The Complete Works of Shakespeare. And Other Thoughts on Reading.

I am reading the complete works of Shakespeare, because - well, I’m not exactly sure what the because is. It may be the equivalent of a mid-life crisis, except I’m not buying Maseratis and sleeping with my secretary. (I know this, because I don’t have a secretary.)

The thought process came about quite logically. (I mean: it all seemed very obvious to me at the time.)

Many years ago, I asked my father to give me the complete works for my birthday, and he found a lovely edition, and I treasured it. I always had to ask him for specific presents because he left when I was seven and I never lived with him again and he was busy with horses and so he didn’t know a huge amount about me and what I liked.

I’ve had that big, fat book sitting on my shelf for about forty years, and I never opened it. I knew I wanted to have Shakespeare with me, but embarking on the whole shebang always seemed too much. I’d occasionally read Hamlet, but that was about it.

I’m fifty-eight now, and I love words, and language, and poetry, and literature of all kinds, and life is shooting past my ears, and who knows whether I am going to get run over a bus tomorrow? So, I suddenly decided that it was time for the big book.

I did some maths, and I worked out that if I read seven pages a day I could finish by Christmas. This felt solemn and symbolic. I had a mission! I was oddly delighted.

Off I set, with all my flags flying.

I had two quick, vivid realisations. One is that I always say that Shakespeare is my boy, but in fact I know a very few of his plays very well. The other is that I do see why they don’t put on The Merry Wives of Windsor that often.

But reading The Tempest, which was the first play of the lot, was a dream and a joy and I have gone back to my sweet, youthful, swot-self, who was so eager to do everything right and who took the best notes.

I’m writing down the bits that tickle me, and there is no rhyme or reason.

For instance:

Gonzalo:

‘Now would I give a thousand furlongs

of sea for an acre of barren ground - long heath,

brown furze, any thing. The wills above be

done, but I would fain die a dry death.’

(He is at sea and the ship is sinking.)

I look at that note and am pleased I have it. I’m not sure why I love that speech so much. Perhaps it’s the ‘thousand furlongs of sea’. Or the yearning to die a dry death. Or the long heath and the brown furze.

I don’t know. But I am filling my brain with beauty, and that’s what John Barrymore said when he was asked why he never learned his lines in Hollywood. (Young operatives had to contort themselves on the side of the set with idiot boards.) He said something like - and I can never quite find the exact quote - ‘My mind is full of beauty. Do you expect me to fill it with this shit?’

Here’s another dash of the beautiful:

Prospero: ‘Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.’

The last of our sea-sorrow! Ah, I shall be stealing that and using it all over the shop.

Apparently people are not reading any more and not doing English literature degrees and the children are hardly literate at all. (They can do screens, and coding. Or some such. Things people my age cannot really understand. Or, at least, I can’t understand.) There is a small panic about this, just now. I am such a believer in books that I don’t panic. The books surely must survive. The beauty of singing, dipping, humming, dancing prose - and poetry too - must touch all the hearts. Everybody, surely, must want the mermaids singing, and the stuff that dreams are made on, and the boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past?

But then my dad, who gave me the book of beauty, did not know any of those things. I once told him with great excitement of George Eliot, because I was reading Middlemarch for the first time and I was beside myself at the brilliance of it all. ‘George Eliot?’ he said, vaguely, patting my hand. ‘Has he written any other good books?’

(I tell that story quite often, because it’s funny, because it was so Dad, because I never stop thinking how freakishly odd it is that I got the love of reading at all. Odd, unexpected and lucky.)

My father lived perfectly well without the mermaids singing. He felt the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but he did not know they were called that. I don’t think he ever saw a play by Shakespeare in his life. He was a singer of songs though, and a teller of tales, and he could hold a room rapt, with just a twinkle of his eye and the raising of a glass and his spellbinding ability to speak a story out loud. (The best ones, and the ones which made him laugh the most, were the ones against himself.)

So, maybe the not reading isn’t the end of the world. You can see from the photograph - which I just took now this minute from the chair where I am writing these lines - that I would be very sad to have a life without books. But I’m not going to expect everyone to love what I love. As my dazzling friend The Neuroscientist tells me: we all have different brains. My brain, just now, has Shakespeare in it, and that’s enough for me.