Why the FUCK are you not reading Shakespeare right now?

plays were written before they were performed

This one's the dumbest of them all. His style is completely different.

You are a fucking idiot.

Titus Andronicus, then.

Is Julius Caesar a good starting point for Shakespeare?

I've read them all but The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which I will have read in a couple days.

5 favorites, everyone?

>Lear
>Hamlet
>Macbeth
>Coriolanus
>Shrew

Do you have to be a member of NAMBLA to read Shrajespare`?

There is nothing ironic about Boemia chapters. It's clearly pastoral at first with few great lines from Hermione, but it quickly turns into pure comedy relief and then as soon into drama with hastened ending.

I never know from where to start, please guide me Veeky Forums

I was about 5 minutes ago.

>tfw reading Coriolanus

Is it really "proto-fascist" as people claim it to be?

Good starting plays:

>Romeo and Juliet
>Taming of the Shrew
>Macbeth
>Othello
>Titus Andronicus
>Hamlet

Shakespeare is meant to be re-read and re-read and watched live, so if you find yourself struggling (especially at the beginning of going through his work and especially while going through each play for the first time), then you're completely fine. Know that half of the fun is the reward you get from toughing through his work and constantly challenging yourself.

Read a play like Macbeth once (preferably all the way through if you're truly dedicated) without looking at external sources outside of the footnotes. Then, depending on how "gifted" or "dedicated" you are, you can watch a play or read some criticism, but I recommend reading a play at least twice before doing this. That way you can get a picture in your own head of what's going on, and you can come to your own analysis.

Also, reading aloud helps, but I find my voice always tiring out by the third act when I do this.

>If? He is their god. He leads them like a thing
>Made by some other deity than nature,
>That shapes man better, and they follow him
>Against us brats with no less confidence
>Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,
>Or butchers killing flies.

Brb bros, gonna go hit the gym.

Titus it is.

>Romeo
>Hamlet
>Richard II
>Troilus
>Comedy of Errors

Lear, Othello, and Coriolanus are very close. I'm sucked for endings, and the one in Coriolanus is somewhat watered down with momy coming to rescue. His speeches are amazing, though.

his worse plays (relative to himself) are far better on stage than in text.

like cymbeline, for example

Othello and Coriolanus are also close for me. I need to re-read Richard II again because I've only read it once, but why Comedy of Errors?

Because I'm reading Pynchon you pink sock gobbling cunt

>hamlet
>hal, part 1
>julius
>taming
>tie between the tempest and 12th night

i have yet to read king lear, mostly because i want to find a good critical edition w/ lots of supplementary essays

First of his that I read for pleasure. Also those fat lady jokes are hilarious.

Hermione doesn't appear in Bohemia, she's supposed to be dead. Do you mean Perdita?

It's a pastoral SETTING, but it isn't a pastoral MODE. You have two upstart bumpkins squandering their arbitrary fortune on frivolities like hundreds of pounds of ginger while a conman that used to be employed by the king takes the idiot locals and the bumpkins themselves for everything they have selling sheet music and NAPKINS, while the king himself--the ruler of this false idyll--very nearly recreates for himself the same tragedy that consumed his childhood friend not two acts prior--and so on.

Read closer?

There are no pure modes in Shakespeare. If you try and pigeonhole his work you completely lose sight of what makes it great, which is its playfulness.

Sorry if I'm all over the place, but I just love the Shakespeare discussion:

Fair enough--It's a fun ride.
"We have King Lear: and it is immortal." I've only read it twice, and a few essays on it, but hot damn is it great.
Also,
Since you two also chose Hamlet, can I ask why? For me, it's his moral sensibility and his genius (Bradley) and the "coming to terms" with his mother and his life crashing around him, and how that goes with the "bounded in a nutshell" line, and so, so much more.
Who are your guys's favorite Shakespeare critics? Essential readings?

Coriolanus the character is undeniably a proto-fascist, but I don't know if it's accurate to say that the play itself is an endorsement of fascism. It's a sympathetic portrayal of a fascist rather than a sympathetic portrayal of fascism. It's not explicitly promoting or criticizing a form of government, it's making use of politics for dramatic effect.

really dissapointed that wasn't a shakespeare roll chart

>Shakespeare

back to /pol/, nazi retards

>i have yet to read king lear, mostly because i want to find a good critical edition w/ lots of supplementary essays

Arden Shakespeare my nigga

I'm reading. It's wonderful anons

Because I haven't finished the Greeks yet

Arden has such ugly covers holy fuck.

H. C. Goddard's essential. G. Wilson Knight's fantastic.

How about his sonnets, guys?

