The Plays of Shakespeare

A couple of anecdotes to start us off:

Twenty years ago, I and the woman who is now my wife were in that early-to-middle, feeling-out phase of courtship, when the talk turns to existential matters of life and death, art and religion. I told Dorte — that being the name of the love of my life — that I wasn’t in any sort of way conventionally religious, although I preferred to call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist, due to a gut feeling that there are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of Science. (This is largely the way I still feel today, by the way, although I have become friendlier toward the notion of organized religion, to the point of attending Sunday church services from time to time.)

“You’ll certainly never catch me carrying a Bible around with me,” I said back then.

“But you already do,” replied Dorte, who has a way of cutting to the chase.

“What? What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“That big Shakespeare Complete Works you’re always toting around with you,” she said. “That’s your Bible.”

I had no retort to that. I tend not to when she’s right, as she is an alarmingly large percentage of the time.

Anecdote number two:

Just a few months ago, Dorte and I were at a party with many of our Danish neighbors, some of whom we know better than others. Just across the table from us on this particular evening was one of those whom we know less well. Dorte made first contact, then pulled me in. “He’s an American,” she said with a smile. “That’s why he speaks Danish kind of funny. But don’t worry. He’s a nice American…” (This was just when President Trump was bellowing most vociferously about attacking Greenland, you see.) “Just don’t talk to him about the Beatles or Shakespeare, because you’ll never shut him up.”

Once again, my wife had cut to the chase. For anyone with intellectual aspirations or pretensions, there are huge benefits to being married to such a woman, as Shakespeare himself would well have recognized.

The Beatles and William Shakespeare really have been my lodestars for most of my life. I discovered the former through my cool big sister when I was around ten years old; the latter in junior high school when we were assigned Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet back to back, and the words that my classmates mumbled and stumbled their way through and were happy to see the back of cut through my adolescent soul like a steely beam of distilled Truth. I soon embarked on on a bizarre project for any red-blooded American teenage boy: to read everything Shakespeare had ever written, a task I completed before I graduated from high school. This might make me sound precocious or insufferable, but trust me when I say that I was not really the former at least: I spent most of the rest of my free time playing computer games.

Shakespeare — and also the Beatles, of course — have remained among my best friends ever since, through quite some decades now of ups and downs, of modest successes and the occasional abject failure. They’ve never, ever let me down, in good times and especially in bad. I must admit that my inner teenage nonconformist finds it a little vexing that my personal lodestars should be such clichéd examples of GOATs, as the kids like to say today. (GOAT stands for “Greatest Of All Time,” in case you’re even more out of it than I am.) In countless other preferences, I am gleefully, proudly contrarian. Elsewhere in the field of literature, for example, I’ll take Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens any day of the week and twice on Sunday, find Marcel Proust to be a tedious self-absorbed windbag (and yes, I’ve read every word of him), agree with Henry James that War and Peace is a baggy monstrosity screaming out for a ruthless editor (and yes, I’ve read every word of it — twice), and will happily trade you our entire modern-day literary class of creative-writing professors who write for other creative-writing professors for one sturdy storyteller like Stephen King, who still knows something about the way that real people live. One of my sincere regrets in life is that I’ve wasted so much time reading stuff that other people tell me I ought to love when I could have been reading the stuff that I love. At least I haven’t had this problem with music; here my Hot Takes metastasized decades ago into a collection of completely unreasonable vendettas against countless critics’ sacred cows. But still, my lodestars are the Beatles and Shakespeare. What can I say? Sometimes the wisdom of critical consensus is real.

My professional career, such as it has been, saw me starting out as a computer guy and gradually transitioning into writing for a living — according to a fairly generous definition of “for a living,” that is. But throughout, I’ve shrunk away from writing about my lodestars. At first, this was more a byproduct of instinct and opportunity than premeditation, but I later came to formulate a theory of cultural criticism which says that it’s best if you don’t write about the thing that you love more than any other (non-living) thing in the world, because that’s a recipe for complete loss of perspective and rampant fanboyism. No — it’s best to pick something that you like and care about a lot, but from which you can also distance yourself when necessary, a sort of second-tier obsession. For many years, that thing for me has been computer games and matters adjacent, subjects to which I still devote half of my writing time and energy, as you’ll find if you visit my other site. I really do love to play games and talk about my experiences and opinions, and am deeply intrigued by their evolution over time, by the technologies that spawn them, and by the effect they have had on this real world of ours, for good and sometimes for ill. And yet if you told me today that I could never play another computer game again for some reason, I’d doubtless complain a good deal, but then I’d simply find other things to do. It would be no worse than that. This strikes me as the sweet spot for a cultural critic to occupy — close enough to be thoroughly engaged, distant enough not to lose all perspective and begin to think that these artifacts are a lot more important than they actually are.

