It's fiendishly difficult to decide where to begin a collection of Shakespeare. He may be the most esteemed, most popular, most influential writer in the English language, but we know next to nothing about him, his first book was poorly printed, and-- assuming you can find a copy available in the marketplace--it most likely will have been tampered with at some point in its illustrious past:
So if most of the biographies of this guy are little more than conjecture, and if his first book isn't exactly an exemplar of the printer's art, and if most copies of his first book have been "made up" at some point, why collect the guy at all? And if you do collect his work, how do you go about it?
You collect him because only the King James Bible of 1611 has had anywhere near his influence on the development of the English language. You collect him for his unparalleled understanding and exposition of the human condition. You collect him for the sheer magnitude of his genius, such as Lorenzo's speech in the last act of The Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Or this...
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
As I foretold you were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest, IV,i,148-158
Tomorrow, we will look at some inexpensive ways of making Shakespeare our own....
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