The Moth Eaten Shelf
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Shakespearean Challenge
Four years ago I started a personal challenge to read all the Shakespeare plays that had not been forced upon me in school or had read on my own. At the time, I believed that I could read the remaining 28 plays in 13 months, at two plays per month, as I was working in a remote area for 10 hour-days for eight days straight but still wanted to have some kind of a life. Once again, I managed quite well for the first half of the year and then life creeped in, leaving the challenge fallow.
The main rules of the challenge were:
1. Read two plays per month so as to have a life.
2. Poems and sonnets to be read at leisure.
3. Read the play before seeing a production.
4. Histories to be read in chronological order.
5. The order of the plays depended on category with no two same categories next to one another in order for balance. Example: history, tragedy, comedy, history, comedy, tragedy but NOT history, tragedy, tragedy, comedy, as that could get too depressing. (Given the severity of the histories, I set up the list such that there was a comedy and tragedy between them.)
Once all the plays were read then one could do the more competitive versions of "The Game of Shakespeare", which is much more fun if you actually know the less popular plays and actually like Shakespeare (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3606/the-game-of-shakespeare). ...But I digress. So here is the list with dates of completion and italics for histories.
The Playbill
- King John (14 Jan 2010)
- Trolius and Cressida (24 Jan)
- Coriolanus (16 Feb)
- Richard II (22 Feb)
- Two Gentlemen of Verona (06 Mar)
- Two Noble Kinsmen (not found in my collection)
- Henry IV, Part I (19 Apr)
- Measure for Measure (17 May)
- Titus Andronicus (11 Jul)
- Henry IV, Part II (20 Jul)
- All's Well That Ends Well (29 Jul)
- Pericles (08 Feb 2011)
- Henry V (12 Apr 2011)
- As You Like It
- Tempest
- Henry VI, Part I
- Anthony and Cleopatra
- Love's Labor's Lost
- Henry VI, Part II
- Julius Caesar
- Winter's Tale
- Henry VI, Part III
- Cymbeline
- Timon of Athens
- Richard III
- King Lear
- Merry Wives of Windsor
- Henry VIII
That makes 15 more plays to get through, so even if I am only able to get to roughly one play per month, I should complete the remainder of the plays by the end of the year.