I can't get into him. I've read a lot of his plays but have only seriously enjoyed a few, and could have done without the rest. I'd like to watch them and see if reading them just doesn't work for me, or if I simply don't like the man's works themselves.

Middleton*

>why hamlet?
i actually had the great (outrageous) fortune to play an abridged hamlet in my high school's production. apart from my familiarity with it, there's the obvious question of his sanity, the pre-freudian self-awareness (and lack thereof), and some great lines like "there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow."

also, that proto-postmodern play within a play. hamlet's just a satisfying read.

I'm still with the sumerians

I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
Away, and mock the time with fairest show.
False face must hide what the false heart doth know
...............
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope. O shame, where is thy blush?
................
Though ’tis no wisdom to confess so much
Unto an enemy of craft and vantage,
My people are with sickness much enfeebled,
My numbers lessened, and those few I have
Almost no better than so many French,
Who when they were in health, I tell thee, herald,
I thought upon one pair of English legs
Did march three Frenchmen. Yet, forgive me, God,
That I do brag thus. This your air of France
Hath blown that vice in me. I must repent.
......................
What did he mean by all of these?

I cried the last time I read Shakespeare.

kek

My philosophy professor is an obvious Marxist and he recommended Shakespeare to the class.

Why did Iago do it?

I'm thinking of buying the Oxford World's Classics edition of his complete sonnets, is there any edition that is obviously superior you or anyone else knows about?

Too subtle for this lot, my friend

What does everyone think of the new Pelican editions? I quite like them.

Recipes were written before they were cooked. You wanna read your cake or eat it, mong?

He was just an all round bad dude.

why the fuck have you not yet read Antony and Cleopatra?

The Arden one is prettt good. There's also a Longman Annotated Poets edition that will be available next year I think? That's probably the most scholarly one there will be. I don't like the Oxford since it's too thick and kinda unwieldly. The Arden is much better in that regard. The Penguin edition is also very good.

Decent text, but there are better editons.

That is not the important question, really.

>Macbeth
>Antony and Cleopatra
>Merchant of Venice
>Hamlet
>Lear

>thinks that was subtle

Holy Shit.

Checkmate

>antony and cleopatra
>not shakespeare's worst tragedy

are you fucking kidding me

>being this much of a pleb

fight me

Rankings of the plays I've read:

Macbeth
Hamlet
Othello
12th Night
King Lear
Julius Caesar
Merchant of Venice
Measure for Measure
The Tempest
Henry VI, Part Three
Coriolanus
Romeo and Juliet
Henry IV Part Two
Richard III
Richard II
Henry IV Part One
Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry V
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
A Winter’s Tale
Henry VI, Part One
Henry VI, Part Two
Love’s Labour Lost
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It

utterly pathetic

I would definitely like to explore his work deeper but they are too over written. I remember reading Macbeth in high school and how terrible the experience was because I needed to have so much previous knowledge of the subject matter and hundreds of obscure references to understand his "metaphors" and "allegories" that was AP English and that class busted my balls to the max.

Shakespeare is too hardcore for me. Literally shouldn't be painful in my opinion it's suppose to feel natural and intuitive to the mind.

This.

In high school I read:
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet

What else should I read by him? (besides King Lear)

>As You Like It
Patrician.

>Macbeth
>Hamlet
>Othello
>Lear
>Merchant of Venice
Incidentally, my favourite flavour of ice cream is vanilla.

I'm too busy writing my thesis on Faust.

Goethe or Marlowe?

Because of the Cassio promotion, but moreso because he is jealous that he is incapable of being as good a man as Cassio or Othello.

Literally everything and 90% of it again and again

I played Macbeth in normal English and it was pretty sweet.

Wait for a few years. As long as youre reading a lot it will be totally different. Your post is why starting with the classics can be counterproductive - if youre no well versed in the canon this is how ppl feel

Make sure to read both the extant versions of Lear, the differences are worth it. (This doesn't refer to the bowdlerized version where yay everyone lives.)

Bleh

i am currently shaking my pear
aka masturbating

Nigga that's what almost everyone feels first reading Shakespeare.

Protip: read more difficult and varied literature in terms of syntax, not too difficult but build up to more difficult literature. Read more shakespeare plays themselves, preferably annotated additions or something. All you need to do is actually care about it, and eventually you'll be able to read Shakespeare "fluently" after a few years, that is, quite easily, having memorized some slightly archaic vocabulary, being used to his somewhat convoluted syntax, and able to more easily understand strange usages of words and complicated metaphors.

After forcing yourself over a time to just read about 10 of his plays, reading Shakespeare already becomes a qualitatively different experience. Eventually, it becomes EASY and you can go back and reread the plays you started with and you'll be amazed at how worth it it is.