But if you told me that I couldn’t listen to music or read books anymore… well, then we would have a problem. My opinions on these subjects lack any semblance of objectivity or perspective. So, I think I’ve been wise on the whole to avoid them. About seven years ago, I started feeling restless writing about nothing but games all the time, and so I started to combine that writing with more generalized histories of “worldly wonders” on this very site. That too made a pretty good fit for a good long while; for all that I find, say, the Pyramids of Giza endlessly evocative and fascinating, I’m unlikely to start foaming at the mouth about which one is my personal favorite.

But now I’m sitting here writing the introduction to an Analog Antiquarian series on Shakespeare, which begs the question of what the heck I think I’m up to. There are several reasons that I’ve chosen to break my cardinal rule of writing about things I find interesting but not ones that get me all hot and bothered. Rule or no rule, I’ve long felt that if I go to my grave without turning my metaphorical pen to Shakespeare at some point, I will die a disappointed man. (For some reason, I don’t have that same feeling about the Beatles, at least not yet. So, never fear: the Analog Antiquarian series that follows this one, whatever it turns out to be, won’t be filled with chin-stroking deconstructions of “She Loves You.”) At some level, I think that I’ve been waiting until I felt like I was ready for Shakespeare. Although I’m all for introducing the Bard early and often to our young ones, I think you have to have lived a fair amount to fully appreciate his genius about the proverbial human condition — his ability to capture all aspects of life, from the giddy passions of young love to the wintery discontents of old age. At this point, I’m 53 years old and thus closer to the latter than the former, although, as Chip Taylor (RIP) told us, young brooks flow forever in old men’s dreams. I have by now done a fair number of things, seen a fair number of places, and known a fair number of people. I think I might be ready — or as ready as I will ever be.

Maybe I should tell you a little bit about myself, since you are the one who will have to decide for yourself whether I’m right. I was born near Detroit, Michigan, in 1972, but my family wound up in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, when I was eight years old. I lived there for almost 30 years.

I was a nerdy 1980s kid with all the trimmings; my life was Stranger Things with Texas accents and no monsters except the ones found in my Dungeons & Dragons rule books. But there was always music too, and my first job was in a record store. After it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t a great route to a stable and prosperous future — it was, on the other hand, the funnest workaday job I’ve ever had — I parlayed my talent for computers, which I had discovered when I was given my first Commodore 64 at age eleven, into various jobs in information technology. Yet I was a restless sort of IT drone. I took whatever time I could negotiate away from work traveling around the world, backpacker-style. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, the 1990s were in many ways the golden age of backpacking, when there were very few places to which an adventurous backpacker couldn’t travel and it really did seem that the end of history might be nigh.

Eventually I enrolled in community college, and then at the University of Texas at Dallas, part-time on a humanities track. Amidst it all, I went through my share of raptures and disappointments in the romantic arena, as all restless young men tend to do, until I met Dorte in Australia in 2003. I was about to turn 31; she was 20. This alone was enough to preclude me from thinking of her as a potential love interest in the beginning, even if she hadn’t been a German who was about to start attending medical school in Denmark. Still, I was struggling to learn German in university at the time, and I thought it would be good to have a native-speaker pen pal to practice on. We became steadily closer after our time together in Australia was over, in the golden age of Microsoft Messenger and MySpace. (It was a simpler digital epoch…)

I suppose I was lucky to find Dorte when I did, because I was just about to age out of the freewheeling backpacker demographic. I took only one more big trip after meeting her, to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in the summer of 2004, when the Second Gulf War was at its worst and American hostages were being tortured and executed before rolling cameras. If you want to ask me what on earth possessed me to take such a trip at such a time, know that I can’t answer you; I’m dumbfounded myself when I think back on it. But I do remember realizing in the course of that trip that the hostel life was beginning to pass me by. Throughout my backpacking period, there were always one or two “old guys” at every place I stayed, eyeing the young women with ill intent and trying to show everyone that they were still with it. I knew that I didn’t want to become one of those vaguely pathetic creatures. So, I decided to make the most out of this last trip and then to let my membership in the all too accurately named International Youth Hostel Federation lapse. As Shakespeare teaches us, everything in life has its season. I am not always so wise, but, like most of us, I do have my moments.

