As some of you already know, one of my goals for the year was to carefully read all of Shakespeare, mostly on the subway. Today I finished reading Henry VIII, and with that, I've now read all of the plays. (Well, fine, there's still The Two Noble Kinsman, but it isn't included in my 40-volume Yale Shakespeare set.) It took me about six months, since I started in mid-April, and the Sonnets and other poems should take me through the end of November. I'll probably blog more about this over the next few days, but the bottom line is that I should have done this years ago. In particular, if I'd read Shakespeare seriously during my freshman year at college, I might have majored in English and ended up in graduate school.

First, though, a minor complaint. The book that I'd really hoped would be my guide to Shakespeare, Marjorie Garber's acclaimed Shakespeare After All, ended up being a disappointment, a flat, boring book that reads like a sold B+ term paper stretched out over a thousand pages. The problem, I think, is that it tries to be objective about an author who defies objectivity, and who demands a personal, idiosyncratic response from his critics. Shakespearean criticism, like all good criticism, really needs to be written in the first person, and there isn't a moment in this huge book when Garber speaks as herself. The result reads like an epic set of Cliffs Notes:

Significantly, in this deposition scene, Richard deposes himself.

King Lear focuses at once on partiarchy and paternity, on the interaction between the role of the king and the role of the father.

In the fifth act of Macbeth, the language of disease is everywhere.

None of this is at all wrong, of course, but it's a series of observations without opinions or insights. Compare the previous three sentences, chosen basically at random, with an equally random plucking from Harold Bloom:

If your Cleopatra is an aging whore, and her Antony a would-be Alexander in his dotage, then we know a touch more about you and rather less about them than we should.

All else aside, which of these two critics would you rather read? You could argue, of course, that the focus of these books should be Shakespeare, not Garber or Bloom. But if there's anything I've learned over the past six months, it's that everyone has his or her own Shakespeare, and part of the interest of good Shakespearean criticism is following the personal engagement of a strong critical mind with a mind that is even stronger and less knowable. Without that engagement, you might as well just stick to the plays, which don't benefit from a cautious critical approach. It's a shame, because elsewhere, Garber can be smart and provocative and sort of crazy. Unfortunately, in trying to write the "indispensible" book about Shakespeare, she ends up being completely dispensible—everything and nothing. It's like reading a Shakespearean essay by Harriet Miers.