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.
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