Not in High School, not in College and certainly not before, in between, or (until recently) after, have I ever bothered to study Shakespeare or Shakespeare’s plays. I may have seen two, possibly three productions of his plays, but none of those made any impression on me. I don’t know why, exactly, I have avoided Shakespeare other than I have just never felt the need or had the inclination to learn about him and his work. Maybe it’s due to my naturally contrary nature coupled with the fact that I lived in Cedar City, Utah where they have a world-renowned Shakespeare Festival at Southern Utah University. Of course, if you accuse me of being contrary, I’ll deny it.
Recently, my avoidance of Shakespeare has abated, and I blame it on podcasts.
I listen to quite a few podcasts on a regular basis, including several from Pushkin Industries. While listening to one of the Pushkin Industries podcasts, I was made aware of a new podcast they had produced called “Where There’s A Will”, and it intrigued me, so I subscribed to it. Here is part of the description of this podcast: “Where There’s a Will searches for the surprising places Shakespeare shows up beyond the theater.”
Did you know that there are at least 420 words and phrases that are commonly used in English today that were originally created by William Shakespeare? Some people claim that the word count is closer to 1700, and I stumbled upon this site that talks about that.
As with many of the other podcasts I listen to, “Where There’s A Will” is informative, insightful and intriguing, and I have listened to all the episodes. While listening to them, I got the idea that I should probably learn a little bit about Shakespeare’s plays.
So I started searching for something to help me in that effort.
As a result of that search, I stumbled upon another podcast, one that is presented by the CiRCE Institute called, “The Play’s The Thing.” Here is the tagline from their website:
“The Play’s the Thing is the ultimate podcast resource for lovers of Shakespeare. Dedicating six episodes to each play (one per act, plus a Q&A episode), this podcast explores the themes, scenes, characters, and lines that make Shakespeare so memorable. In the end, we will cover every play The Bard wrote, thus permitting an ongoing contemplation and celebration of the most important writer of all time.”
So far on “The Play’s The Thing”, I have learned about these four plays: Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. These four plays, a “Tetralogy” are known as a “Henriad” and are historical plays. Inspired by what I learned in those podcast episodes, Lisa and I bought and watched season 1 of “The Hollow Crown” on Amazon. Season 1 has all four of these plays, one in each episode. If you’re a fan of Tom Hiddleston, who plays “Loki” in the Marvel Comics movies, you’ll enjoy watching him in the last three episodes of season 1 of “The Hollow Crown”.
Also while listening to “The Play’s The Thing”, I learned that Isaac Asimov wrote a book about Shakespeare’s plays called, “Asimov’s Guide To Shakespeare: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying the Works of Shakespeare.” Isaac Asimov is one of my favorite authors and was quite an intellectual and a prolific writer, he wrote or edited over 500 books, but I didn’t know that one of those books was about Shakespeare. After learning about this book, I knew that I needed my own copy of it, so I found and purchased a used copy on thriftbooks.com (besides thrift stores, it is one of my favorite places to buy books).
This journey into Shakespeare has already proven to be very enjoyable. Who knew?
