Well, gentle reader, like my sainted mother, I do not like to rush into anything. I started reading this giant Complete Works of William Shakespeare eight years ago, reading The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night in 2018 before tabling the book for six years and then reading Much Ado About Nothing in 2024. However, I am determined to start whittling down the stack of thick books that I’ve tabled over the years (and which are largely unchanged from this photo from 2019). This stack includes Pamela, The Life of Greece (only coming up on three years), and, most recently, the complete Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis (currently bogged in the beginning of That Hideous Strength). Ah, gentle reader! I’ve reclaimed a large stack of comic books and comic collections/graphic novels from my youngest son’s room earlier this year, and they now claim the bottom shelf of that chair-side table, but I’ve only read a couple of them. Instead, I’m trying to read something from these longer books interleavened with other books. And so here I am reading, outerleavened, the Shakespeare.
I said this when reporting on Much Ado About Nothing in 2024:
When I mentioned I was reading this play and that I remembered the movie to my beautiful wife, she “remembered” seeing the movie with me as well as the play and the symphony. Which gave me pause: I remember seeing the film with a girl I dated before the woman who would become my wife, and I remembered seeing a play at Washington University with my beautiful then-girlfriend, but a symphony? Ah, she is thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Which is the next play in this collection, by the way. Which I will likely read before the 2020s end, but one never knows.
Score one for me on that last point, but it’s true otherwise (I think). We saw Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra…. what, 30 years ago? We were not yet married, and I picked up a Valentine’s Day package that included it probably circa 1998. Yeah, you know, that’s probably actually the year–we were dating, but we were not engaged, so that would be February 14, 1998. And we had the wedding march from that played at our wedding, so…. Also, I recall seeing a performance of the play at Washington University, where the students put on an updated performance where Puck, played by a woman, pretended to ride a motorcycle from scene to scene. My wife thinks she saw that performance with me, and I cannot pinpoint the date–it comes from that very busy couple of years between college and marriage, but if she thinks she saw it, we did.
So: A young woman, Hermia, is promised to a young man, Demetrius, by her father, but she loves Lysander. Helena loves Demetrius, who might have betrothed himself to her before abandoning her for Hermia. Hermia and Lysander want to run away as Helena must marry Demetrius or die. Helena brings Demetrius to the woods where they are to meet to prevent their escape. Meanwhile, the gods Oberon and Titania, married, are feuding over possession of a single waif, and Oberon engages Puck to sprinkle fairy dust on her eyes to make her fall in love with the first thing she sees (Titania’s eyes–Puck is a boy, I think, regardless of if he’s played by a girl or not). Also, Oberon wants Puck to put some dust on the Athenian’s (Demetrius’s) eyes so he will fall in love with the woman who is with him (Helena), but Puck dabs Lysander instead, and Lysander falls in love with Helena and renounces Hermia, and Helena feels like they’re all making mock of her. Hijinks ensue, Titania falls in love with an Athenian peasant out in the woods to practice for a play for the wedding of Theseus, the leader of Athens.
So it’s Much Ado in Midsummer, neh? A serviceable comedy with all of the Shakespeare tropes, again, better experienced live or after six years–we’ve got a play within the play, the love quadrangles, and so on. I’ve a couple of nights after reading this play picked up the next, and starting over the same thing with fairly small print and an interchangeable collection of characters kind of put me off.
A couple of other things this brings to mind:
- I sent my mother-in-law, a former English teacher, a photo of the first page when I started reading it to show her I was still in the game, and she mentioned needing a scribble chart of the characters. Ah, gentle reader, it’s not that bad (probably worse if you read a bunch of them in a row). But her scribble charts got her through War and Peace, which is something I have not done. Maybe I need scribble charts.
- Ah, those years in the middle 1990s. Once, when Mike and I were at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, we volunteered to help a troupe (The Merry Wives of Windsor?) do a bit where they would have the volunteers read insults highlighted in a Shakespeare collection to each other, and Mike and I proceeded to ignore their prompts and hurl Shakespeare insults at each other from memory. Ah, we were young. And well-read.
I suppose I should scour the local universities’ Web sites more to see if they’re making Shakespeare available or to see whatever they’re putting on these days just so maybe the middle part of the 2020s is as packed as the middle 1990s were. Or, I suppose, I could retire to the chair and read.
