Yea, from the table of my memory

Sir Kenneth Branagh working with John Gielgud on the set of Hamlet (1996)

Not long ago, I made up my mind that I would read EVERYTHING SHAKESPEARE EVER WROTE. After years of on-off studiousness and a final flourish of reading Sonnet 154, I celebrated my achievement by having a few pumpkin ales and reciting every Shakespeare speech I knew from memory to an empty house. This was made possible because several weeks before, as an amendment to my resolution, I had passed a personal law to learn a new speech from Shakespeare every week until I knew at least one from every play.

Halfway to my goal (and still going strong), I realized that there's not a whole lot of Suzy Q, non-theatre/non-lit scholar folks who take up memorizing tracts of Shakespeare for fun (or at least they don't blog about it). This disappointed me. I thought for sure someone would have the same idea and felt it was worthy of rumination... but not so much. This had to be amended.

All my inspiration for this can be traced thusly:

In my studies, the name Kenneth Branagh came with the wheat separated from the chaff. He was mentioned so often that I could come to one of two conclusions: this guy is a genius or a total dick. Outside of a random viewing of As You Like It and Thor, I was tragically unconscious of his extensive  work.

But then came Henry V. I thank Netflix everyday for streaming this masterwork. Sir Ken's wooing of Catherine of Valois rendered me a puddle of sighs. Then his Hamlet entered my Blu-Ray player, and I beheld this ballsy, epic undertaking of recording the entirety of my favorite on film for the first time. I was done. I was nuclear-reactor-level smitten with this man. It was inevitable, I suppose, given his passionate grasp of the material and my recent re-upped love of the plays. I floated on an inexplicably delirious intellectual high for days, nursing the brand of fawning, explosive fangirl crush that has become my trademark since I first posted on LiveJournal ten years ago.

The second time I watched Hamlet, I listened to the director's commentary. It was the most edifying four hours of movie commentary I had encountered since The Lord of the Rings. Sir Ken lit up the movie with insights. Along the way, I found myself envious of his ability to rattle off quotes to make his points. I came away thinking: "I want to be the person who can quote Shakespeare."

I was going to seriously memorize some shite.

Having already undertaken memorizing the Periodic Table from hydrogen to americium, I felt it was entirely achievable and sufficiently challenging. Memorization is a parlour trick in the end. Humans are capable of memorization feats that boggle human minds. People have long set themselves to committing holy scriptures to heart in the hopes that it will enrich their souls. Shakespeare's words are so essential to and ingrained in the English language and culture that they command no less respect than divine inspiration. That's why I've not only resolved to memorize these speeches, but to deeply analyze them within their contexts to discover clues as to how to properly recite and ruminate over them and gain understanding of the characters' thoughts.

These selected speeches have become, for me, a living canon--the soul's scripture--as accessible to me as my thoughts, and as important to me as my journey through life. It's as serious as it is comic at times, but always enriching, always nourishing, and completely worth enduring the wide-eyed looks of bemusement I get when I tell people what I'm doing.