This question has come up in the past, and I’ve often seen it appear on people’s bucket lists: read the complete works of William Shakespeare.
I open up for discussion the question of whether this is a worthy goal. Keep in mind that, at least in this particular instance, I am not talking about a life long goal of experiencing every play, or otherwise diving deep. I’m talking about getting yourself a Complete Works, starting on page one, and then reading cover to cover and calling it done. Saying you did it, in other words. A checkbox on ye olde bucket list.
Although my answer has probably changed over the years, right now the answer is “No. Don’t do this.”
I’ve done it. I can answer in the affirmative if the question ever comes up. Now ask me my opinions on Measure for Measure or All’s Well That Ends Well and I’ll ask, “Which one was that again?” and struggle to remember even the barest of the plot. I’ve not seen them, either on video or live. I didn’t study them in school. So my retention for most of them is just terrible. Probably because there was no reason to retain it.
I’ve known people who set it as a goal to *see* all of the plays. Depending on where you’re at and what resources are available to you, this is a project that could take a great deal of time, travel and money. But for each play you’ll have the memories to go with it – how you got there, what the circumstances were, what sort of troupe it was, etc… – and those things will help lock it in your memory. I’ve seen The Tempest 3 times, and I can tell you vivid memories from every show.
Ask yourself why you want to do it – whether it’s for the accomplishment of saying you did it, or if it’s out of a true desire to experience every bit of Shakespeare that you can. Because if it’s the latter, well, you’re not even scratching the surface if you just read the book and call it done.

Watching a bit of Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth yesterday, I was reminded of something I don’t like about the Porter’s scene. Whoever is at the door knocks *10* times. That’s an awful lot of knocking. If you were at somebody’s front door, you’d almost certainly give up before knocking 10 times. I realize that this is a castle, not a house, and that someone is surely home and just needs to wake up. That doesn’t change the fact that the amount of knocking is jarring to me, it takes me away from the scene and makes me think “Somebody answer the damn door!”
Here’s what came to me, though. The Macbeths hear 4 knocks before exiting, and then the porter hears 6. But what if the first knock that the Macbeths hear is really the same first knock that that the porter hears? They are almost certainly in two different parts of the castle, after all. See what I’m saying? What if these two scenes actually take place simultaneously? It’s a common enough trick and you’ve probably seen it in any number of novels: one chapter shows you that a situation has changed unexpectedly, and then the next chapter, written from a different character’s perspective, goes back in time a little bit and shows you how that character caused the change in whatever situation.
How might such a technique play out on stage? Could you even attempt to put both the Macbeths and the porter on stage at the same time, or would they step on each other’s lines? If you don’t, though, how do you explain that this is not a sequential series of events, but a simultaneous one?

So, when your kids are in pre-school you get lots of things sent home with them that they made for you. Sometimes it’s finger painting, sometimes it’s something glued to something else. Sometimes it’s just a cut up piece of paper that your young darling decided looked pretty, and he wanted to keep.

I got this.

Shakespeare was talking to Puck so he would know when Hamlet was born.

Now of course my 5yr old son did not write that – he dictated it to the teacher. Whether or not he did the purple decorations, I have no idea. (For those who may not be able to see the image, it is block lettering in what appears to be colored pencil the words “SHAKESPEARE WAS TALKING TO PUCK SO HE WOULD KNOW WHEN HAMLET WAS BORN.”)

I expect that this comes directly from his latest request of telling Shakespeare stories at night. But personally I think it’s very Neil Gaiman, very Sandman. It occurs to me, as I go hunting through the archives, that while I’ve read Gaiman’s Sandman books (at least the Shakespeare bits ;)) I never blogged about it. Will have to fix that. But, either way, I definitely get the vision of Shakespeare the playwright wandering through the forest, speaking with mischievous sprite Puck, while Puck feeds Shakespeare all his best ideas.

I love that I’ve created a world in my child’s brain in which Shakespeare, Puck and Hamlet can all live simultaneously.

If anybody ever corners me and asks for a Shakespeare trivia question, I will say, “Who is Corambis?”
The answer is that this is the name Polonius is called by in the Bad Quarto of Hamlet.

The origin of the name Corambis has been the subject of scholarly speculation. Some have noted that William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Queen Elizabeth I’s chief counselor, had the Latin motto Cor unum, via una (“One heart, one way”), and that Corambis can be interpreted as Latin for “double-hearted” (cor meaning “heart” and bis or ambis meaning “twice” or “double”), implying deceitfulness or two-facedness, which satirically points to Burghley’s motto. This suggests it might originally have been a satirical reference to Burghley, and that the name Polonius was substituted in later versions, possibly to avoid offense or censorship.

However, not all scholars agree; some argue that the name change could reflect an early version of the play, or that Corambis and Montano might have been derived from other sources, such as Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, where a character named Corambus appears.