I never did learn to speak or write German beyond a rudimentary level, but I got the girl all the same; one of the nice things about age differences is that they seem less and less relevant the older you both become. Dorte and I were married in 2008, and moved together the following year to Denmark. I left the United States with a freshly minted Masters Degree that had taken me nine years to earn, one which has to date never convinced anyone to hire me for anything. And yet I wouldn’t trade it, or rather the experience it represents, for a fortune in salary. For my time at university taught me to think and talk and write about things that are, well, universal rather than of the moment. Three cheers for “useless” humanities degrees! In my opinion, the world might be a better place if we awarded more of them.

Ironically, Denmark was a country I’d never visited during my backpacker travels. What can I say? It had always struck me as… not very interesting. Nevertheless, I thought as I prepared to move to this country of which I knew nothing about that my long record of travel had prepared me for this ultimate trip away from home, as it were, the first one that did not come complete with a return ticket. I was wrong.

Had I known how difficult it truly is to immigrate to another country and culture — even when it’s another Western land like Denmark — I surely would have, at the very least, thought a little more about it before leaving my homeland. But ignorance does lend itself to bravery; perhaps it is the key to it. After quite some years of struggling to figure out where I fit, I feel like I’ve finally come out on the other side, reasonably fluent in the Danish language and culture. I’ve found that this cozy little country has much more to recommend it than I ever imagined it might back when I was gallivanting to Vladivostok and Melbourne and Bangkok. There are bigots and jerks everywhere, but for the most part Denmark is a lovely, deeply humane place, filled with warm-hearted and unnervingly sensible people. I’ve learned to love it here, at the same time that I’ve learned enormous respect for those immigrants who move to countries that have far less in common with their own than the United States does with Denmark, those who venture into the unknown without even the fallback option of communicating in English. The next time you see a politician railing against immigrants on your television screen, pause to consider how much less brave such demagogues are than the people they attack, who have in some cases dared to undertake journeys of thousands of kilometers with little more than the clothes on their backs and no idea what awaits them at the other end.

These days, Dorte and I and our two cats — yes, I’m one of those dreaded cat people; our cats should probably be added to Dorte’s list of stuff you don’t want to get me started talking about — live in a little village in southern Jutland called Lindeballe, whose history, judging from the date on our local church, stretches back at least as far as the thirteenth century. We’re ten kilometers from Billund, whose principal claims to fame are the worldwide headquarters of Lego and Denmark’s second biggest airport. (This is not saying all that much, believe me.) We are also close to Jelling, where, according to legend, the first Danish king to become a Christian was converted during the late tenth century. (His name lives on in our technology: Harald Bluetooth.) My adventurous streak is mostly confined these days to the long walks that I love to take — alone, with Dorte, or with my hiking buddy Stefaan — whenever I get the chance. Suffice to say in this context that I have found that William Blake’s epithet of “the green and pleasant land” applies as well to Denmark as it does to England. Otherwise, I participate on the village council, take care of our house and garden, hang out with friends and neighbors and the love of my life, play my silly computer games from the sofa next to Dorte, and write and read and write. It’s a good life. The practical worries I have are so trivial in comparison to the challenges facing many other people that they aren’t worth mentioning here. The existential worries I have are all bound up with the state of the world.

Which brings me back around to another of my excuses for writing this series about Shakespeare now. I do feel like the world we live in today is more in need of Shakespeare than ever. Many of my readers have told me over the years that they see my writings, whether about games or about the distant past, as a kind of escape, a refuge from the daily drumbeat of conflict and crisis that seems to be inching us ever closer to some irreconcilable point of no return. On the rare occasions when contemporary politics do intrude into this safe space, some readers get actively upset at me. I understand this; I really do. And I intend to continue to minimize such ruptures here. At the same time, though, we live in a world that desperately needs to be reminded of its fundamental humanity — needs to be reminded that algorithms are no substitute for journeys of personal discovery, that AI chatbots are no substitute for human friends, that a mobile phone is no substitute for a walk in the woods, and that the very best connections we can have with others are the ones that are formed and nurtured face to face. We have placed too much responsibility in the hands of people who have become deeply estranged from their own humanity. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, these are people who are defined not by the qualities they possess but by the ones they lack. If we allow them to, they will burn down civilization itself in their hunger to fill an internal void whose existence they are incapable of even recognizing. They wander blind and groping through their lives, so out of touch with their nature that they mistake fiction’s dystopias for its utopias and imagine that the machines they have built are no different from themselves. They would be pitiable, if only they weren’t so dangerous.

