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. Today we are discussing one of my favourite subjects

of all time, the comedies of William Shakespeare. At time of recording, it is June and England is

sliding from spring into summer.

We've had weeks of heavy rain, as one might expect from this sceptod Isle,

but now a fair breeze carries a symphony of birdsong and an intoxicating bouquet of sweet musk roses.

In the Hardcore Literature Book Club, we have enjoyed a procession of Shakespeare's tragic

masterpieces. We read King Lear together in the dead of icy winter.

Although to say we read it would be a disservice, we lived it.

We inhabited its bleak, cavernous cosmos.

And we found ourselves emotionally overwhelmed, as is the effect with sublime works of art. We utilised the

three reads method, beginning with a pre-play preparatory discussion to set expectations,

then we read the play and we put it on in the theatre of our minds, seeing the scenes,

casting and dressing the actors, furnishing the stage.

Then we broke the play down and we read it through together, appreciating it like fine wine,

though perhaps King Lear is more like a well-aged single malt. Then we watched different adaptations together, stage and film, before moving on to

Hamlet, another endless work. It's like a book of essays that one must return to every single

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