Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written, provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books, we live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the

reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Hello and welcome back to hardcore literature.

I'm nervous and excited today because we're doing our first ever Shakespeare play.

That's right. We're doing Richard the Third. Why are we doing Richard the third?

Well you may or may not know that I'm doing a Shakespeare reading challenge.

I want to read everything William Shakespeare, the Bard, ever produced in chronological order.

There's a lot of different Shakespeare reading challenges online. They have different merits,

different virtues. There's a really famous one by Ian Doshar, I think that's his name,

who did Shakespeare in Star Wars. And he's got a really nice order to his. He kind of lines everything

up seasonally. So you're doing a Midsummer Night's Dream during midsummer. You're doing Julius Caesar right around the Iids of March time. The Tempest is at a relevant time, which is really nice. And then there's my recommended order for complete newbies to Shakespeare, basically trying to stack the really good plays up front to get people enthused and excited. But this, this style of reading, chronological, is really deep-cut Shakespeare. It's for people who are quite serious, and I've got to say, I'm quite serious. Shakespeare is my favourite writer of all time. We're going to talk about that more in depth, and also if you

stick around to the end of the show, there'll be a nice little treat at the end of this one that

I think you'll like. So I'm reading Shakespeare chronologically, because I've already read

everything he put out. My final year at Oxford University was, there was a deep module on Shakespeare,

so we had to write about Shakespeare, and I

specialised in Shakespeare and mythology, but I thought, I want to read everything that the

bars have produced, but the reason I want to do it all over again is because, in all honesty,

I've only just recently come to the realization that my reading is effective, and I'm actually reading synoptically. Synoptic

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