Shakespeare is the antidote to such people, being one of the most human human beings who has ever lived. He would not understand much about our lives today if he was dropped into the 21st century, but he would understand us. When we read him, he forces us to get down to the brass tacks of existence, to think and talk about the things that really matter. And he makes us laugh and cry while he is about it. We are living in a world that could use more of both hearty laughter and unaffected tears. In my book, any time is a good time for Shakespeare, but this current time may just need him more than any other in recent memory.

That said, anyone who proposes to write about Shakespeare in the 21st century has to reckon with the fact that so darn much has already been written about the man and his work. The Shakespeare canon of 37 plays — give or take one or two, for reasons we’ll discuss at a future date — represents quite probably the most minutely studied collection of secular texts in the history of the world. What can I possibly add to the hundreds of millions of words that have already been written about Shakespeare, dwarfing the corpus of works that issued directly from the man himself like the Sun dwarfs the Earth?

The short answer is nothing — but then, if you’re approaching your writing from a cost-benefit point of view, you’re probably in the wrong profession. There are few quicker routes to poverty than deciding to become a writer, after all. We write because we want to, or perhaps because we need to, because we have things that we urgently need to say, almost regardless of how many people wind up reading our words. The act of writing is a sort of thinking. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head about Shakespeare, thoughts that need to come out. That’s justification enough.

To the extent that I have an agenda beyond that, it’s to de-snobbify Shakespeare. I’ve spent my life ping-ponging between “low” and “high” culture, between sweaty rock concerts and gala symphony performances, between computer games and art films. And what I’ve long since come to realize is that it’s all just different suits of clothing hung on the same old mannequins. As our postmodernist friends love to tell us, it’s all subjective, all culturally constructed at the end of the day. And it’s always in flux. William Shakespeare was the vaudeville maestro of his day, keeping the beer-swilling mobs who showed up to see his plays placated with dirty jokes and slapstick routines worthy of The Three Stooges; Charles Dickens’s novels were the soap operas of their day, being published in installments, with every one ending on a cliffhanger, the better to ensure that the punters plunked down their money to read the next one. Meanwhile surprisingly few of the authors of the nineteenth century and earlier who were most respected by the hoity-toity have had their fame endure. Ben Jonson was once considered the real genius of the Elizabethan theater scene, far outshining the ruder, cruder Shakespeare in wit and erudition. And what is Ben Jonson known for today? Not for his own plays, which are seldom read or performed, but for being smart enough to recognize his less highfalutin peer’s talents and ensuring that his plays were preserved in the First Folio (albeit not without a little jab at Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek”).

So, you won’t catch me prattling on here about how Shakespeare “invented the human”; as far as I can tell, people were doing just fine at being human for thousands of years before he came along. I’m interested in the people’s Shakespeare more than I am the scholar’s. I care about the verve and dash of his language more than I do the precise way that the Elizabethans pronounced their vowels. Much though I love books, I think it’s important never to forget that Shakespeare did not write books: he wrote play scripts that were meant to be performed. If you don’t understand a passage when you’re reading one of them, the best thing to do is just to plow on. (There are a few passages in almost every play that no one quite understands, whether due to a corruption of the text or some cultural context that has been irrevocably lost.) Do you stop and rewind a Monty Python episode because you didn’t catch a joke? (A strong argument can be made, by the way, that the whole magnificent British comedic tradition springs directly from Shakespeare.) No, you let the (metaphorical) tape run on, confident that there will be other jokes that you will get. Shakespeare is in no more need of handling with kid gloves. If he could stand up to the rough and rowdy audiences at the Globe Theatre, fresh from the pubs, the brothels, and the bear-baiting rings, he has nothing to fear from you. Nor do you have anything to fear from him, for that matter. He’s a very nice guy. Really.

Let me tell you what you can expect from me and him in the months to come. We’re going to visit each of Shakespeare’s plays — yes, every single one of them — in… well, I wish I could say in chronological order and leave it at that, but the fact is that it’s impossible to know for sure what that order is. For, as I just noted, Shakespeare’s plays were written first and foremost to be performed by the theatrical troupe to which he belonged. About half of them never appeared in print at all during his lifetime. Even those that did prove popular enough to be printed and sold were published some time — usually an indeterminate time — after their first performance. Many, many scholars who know vastly more about these subjects than I do have engaged in a raging debate that has gone on for centuries now about which play fits exactly where. For my part, I have selected one thoroughly arbitrary order: it’s the one found in my faithful old copy of the 1969 Complete Pelican Shakespeare, the same one I was toting around when I was courting Dorte all those years ago.

