I do not recommend that anyone waste any time on Shakespeare's plays without listening to Prof. (and Shakespearean actor) Peter Saccio talk about them first.
For us, it has been like being half-blind, and finally getting the right glasses.
Prof. Saccio's retirement from Dartmouth is a huge loss for the College, but anyone can listen to his course via the Teaching Company's recordings. A bit expensive, but if your library doesn't have them, ask them to buy them.
Listening - and re-listening - to Saccio is a pure delight. A quote from the piece in Dartmouth Life:
On the day of the lecture, Saccio begins almost dispassionately. "The death of Falstaff," he says, "is a short passage, in prose, related by simple characters leading common lives."
And then he begins to act the parts of those characters, explaining between lines how Shakespeare employs biblical allusion, Elizabethan thought and culture, word play and stage direction. He describes how Falstaff, near death, plays with his bedclothes and examines his fingertips, noting that contemporary doctors tell him that what Shakespeare portrayed four centuries ago is grounded in the physical reality of death.
The room becomes electric.
Saccio continues, "For Falstaff, in his final moments the world is getting smaller and smaller. He is 'focusing down'—as dying people do." He points out a reference to the 23rd Psalm towards the end of the scene and begins, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want..." and the classroom becomes utterly silent, spellbound.
Breaking the silence, Saccio concludes, "I've been trying to enter into Shakespeare's imagination. He imagined a scene that was peaceful, hopeful, bawdy, silly, childish, drunken, lecherous and terrifying—terrifying both physically and spiritually. All at once, in only 40 lines. I put my cards on the table," he concludes. "The man could write."
Photo: Leon D. Black Professor of Shakespearean Studies Peter Saccio
