When I’m reading Shakespeare, I ask myself why I ever waste time reading other writers, and I resolve to read nothing but Shakespeare from then on.
When I’m not reading Shakespeare, I hold back from picking him up and having a go at it again. I’m lazy and reading Shakespeare is work. He’s work, because he asks of you all the attention and nimble-wittedness than you can bring to bear on him. I like Rex Stout’s detective stories about Nero Wolfe and his cheeky factotum Archie Goodwin, and I make no apologies for liking them. But I have one thing to say against them. They keep me from reading Shakespeare, because reading them is not work.
The harder jobs pay better. Brain surgeons make more than school crossing guards. Reading Shakespeare pays better than reading Rex Stout. So I always go back to reading Shakespeare, eventually.
But he is work.
Matthew Arnold wrote that there are few lines in King Lear that he didn’t have to read several times before he understood them. Shakespeare glories in puns and metaphors and stretching and pulling words until they mean things they have never meant before. Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson do not do this and because they don’t they are much easier to read.
In Cymbeline, Imogen tells her husband Leonatus that he must marry again if she should die before he does. Leonatus, loving husband that he is, says to her in reply what every wife would want to hear:
How, how? Another?
You gentle gods, give me but this I have,
And sear up my embracements from a next
With bonds of death!
I understood Leonatus’ reply, more or less, on first reading. Context helped. But this wonderful language is not plain. I have to be at my reading best to understand and enjoy it.
In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses urges Achilles to act greatly once again:
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.
I understood most of this at first reading, even though Shakespeare here fails to manage his metaphors coherently. My literary conscience rebels and then submits to Shakespeare’s magnificent flouting of prose logic.
Christopher Marlowe, in contrast, has Dr. Faustus avow his damnable ambition lucidly:
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor and omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
but his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
A sound magician is a demigod.
This is great poetry, in my opinion, and it’s a lot easier to understand than Shakespeare. But it’s just not as much fun as Shakespeare.
One part of Shakespeare is not much fun, however, and that is the joking, the duels of wit, the brazen punning, wherein the speakers try to impart a backward spin to their every word the way Minnesota Fats imparted the same to pool balls. Jokes are no longer funny when they have to be footnoted.
But then there is the miraculous exception, the play that has the perfection of something found, not made: Henry IV Part 1. Here the horseplay is all perfectly understandable and fresh because it is a working and necessary part of the play, not a treat for the members of the audience who would rather be at a public hanging.
My enjoyment of Falstaff is so great and I cherish it so much that I have never been able to bring myself to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. I’m told that this play is a sad affair for lovers of the fat old rogue. But someday I’ll screw my courage to the sticking place and read it. It’s by Shakespeare, after all.
Books Matter 
I fear the Bard has fallen out of fashion in schools today, but I agree completely about the pleasures his plays afford. I taught a variety of the plays over the years, my favorites for teaching being Othello, Hamlet, and Much Ado about Nothing. One small quibble, however. Lady Macbeth advises her husband to screw his courage to the sticking place, not point. It’s an archery metaphor. Loading a crossbow involves turning a screw until it sticks, then it’s ready to shoot. But i concur wholeheartedly with the sentiments you expressedl
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The sticking “place”. Thanks.
The Bard is out of favor? Poor kids. We were so lucky!
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I have a Peruvian brother-in-law who teaches Spanish literature at a university. One time I asked him if readers of Spanish today could easily read Cervantes; he told me that, yes, they could. You’ll recall that Cervantes was Shakespeare’s contemporary, but it seems the Spanish language was more mature at that point than English was. Shakespeare has always been terrific to me, but he’s also work because the language he wrote in was, essentially, pre-modern English. This is in my view the most important reason why Shakespeare is more admired than read these days. (Whenever I attend a Shakespeare play, I read the play beforehand in order to be enjoying the performance, not aurally parsing the lines.) Since kids read less today than we did, it’s predictable that Shakespeare is taught less now, which is a real shame.
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Perhaps I should say that The Bard’s language is uniquely his own rather than “pre-modern”, but I do think that Elizabethan English presents more challenges than, say, even the English of John Milton.
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The vocabulary of Shakespeare in his writings is about twice that of Milton in his, and I suspect that it would be larger than that of his contemporaries — and yet Milton and Ben Jonson were supposedly better educated than Shakespeare. Milton certainly was. But Shakespeare attacks the English language and stretches it and explores its capacities. This is what makes him so exciting and so obscure. I’d like to ask my old friend Lance Coon, who was an English teacher, why Shakespeare is falling out of favor in schools. I’d imagine it would be because of his difficulty, resulting from his restless exploration of what English can do and be.
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Hey John! Great little missive! Have you ever seen Roman Pulanski’s “Macbeth”? Stunning. Talk to you soon! Tris
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Tris, No, I’ll have to check that one out. There’s a great production of “As You Like It” with Laurence Olivier — you can see it on youtube. More later.
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