All right, cards on the table time. Here is the list of the Shakespeare plays I was familiar with before I started plowing through my kindle: Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Henry V. This is basically my high school reading list. There are also one or two plays I’ve seen that I don’t remember the names of. I once saw Shakespeare on the UC Santa Cruz campus among the redwoods. It’s a fantastic experience that I recommend highly. But, uh, don’t drink as much California red wine as I did. You tend to forget which play you saw. I think it was As You Like It but I may be wrong.

Anyway, you can see some pretty big gaps there. Most of the comedies and histories are new to me. And that means I have, to this point, never encountered one of the more important characters in English literature — Falstaff.

I’m told that the Merry Wives Falstaff is not as good as the one of Henry IV. I’ll let you know when I get there. If so, I’m really looking forward to those plays, because Falstaff in Merry Wives is quite fun, even if he is something of a secondary character to the wives themselves.

Wives is another play that probably plays better than it reads. The wordplay off the accents of Evans and Caius, in particular, is a bit difficult on the page. Envisioning it in my heads makes it more amusing. And there’s a momentum in the last acts that stalls a bit when you’re having to take breaks to play castle with your daughter. I’m also sure that the climax, in which the spurned suitors accidentally marry boys, was even funnier when women’s parts were played by boys. Overall, however, I found this comfortably within the gaussian of Shakespeare quality.

Next up: Measure for Measure.

Two gentlemen is close to being great Shakespeare, but it doesn’t quite there. Some of the dialogue is fantastic, as you would expect, particularly the wordplay of Launch.. What unravels it, as sometimes happens with the Bard, is the ending, which tries too hard to tie everything up neatly and get everyone married. Proteus never gets the comeuppance he so richly earns and the characters seem almost casual in whom they end up with. Scholars tell us Shakespeare had some hidden meaning in this. I think it’s just the limitations of trying to shoehorn the play into the genre of “comedy”.

It’s an interesting look, however, at an artist stretching his arms before he upends everything. I’m reminded somewhat of Beethoven’s first and second symphonies, which occupy an odd niche of respecting classical tradition but giving hints of the greatness that was to come. Given the organization of the First Folio, however, it will be a while before I get there.

Side Note: Cracked and I are on a wavelength (warning: gruesome Shakespeariness). I am really not looking forward to Titus Andronicus. Woody Allen once said that the end of the universe and the extinguishing of all human achievement might be acceptable if it got rid of Titus.

Now that’s more like it.

The Tempest is much more of what I think of as Shakespeare, with sympathetic characters, some comedy and great words. It was his last solo play and it’s a bit past his prime. The ending, in particular, I’ve always founds somewhat unsatisfying after a great first three acts.

One of things I’ve always noticed about Shakespeare’s plays is that the comedies are a thin layer from being tragedies and vice versa. That is, the difference between the happy conclusion of Much Ado About Nothing and the tragic conclusion of Romeo and Juliet is a tiny diversion in narrative. A few more seconds here, a few words there and Romeo becomes a comedy while Much Ado becomes a tragedy. Reading the Tempest, I wonder if it would have played better as a tragedy. It’s interesting to note that some works inspired by The Tempest — the movie The Forbidden Planet, for example — have gone in that direction.

One of the problems with this project is that Shakespeare’s plays do not read as well as they play. Shakespeare was an actor and wrote plays, I think, that would feed on great acting. One can read them by visualizing the play in one’s head, but it is never quite the same. This is particularly true of the comedies where much of the humor depends on delivery.

Earlier this year, I paid a couple of bucks to download the entire works of William Shakespeare to my Kindle. While I have seen a number of the plays, I’ve never read through all of them and, now that I’m pushing 40, probably should. So I’m going to tackle it the way I tackle everything: start at the beginning and push through from sheer bloody-mindedness. And I’ll post the occasional update and thought.

I’m going to follow the order in the First Folio from his point on, but the first one I actually read was All’s Well That Ends Well, since the Kindle lists them in alphabetical order. This is one of the so-called “problem plays” since it’s one of his lesser works and of the two leads, one is an asshole and the other is kind of passive. Helena was particularly unpopular in the Victoria era, according to wikipedia, because of her “predatory” nature. So performances, which are rare, try to redeem the couple.

Personally, if I were to put the play on, the theme would be comeuppance. Betram is a fool and a rascal — someone spoiled by wealth, class and, most likely, good looks. He ends up married to a woman he despises who now has his title, his wealth and a much higher standing in the eyes of the King and his mother. I’d let that be the moral — that an arrogant asshole got what was coming to him.