Reading the complete works of Shakespeare in a year seems like a tall order, doesn't it?

But it's actually not. If you have the right game plan and the right approach,

reading everything the Bard ever produced is actually very feasible in a year.

If we're talking about just the plays alone, he's just about 36, depending on who you talk to,

36 plays. A play a week, which is very doable because you just portion out the pages

per day. A play a week will have you, having read the entirety of his plays, his play output

in less than a year. That's one per week, that's 36 weeks. Easy. And the fact is that if you're

going to read the play, two things to keep in mind. One, the Arden editions of Shakespeare are the best. They're going to look like this. They have the best critical commentaries, the best introductions and the best footnotes. They will be well worth the weight in gold. You're about a tenor, if you're in England, a tenor, a book, and they're very much extremely valuable. You want to get the individual plays in the Arden editions rather than the complete works in a big chunky one. That'll be all socio-historical cultural context and everything,

and they're just a delight to hold and things like that. Another thing you might want to consider

is you might want to read the plays, Solidarity, not see the performance, but if you can see a performance,

that will be brilliant, especially if you can see a performance, that will be brilliant,

especially if you can see a good performance. There's plenty of adaptations. There's stage, there's TV,

there's film, there's audio, but it's actually perfectly fine. Am I thinking on this as matured

and it's perfectly fine to want to read the plays? If so, I would say, again, however you manage it is perfect, it is better to cover

all the plays in however it's comfortable to you, however you get the most resonance out of it,

if you try to read a single play in a single sitting, that would be as close to how it was

supposed to be performed and how it was supposed to be perceived. So single sittings are key,

but then again, when it comes to

reading and specifically rereading Shakespeare you might want to spend some

time over the long term particularly with the works that are most resonant to

you for me I like to reread King Lear every single year like Hemingway and I will

spend weeks with King Lear even though I could digest the play and it's a long one

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