Binge reading Shakespeare

from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

We binge watch. Why not binge read?
When you change the context of writing, you change its meaning.
To binge watch a TV series is to experience a series of episodes as if they were a single work, to enjoy them in a new way.
In the old days, the only choice for watching series was broadcast television. Typically, 22 episodes constituted a season, and the episodes were broadcast one per week, with the time slots for the rest of the year being reruns. It was a stop-start experience, often with cliff-hanger stories to encourage viewers to come back next week or next year.
The advent of video recorders changed that experience. You could save episodes and watch them whenever your wanted or in a bunch. You could rent or buy. You were no longer constrained by the schedule of the network or local station. You could fast-forward past commercials. You could pause. You could rewind and rewatch. You were in control.
Then came cable with video on demand and DVRs, giving you similar control even more conveniently. Programming to record what you wanted when you wanted was far easier.
Now with streaming, you don't have to plan ahead. You can at any moment decide to binge on a series and watch one episode after another, from the first episode of the series through the last one, without commercials. Watching in that mode, with only the interruptions you want, you can get deeply involved in the story and identify with the characters, and see the actors growing up and aging -- like time-laps photography, watching grass grow or a flower bloom, where what normally takes days or months or years unfolds for you fast enough for you to perceive and enjoy the spectacle of change. Or you can choose to watch in stop-start mode, with breaks as long as you want, to suit your personal schedule and lifestyle.
I'm watching the same content I saw before or could have seen before as separate episodes. But seen together, an entire series is a different genre, a different way of telling stories and enjoying them.
My favorite instance of this is Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin, which originally aired on Showtime from 2012 to 2014, twenty-five episodes spread across three seasons. Viewed in its entirety, it has a beginning, middle, and end. While each episode is satisfying in and of itself, the series as a whole is a single work of art, deliberately written to be experienced that way.
Typically, graduate students in literature read in a similar way. In preparing for orals they are responsible for reading the complete works of a set of authors. Rarely do they get the opportunity to focus on one author at a time. But they do often come to think of an author's life's work as a single work. Today, when E-books are readily available and the classics are free, or nearly free, many more people have the opportunity to have such experiences.
I'm getting warmed up to write an historical novel set in the time of Shakespeare. So I decided to binge read his complete works, one play every day or two. That's 38 plays, written over the course of about 19 years. I'm a third of the way through now, and it has been a surprisingly delightful experience, prompting me to want to do the same with other authors, and also prompting me to rethink what I write and why.
I'm reading the Shakespeare plays aloud to get a feel for the rhythm. As I become familiar with the vocabulary and the syntax I don't have to go running to the footnotes all the time. His langugage begins to feel normal rather than alien as I become familiar with stock phrases and images and allusions, as well as the range of reactions of characters experiencing love, jealousy, hate, vengeance, temptation, ambition. What they are willing to do. What they are willing to die for. What they are willing to kill for.
The histories, in particular. make much more sense read together. The complexities of genealogy and royal succession fall into the background as you become familiar with them, freeing you to focus on the characters and the spectacle and the pageant. Imagine watching the player introductions at an all-star baseball game when you know nothing about baseball, or watching the red-carpet arrivals of celebrities at the Oscars when you've never heard of the celebrities. Shakespeare's audience knew these historical figures, knew about their tangled relationships, and the ins and outs of royal succession -- at least knew enough about them to recognize them as celebrities and to enjoy seeing how they were portrayed. To them there was no more surprise in what happened in the plays of Henry VI than there is in watching a Christmas pageant at your church, with the stable, the manger, the shepherds, and the wise men. And there's pageant -- portraying what is well known and expected, with pomp and glitter and fine words -- in many other plays as well.
Now I'm tempted to binge read the complete works of other authors -- of course the ones like Balzac and Zola who deliberately set out to tell multi-volume stories, but others as well, light weight as well as heavy weight -- Faulkner, Michener, Somerset Maugham's stories, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency: sets of books that gain from being read together, one after the other.
This experience also makes me think differently about what I write and why I write.
If I am driven by what I need to write rather than what an editor wants or what I guess the market wants, then, by nature rather than by plan, the pieces will fit together and form a coherent story. And, for me, the main purpose of writing is to discover that story and tell it.