“In total, the comedies, plus commentaries, run for 767 pages, and there are good bits, lots of...

“In total, the comedies, plus commentaries, run for 767 pages, and there are good bits, lots of them, don’t get me wrong, dude knew what he was doing, but I do kind of wish I had read these in the seventeenth century, back when I would have known a hawk from a handsaw (Shakespeare in-joke) and could have actually understood what was being said. Humour does not travel, and it definitely does not time travel. (My novel will be a horrendous read in 2517.) The relief when you make it to the tragedies with all the drama and doomed heroes and villains and dead bodies and To Be-s Or Not To Be-s is IMMODERATE. (That relief is in many ways misplaced, because you still have all of the poetry to go, including seventeen near-identical sonnets about why having babies is a good idea, but by then you’re into the last few hundred pages, and nothing bar death or your hands no longer being able to hold the book up can stop you.)”

My latest update for Unbound: on reading the Complete Works of Shakespeare.