakespeare, now it’s time to enjoy the colorful (if sometimes more crass) works of his great contemporaries: Marlowe, Heywood, Marston, Middleton, Rowley, Massinger, Webster, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Shirley. Learn to swear in Elizabethan! Get acquainted with the whores and sharpers and other shady types of this era.

On the Tragedies of Shakspere Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation — by Charles Lamb

Lamb, Hazlitt, and de Quincey form a triumvirate of great early 19th century prose writers who wrote like prose Shakespeares (or, to be more precise, like the great prose writers of Shakespeare’s time.) If you love Shakespeare’s language, you will love reading essays by any of these three gentlemen.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such “intellectual prize-fighters.” Talking is the direct object of the imitation here. But in the best dramas, and in Shakespeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition.

“On The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” by Thomas de Quincey

A short but evocative sketch, one of De Quincey’s best. His analysis is interesting, and ends with this eulogium:

O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art: but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert but that, the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident.

Shakespeare by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Swinburne shall not be outdone in his Shakespeare hagiography!

There is one book in the world of which it might be affirmed and argued, without fear of derision from any but the supreme and crowning fools among the foolishest of mankind, that it would be better for the world to lose all others and keep this one than to lose this and keep all other treasures bequested by human genius to all  that we can conceive of eternity–to all that we can imagine of immortality. [Spoiler: It’s Shakespeare.] … The word Shakespeare connotes more than any other man’s name that ever was written or spoken upon earth. The bearer of that name was the one supreme creator of men [Ed. note: That’s the second time you used the word supreme in this paragraph!] who ever arose among mortals to show them and to leave with them an all but innumerable race of evident and indisputable immortals. [Wait, what? Are you just repeating yourself? I mean I love Shakespeare, but my goodness …]

From Heroes and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle, “Lecture III: The Hero as Poet – Dante and Shakspeare”

The always entertaining and slightly over-the-top Carlyle chimes in:

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!

A.W. Schlegel on Shakespeare from Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

And now for the views of some foreigners, starting with A.W. Schlegel, who produced a translation of Shakespeare in German which was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, and helped along the Shakespeare craze in 18th century Germany.

Shakespeare is the pride of his nation. A late poet has, with propriety, called him “the genius of the British isles.” He was the idol of his contemporaries: during the interval indeed of puritanical fanaticism, which broke out in the next generation, and rigorously proscribed all liberal arts and literature, and during the reign of the Second Charles, when his works were either not acted at all, or if so, very much changes and disfigures, his fame was awhile obscured, only to shine forth again about the beginning of the last century with more than its original brightness; and since then it has but increased in lustre with the course of time; and for centuries to come, (I speak it with the greatest confidence,) it will, like an Alpine avalanche, continue to gather strength at every moment of its progress. … In England, the greatest actors vie with each other in the impersonation of his characters; the printers in splendid editions of his works; and the painters in transferring his scenes to the canvas. Like Dante, Shakspeare has received the perhaps indispensable but still cumbersome honour of being treated like a classical author of antiquity.

Heine on Shakespeare; a translation of his notes on Shakespeare heroines

Heinrich Heine was not only a gorgeous, lovelorn lyric poet, but a very witty prose writer of travelogues and essays. This  book about Shakespeare’s heroines (really any of Heine’s prose) deserves to be read, in part for the introduction where he shits all over the English in order steal away Shakespeare as a secret German (continuing a tradition started by A.W. Schlegel.)

I know a good Hamburg Christian who could never get over the fact that our Lord and Saviour was by birth a Jew. [ed. note: Heine was Jewish by birth, but later converted to Catholicism.] … Even as Jesus Christ impressed this son of Hamonia, so am I impressed by William Shakespeare. I grow desperate when I reflect that after all he is an Englishman, belonging to that most odious nation which God in his anger created. … But the England of those days, the birthplace of the man born in that northern Bethlehem called Stratford-on-Avon, to whom we owe the gospel of this our world, as we may well name the Plays of Shakespeare–the England of those days must surely have differed widely from the England of this. Indeed they called it Merry England, and it was bright with many colours, fanciful costumes, profound whimsicality, teeming energy, exuberant passions. … The name of Shakespeare was forgotten for a long period, during the turmoil of these fore-named ecclesiastic and political revolutions, and nearly a century elapsed before he was again held in esteem. After that period, however, his fame increased from day to day, and he beamed like a spiritual sun over that country which is sunless for nearly twelve months of the year, that island of darkness, that Botany Bay minus a southern climate, that smoky, machine-whirring, church-going, and wine-bibing England.

H.A. Taine on Shakespeare in his History of English Literature

The great French critic H.A. Taine, by contrast, had a much more generous view of the English, and a no less worshipful attitude towards Shakespeare. And of course he has just performed several chapters of picturesque proto-Freudian sociological prep-work, after which he begins like this.

Lofty words, eulogies, all is vain by his side; he needs no praise, but comprehension merely; and he can only be comprehended by the aid of science. [Ed. Note: Science! Now for an epic simile.] As the complicated revolutions of the heavenly bodies become intelligible only by use of a superior calculus, as the delicate transformations of vegetation and life need for their comprehension the intervention of the most difficult chemical processes, so the great works of art can be interpreted only by the most advanced psychological systems; and we need the loftiest of all these to attain to Shakespeare’s level–to the level of his age and his work, of his genius and of his art.

Shakespeare by Victor Hugo

I have no idea what Victor Hugo is going on about here, but it’s still fun to read.

Shakespeare is, above all, an imagination. Now,—and this is a truth to which we have already alluded, and which is well known to thinkers,—imagination is depth. No faculty of the mind goes and sinks deeper than imagination; it is the great diver. Science, reaching the lowest depths, meets imagination. In conic sections, in logarithms, in the differential and integral calculus, in the calculation of probabilities, in the infinitesimal calculus, in the calculations of sonorous waves, in the application of algebra to geometry, the imagination is the co-efficient of calculation, and mathematics becomes poetry. I have no faith in the science of stupid learned men.

Benedetto Croce on Shakespeare

This is actually a very sane and rational commentary by the Italian critic and philosopher. Might need to read some more Croce . . .

The good, virtue, is without doubt stronger in Shakespeare than evil and vice, not because it overcomes and resolves the other term in itself, but simply because it is light opposed to darkness, because it is the good, because it is virtue. This is because of its special quality, which the poet discerns and seizes in its original purity and truth, without sophisticating or weakening it. Positive and negative elements do really become interlaced or run into one another, in his mode of feeling, without becoming reconciled in a superior harmony. Their natural logic can be expressed in terms of rectitude, justice and sincerity; but their logic and natural character also finds its expression in terms of ambition, cupidity, egoism and satanic wickedness. The will is accurately aimed at the target, but also, it is sometimes diverted from it by a power, which it does not recognise, although it obeys it, as though under a spell. The sky becomes serene after the devastating hurricane, honourable men occupy the thrones from which the wicked have fallen, the conquerors pity and praise the conquered. But the desolation of faith betrayed, of goodness trampled upon, of innocent creatures destroyed, of noble hearts broken, remains. The God that should pacify hearts is invoked, his presence may even be felt, but he never appears.

Virginia Woolf on If Shakespeare Had a Sister in A Room of One’s Own (1929)

An educational imaginative exercise.

This may be true or it may be false–who can say?–but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational–for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons–but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.

The beauties of Shakespeare by Rev. William Dodd

This book turned the great German writer J.W. von Goethe into a full-on Bardolater. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.