Shakespeare --- adaptations thereof

When I started this resolution, one question that occurred to me right off the bat was: should I, as part of this project, seek out to watch an adaptation of each play in turn?

I decided that was too strong of a condition, to watch the whole play. For one thing, none of the Youtube videos of full productions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, although seemingly earnest and solidly produced, struck me as demanding the time it would take, to watch them at the moment, and thus interrupt the momentum of my project. Even the short one from the Royal Shakespeare Company seemed a bit off the mark to what I was looking for. Maybe I din't have the ear for real Shakespeare yet, I thought. If so I'd make that goal.

What then about The Taming of the Shrew? In this case, the work of seeing an adaptation was already done for me years ago. It was in fact the first Shakespeare play I ever saw produced on stage. I saw it in high school, under delightful circumstance, and so it stayed me like a first love, and always feels familiar, and conformable to the understanding (even as that understanding may be erroneous, or an illusion).

Also I'd recently seen the opening scenes of the 1967 movie adaptation starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. At the time, it struck me as  perfect adaptation of their roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf the year before.

Shakespeare --- Second Play, Summarized

The competing suitors of the younger daughter of a wealthy man of Padua, stymied in their attempts to woo her by an edict of the father, who prevents courtship of the younger until her older, shrewish sister is married off, promote the courtship of the elder by a strange visitor from Verona, who not only rises the challenge but puts them to shame by showing how beautiful, docile, and faithful he has made the elder daughter, after their marriage. The original suitors of the younger daughter meanwhile lose out to a newer arrival, a young man from Pisa, who adopts a disguise to go undercover to woo her.

Shakespeare -- Attempt to Summarize one of his Plays

Two friends, one in love with the daughter of the duke of a nearby city, and the other enamored of a local girl, are put to the test when, after the first has gone off to woo his beloved in the nearby city, the second follows him on his travels, leaving behind his hometown love, and subsequently falling in love with his friend's own beloved upon first sighting her. He resolves to win her even at the betrayal of his friendship, and after secretly thwarting his friend's imminent elopement, resulting in the exile of his friend to live among bandits in the forests, he attempts to woo the daughter himself a, a painful process observed his the loyal hometown girl, who has followed behind him in disguise as a boy, hoping to win him back.  An attempt to secretly reunite the exile with the duke's daughter prompts a series of events, which lead to the happy resolution of all situations, with the local girl revealing her disguise, with all the lovers reunited, and with the exiled friend and forest bandits receiving full pardons from the duke.

Shakespeare continued: Two Gentlemen of Verona with digital side effects

The biggest difficulty I had in reading The Two Gentlemen of Verona on my iPad was not the platform itself, but rather the plain dumb fact that much of the time, I couldn't understand what was being said. So by the second act I cheated and went to No Fear Shakespeare, a web site by Spark Notes that has the play with the modern translation side-by-side. This was exactly what I needed, and I was able to read the original most of the time, and defer to the modern version only occasionally so as to keep the momentum of reading.

The biggest downside of this is that No Fear Shakespeare is a web site, not an app, and furthermore the scenes are broken down into multiple pages between which one must navigate by tabs, which sometimes don't work properly. Thus one is scrolling around and clicking in the conventional way of the web, and furthermore the page refreshes at somewhat random but persistent intervals because of an add graphic that may or may not load properly, thus spontaneously shifting the text up or down, or causing it to flash out of existence entirely for a second or two without warning.

If Spark Notes made an app that furnished these translations, I would surely purchase it and use it. Instead they just get my crummy page view and advertising revenue, which is measly and nothing. So be it. But I made it my resolution to wean myself off No Fear Shakespeare as soon as possible.

New Year 2019 --- The Shakespearean Resolution

One of my new year's resolution this year is to read all of William Shakespeare's plays.

I decided right before New Year's to read them over the course of a year  in a rough order of when they debuted. This turns out to be a surprisingly hard question to settle, but not difficult to cope with if you are not concerned with exact order, which I wasn't.  There are multiple acceptable timelines, for example this one from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

I decided to read early comedies at first, as I had read one of his comedies for a recent project. So right before the New Year I started with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which dates from the late 1580s or early 1590s.

At first I was using the Kindle version of the Oxford Shakespeare, reading it on my iPad. The Oxford has good brief intro notes about the play. I learned that Gentlemen is certainly one of Shakespeare's early works, as evidenced by its style, where Shakespeare has not yet mastered scenes involving six characters. Even without these notes I think I would have found it a little clunky and forced in the plot, compared to the memory other works I've read of his.