This ordering has the benefit of feeling subjectively correct, for whatever that’s worth. It starts with the silly slapstick of The Comedy of Errors, a trifle of a play with stunningly little on its mind, and ends with The Tempest, Shakespeare’s magisterial, philosophical “farewell to the stage.” But no, wait a minute… just because no canon that actually exists in this messy real world of ours ought to be so neat and tidy as that, Henry VIII comes just after The Tempest to serve as a non-sequiturial coda. (The Beatles did the same thing, concluding their recording career on the perfect final grace notes of Abbey Road, only to drop the more shambolic Let It Be on us.)

Anyway, unless the scholars have gotten things very, very wrong, the plays will be sorted correctly in terms of their general eras in the articles that follow. That is to say that the chronology of Shakespeare’s quarter-century or so as an active playwright should be accurate within a tolerance for error of five years at the most, which is good enough for our purposes.

In the article I write about each play, I’ll tell you what we know about its sources and subject matter, and give you a little outline of its plot, just enough to orient yourself by. Then, I’ll let myself ramble a little bit, or perhaps sometimes a lot, telling you what it means to me and what thoughts it puts in my head. Finally, in service of two of my agendas — that of de-snobbifying Shakespeare and that of emphasizing the still living nature of his work — I’ll talk about some media adaptations, meaning mostly films, that might help to make it more relatable and understandable. Naturally, some plays weigh heavier than others and will require many more words for me to adequately discuss. (Something has gone badly wrong for any critic who devotes as much space to The Comedy of Errors as The Tempest.) Regardless of any given article’s length, I promise to strain my utmost to continue to live by my longstanding golden rule as a writer: Don’t Be Boring. Shakespeare should never, ever be boring.

In between these articles on the individual plays, I’ll dive into the broader ecosystem of Shakespeariana. You may wonder how much there can truly be to say about Shakespeare the person and his impact on our world, but trust me when I tell you that there is a lot, from conspiracy theories fit to make an X-Files fan’s day (did the man named William Shakespeare really write Shakespeare?) to the rich tapestry of English history and culture that informed the works and has been in turned informed by them. And then there is what scholars call the “non-dramatic poetry.” Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets range just as widely over the human condition as the plays: love and sex from youth to old age, life and death in all their aspects. We’ll have to fit them in too — but in a non-boring way, I promise. If there are any aspects of Shakespeare that you’d particularly like to see me cover, by all means, chime in in the comments below.

You might be wondering what else I am going to ask from you; by now, you might feel like a student on the first day of class, when the professor drops a brick of a syllabus on your desk and you can almost literally see your free time being crushed beneath the weight of its reading list. Take it easy; there’s no pressure from my side for you to do anything. Feel free to engage with what follows as and how you like. You don’t have to read it in chronological order if you don’t want to; you certainly don’t have to sit down and read every play I write about as if it appeared on a university syllabus. In fact, let me remind you yet again that Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, not for reading. They’re great to read nevertheless, mind you, but the best way to do so is by imagining the stage performance in your head; you might be surprised at how much this tends to smooth out some of the rougher patches. Another approach is to watch a performance, whether for the stage or the screen or even a strictly audio interpretation, with the book open on your lap to follow along. Or, what the hell, just chuck the book altogether and turn on the television and see how it goes. You might be surprised how much you get out of it, especially if you read what I have to say about the play first to orient yourself. (I won’t be worrying about spoilers, and you shouldn’t either; the joys of Shakespeare transcend the need to find out what happens next in the story.)

Of course, a discussion is always preferable to a lecture. If you do read or watch or have done so in the past and have thoughts of your own to share, I’d love to read about them in the comments. You don’t have to agree with me; feel free to disagree as vehemently as you feel is warranted, although I would appreciate it if you could do so in a civil way. There is no one right answer to a lot of these questions. And where there is, by all means, point out any factual errors I make with pedantic exactitude. I will be depending on you folks to keep me honest. As those of you who are familiar with my writing on other subjects can doubtless attest, I’m generally good for about one truly bone-headed mistake per article. Pointing these out is doing me a supreme service.

If you find that you like what I do here and find that it adds something to your life, you can become a patron of this project at whatever level you can comfortably afford. In addition to winning my undying gratitude and helping to ensure that this Shakespeare party keeps going all the way to the end, patrons get access to a library of ebooks collecting all of the Wonders of the World I’ve already chronicled on this site.

But right now, the plays of William Shakespeare are the things, my friends. I look forward to exploring them with you.

Did you enjoy this chapter? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)