Shakespeare?

>>>/woo/

>>9322910
Pic not related fag

Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer's Night Dream, Richard III.

Get a good annotated edition, see a good production after reading it, keep an open, yet rigorously critical, mind when reading or watching Shakespeare, and keep in mind that reading Shakeapeare is both a never-ending process and an experience.

>>9322917
Any recommendations for ebooks? It's not easy to find good editions of books where I live.
Also, is watching the plays a better experience to you?

>>9322906
You should start by not calling him Billy Boy.

>>9322922
I call artistic historical figures by weird nicknames. Mozart is Moza, which means sock in Hindi. Dostoyevsky is Dost which means friend, and there are others.
Will come up with one for Shakybaby next :')

>>9322921
Well, there are some Arden epubs floating around (Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, As You Like It, Much Ado), some Oxford pdfs (King Lear, Timon of Athens, Richard II), and a lot of New Cambridge editions in libgen. I'd recommend any of those editions because they are scholarly. Though the RSC editions are good enough, easier to find and not too overwhelming with the scholarship.

Watching the plays is not a "better" experience (better by what standards? According to whom? For whom?), it's just a different experience. I'd say reading and watching the plays are complementary approaches to the text, and you shouldn't dismiss either of them. This is true of any dramatic text. Don't listen to the meme idiots who say you should put one over the other.

By the way, you would do good to read some criticism after finishing each play. I recommend Bloom's The Invention of the Human, Goddard's The Meaning of Shakespeare, Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, and/or Garber's Shakespeare After All. You can easily find all of them on libgen.

>>9322921
You can also use Book Depository if you want to buy phisical editions (protip: Arden is the best). Free shipping and usually cheaper than Amazon.

>>9322948
Thank you so much for the detailed answer.
I appreciate it.

>>9322976
No prob man. Just a final suggestion: be critical of the criticism you read. Use it as a tool to help your understanding of W.S. increase, not as a manual on how to read him categorically. Create your own interpretations, and then support them, construct them, or dismiss them after resding again the work and reading criticism.

Does Blooms Invention of the Human offer a good view of plays that aren't major, like Henry VI or is its major focus on the popular ones like Hamlet?

I'm looking to get deeper into Shakespeare and would like to have one main secondary source, with minimal online supplements.

>>9322906
Don't read Hamlet. I'd honestly start with Coriolanus. It's the least philosophical and backwards of all his works, and it's the one that reads most like a straight up action story.

Either that or the Henriad, since those are the best.

>>9324519
>Coriolanus
It's pretty great to read because if you say you've read it you sound smart because most people have never heard of it, but it's actually pleb tier so literally anyone with half a brain can stomach it.

I'm surprised it isn't a meme.

>>9324725
It's literally just a dumb action movie. Hence why it's the best place to start with Shakespeare. It's basically a way to get used to reading in iambs without having to think too much on what's actually being said

>>9324737
How does it compare to Titus Andronicus?

Bumping in solicitation of advice for intoing Shakespeare

>>9322906
Macbeth is pretty great, I remember liking it a lot in high school.

File: Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth.jpg (124KB, 806x1536px) Image search: [Google]

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>>9326218

>>9322917
>>9322948

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>>9324504
He focuses a lot on character, but obviously he doesn't write a lot on every play because Shakespeare himself did not develop his characters in his early plays to the same extent as he did on his later drama.

Read Bloom, but also one or two other sources to complement him. In this post >>9322948 I recommend some other options. Goddard's book might be the best; I certainly prefer it to Bloom's.