My Shakespeare Quest: Progress and Prognosis, Part One

I should probably articulate this in full before any more time and progress go by.

Early this year I set about to read the entire Arden Shakespeare Third Series. That, at the outset, seemed itself a gargantual task; but I hadn't counted on the proliferation of side-quests along the way.

I should have seen it coming when 2 years ago when, on a whim, I bought and started reading Double Falsehood, or The Distressed Lovers, which Shakespeare may have had a significant hand in—though doubtless less of a hand than Lewis Theobald conjectured in the 1720s when he undertook to edit/rewrite and mount it as a 'lost' Shakespeare play. The introductory material for the Arden Double Falsehood (by Brean Hammond) has extensive discussion of source material: it seems a good chunk of its plot was ripped from Book One of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which was new and holy shit hot stuff in the first decade of the 17th century. The original story from Cervantes (which Hammond generously summarizes) reads like Shakespeare anyway: double-dealing nobles, a forced marriage, love-lorn madness in the woods, a spurned woman dressed as a shepherd, and an all-cast resolution and happy ending. 

Anyway, ashamed that I had never read Don Quixote (doubly ashamed that my greatest knowledge thereof hailed from that ahem musical), I interrupted my reading of Double Falsehood in order to undertake, for the first and doubtless only time, a read through the entirety of Don Quixote. This took at least 6 months.

After Double Falsehood I moved into the histories. I have read King John, Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1 – 3 Henry VI—all Arden Third Series, which is like reading a complete separate monograph with each play. Most of these plays I had read before in the Pelican editions; and in getting through them this time I've already read the intro material in other complete Shakespeare editions, including Charles Knight (~1875), Kittredge (1936), Pelican (1956–67), Riverside (1974), and the respective entries in The Oxford Companion  to Shakespeare (2001) and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (1998). The Norton Shakespeare, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, and David Bevington's Complete Works are all on order. I have not ever availed myself of the Folger Shakespeare editions (although I frequently, joyously availed myself of the Folger Shakespeare Theatre when I lived in D.C.).

I am way behind on my viewing, but I have several TV versions of most or all of the histories: 

• An Age of Kings (1960), the BBC Shakespeare (late 1970s–early 1980s), and The Hollow Crown (2012–2016) all tackle the entire 8-play cycle (although Kings and Crown abridge Henry VI into two parts).
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• The Show Must Go Online, a mammoth undertaking by Rob Myles of all the canon plays, one per week, in Zoom readings.
• Brave Spirits Theatre last summer ran a beautiful series of source and contemporaneous history plays, also in Zoom readings, including The Troublesome Reign of King John (George Peele? ~1589), Thomas of Woodstock (Anon. 1591–5), The Famous Victories of Henry V (Anon, <1594), Edward IV Parts 1 and 2 (Heywood?, <1599),  Perkin Warbeck (Ford, ~1630), and others. All of these are still available on youtube. (Seeing as how this fabulous and scrappy company had to cancel their glorious Histories plans—which started January 2020 with Richard II and was intended to culminate in Summer 2021 with all eight Richard and Henry plays in repertory—it was nice to have this series as consolation.)
• Plus other television versions and taped-performance, including Peter Hall and John Barton's Wars of the Roses (BBC 1965–66) and various productions from Shakespeare's Globe, RSC, Stratford Festival, and elsewhere. (I'll post my current collection another time.)

I've read several of those plays cited above related to the same historical events and reigns, including Troublesome Reign, Thomas of Woodstock, and The Life and Death of Jack Straw (Anon. 1590s). I've also read a bunch of non-historical revenge tragedies (because fun!): The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd, 1588–1592), The Revenger's Tragedy (Middleton, <1606), 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Ford, ~1626), The White Devil (Webster, 1612), The Devil's Charter (Barnabe Barnes, 1607), and The Maid's Tragedy (Beaumont & Fletcher, 1608–1610).

Next up: All the criticism and sources and theory and history and culture and biography and ephemera I've read this year in the process of working through the histories... and a rough roadmap for the next few years.