Sometime in early 2005, as I fretted over my impending (and, it turned out, short-lived) teaching career, I decided I should write an essay about each of Shakespeare's plays. A bit of context: I was an actor before I was a playwright, and in college I fell hard for Shakespeare, for the usual reasons: the poetry; the theatricality; the mysteries, great and small, beneath even the clearest-seeming lines. Most of all, the poetic, theatrical, bottomless characters. Whereas in high school I'd convinced myself I'd inevitably play Jean Valjean, Sweeney Todd, the Phantom, by the time I could legally drink to my ambitions, they'd morphed into Hamlet and Iago.
Well ... gradually and then suddenly, I abandoned acting, but my love of Shakespeare and his characters has endured. If I won't ever play them, I reasoned, at least I can write insightful things about them. And maybe someday I'll have my own website, and I can publish my insights, free to all! I even thought of a domain name: www.becritical.com. (Get it?)
As of this writing, August 2015, I am roughly midway through the project. Rather than wait another ten years, I'm taking the opportunity presented by this, my first website, to publish each essay as I complete it. Over the coming months, I plan to reread and polish what I have already written, and then post each essay below. I will then start on a new play, and—over the coming years—plow on through to the end.
So without further ado, I give you:
Well ... gradually and then suddenly, I abandoned acting, but my love of Shakespeare and his characters has endured. If I won't ever play them, I reasoned, at least I can write insightful things about them. And maybe someday I'll have my own website, and I can publish my insights, free to all! I even thought of a domain name: www.becritical.com. (Get it?)
As of this writing, August 2015, I am roughly midway through the project. Rather than wait another ten years, I'm taking the opportunity presented by this, my first website, to publish each essay as I complete it. Over the coming months, I plan to reread and polish what I have already written, and then post each essay below. I will then start on a new play, and—over the coming years—plow on through to the end.
So without further ado, I give you:
Insights on Shakespeare, or:
One playwright's quest to consider all of Shakespeare's characters before the Internet becomes obsolete
One playwright's quest to consider all of Shakespeare's characters before the Internet becomes obsolete
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- Troilus and Cressida
- All's Well That Ends Well
- Measure for Measure
- Othello
- King Lear
- Macbeth
- Antony and Cleopatra
- Coriolanus
- Timon of Athens
- Pericles
- Cymbeline
- The Winter's Tale
- The Tempest
- Henry VIII
- The Two Noble Kinsmen