Where to start with Shakespeare (after school ruined him)
Read him for the inside of a mind under pressure, not for the speeches you already had to memorise.
You did one or two of the plays in school, you remember almost nothing except the speeches, and you suspect there is something more going on than a syllabus is allowed to admit.
Reading Shakespeare for the famous speeches and missing the actual technique, which is the soliloquy as a microphone inside a mind in the middle of changing. Or, the school failure: treating the plays as language puzzles to be glossed line by line, and never letting them work as the theatre they were written to be.
The reading path
- Macbeth — Read it in two sittings if you can. Read the soliloquies aloud; they are not commentary on the action, they are the action moving through one mind. The witches are stage machinery, the marriage is the engine, and the final acts are what happens to a man who keeps his promises to the wrong self.
- King Lear — The play Shakespeare wrote when he had nothing left to prove. Read the storm scenes slowly; the speech is at the limit of what English can do, and the moral architecture — fathers, daughters, recognition, sight, nothing — is at the limit of what a play can carry without breaking. Take the gaps between scenes seriously; they are part of the form.
- Hamlet — The play that has been so over-quoted that it has become hard to read. Take it after Macbeth and Lear have rebuilt your trust in Shakespeare's voice, and Hamlet stops being a parade of speeches and becomes what it actually is: a young man stalling because the order he has been given, by a ghost, would cost him the only self he still half-likes.
Why this order
Shakespeare's deepest invention is the soliloquy as the literary form for showing a mind in the middle of changing, not after the change has happened — and the four great tragedies are where that form is doing its hardest work.
Held back, and why
- Othello — Save it for after Lear. Othello is the most relentlessly built of the tragedies — Iago's machine works on you before you can look away from it — and the experience is sharper if you already trust Shakespeare's late mature voice instead of meeting it for the first time inside one of his cruellest plot designs.