Hamlet

So I listened to this as a dramatic reading while driving to and from Cincinnati, and I think this is how I will consume Shakespeare plays from now on. The actors have had to do all the work of translating the archaic language and sentence structure into universal feeling which made the play much easier to digest. I also mostly listened to this so I could really appreciate the hidden subtleties of this skit. ...

March 8, 2023 · 2 min · 414 words · William Shakespeare

Macbeth

Read this while on vacation. Luckily this particular edition came with definitions for most arcane words and phrases used. If I had not have had this the book would have been fairly unintelligible. Overall, even with definitions this book was just “pretty good”. This might be because it is not written as a book but as a play. So much of the weight of what is happening is only as heavy as your imagination can make it. Living in the TV era I can hardly imagine anything, it left me mostly in the dark. With that being said I was still able to piece together that action and character development of the story. The language and metaphors in the book are truly Shakespearian (pause for chuckles). But really the word play is masterful and renders emotions in high dynamic range. The thing that struck me most about this story was that it had many parallels to the movie Scarface. I was not expecting that connection. Some great quotes in this book to be sure.

January 1, 2023 · 1 min · 174 words · William Shakespeare