Reading Every Shakespeare Part 3/3
After three months of effort, I finally made it. I have been able to listen to every single Shakespeare play. Obviously, this is as important a moment in someone’s life as graduation, finding love or even one’s own birth. For that reason, I thought I would record for posterity my opinions on all the Shakespeare I read in recent months. I have now gone through all the histories, and having done so in order of their setting, since it wouldn’t make much sense to bounce around a few hundred years at will. With this, I bring my relations with the Bard to a temporary close.
1) King John – The man who was forced into making the Magna Carta gets a play that’s slightly better than his actual kingship. You can tell this is an early play of Shakespeare because one can barely remember anything about it. 2/5
2) Richard II – A somewhat forgotten play … again mostly for the same reasons as King John. That said, I actually learned a lot about Medieval England through a highly biased and distorted perspective, which is still much better than the one I had before. 2/5
3) Henry IV (Part 1 and 2) – Falstaff is a figure for this age and for all ages. Any scene in any work of fiction is improved with him in the background – admittedly there may ultimately be exceptions to this rule. Prince Hal himself has one of the best character arcs in all of Shakespeare, and his speech to Falstaff at the end is somehow simultaneously righteous while being depressing. Good stuff all around. 4/5
4) Henry V – Yes, I am biased – I fell in love with the Kenneth Branagh film version. Kenneth Branagh is my Northern Irish countryman and did all the voice work on the Dinosaur documentaries I watched when I was a kid – he is thus my hero. Thus, to see him play an actual hero is more than worth it. And the St. Crispin’s Day Speech is not simply the greatest speech in Shakespeare, but I would argue the greatest speech in history … and it’s not even a real speech. It makes you feel like an English patriot, and being an Irishman, you know that’s one heck of an achievement. 5/5
5) Henry VI (Parts 1 – 3): If you like your action, you’ll get your fill alright. Again, I have to admit I really learned/remembered a lot about the War of Roses (like actually knowing whether the White or Red Rose belonged to York or Lancashire). Queen Margaret is honestly a contender for the best female Shakespeare character in all my readings just because of how astonishingly ruthless she was. I literally stopped walking when listening to the audiobook because I was taken aback by what she was doing. I was also surprised to see a Joan of Arc cameo – though she gets the fate you’d imagine an English, Protestant audience back would want against a French Catholic Saint who fought the English. It was interesting, if a bit strange. 3/5
6) Richard III – He’s human evil personified, and that’s why I couldn’t stop listening. Richard III is so absolutely abominably evil that I wanted desperately for his comeuppance the whole play. Yeah, I know it’s historical exaggeration, yeah I know he wasn’t really that evil, I know he didn’t have much of a hunched back, but Shakespeare burned that impression into my brain too fierce for anything else to affect my mind’s eye. 5/5
7) Henry VIII – This was the Shakespeare play that burned down the Globe Theatre during a prop malfunction. If the Globe Theatre absolutely had to burn down, I wish it burned down on a better play in all honesty. I wish I could have ended on a better play too, but I ended my quest here, so that was a reward in and of itself. 2/5
And with that, I have listened to all of Shakespeare’s plays! Now for my next task, I will … read every Sherlock Holmes story … as you do …
See you then! (Or Skype/phone calls for an indeterminate period of months)