Look at me, I'm sooooo cultured, just sitting here on a Sunday reading a Shakespeare play like it's no big deal. Ha! I have meant to re-read some Shakespeare plays for years and years, and now I finally have a good reason to: we are going to England in August and we will be seeing a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theater. THIS Shakespeare play, to be exact. We bought tickets for The Comedy of Errors one of the last nights we will be in London. I have to say that I have spent my whole life imagining London, and hearing about the Globe Theater, so this is the culmination of a whole life of being a book-lover and an English major, and I am so excited. I also was pleasantly surprised that this was a reasonably easy play to read and to follow. I think I had my idea of Shakespeare plays coming from my high school experiences, struggling to read these really complex plays that were too high of a level for me to read, and where I needed to use the explanatory notes for every single line to understand what was being said. But now, as a far more mature reader (ahem), I was able to basically sail through without much problem understanding what the players were saying. I think this will be a funny play to watch, with plenty of hilarious scenes and hopefully it will be easy to understand (although I'm sure there will be plenty of errors as a viewer, as the title suggests). I think a little bit of background helps to ground this play in the necessary suspension of disbelief, to know that it comes from a Greek form and from the Greek playwright Plautus, which helps to explain why neither twin starts to suspect what's going on or why nobody notices any differences in clothing or accent or anything. I actually really enjoyed reading this, and can't wait to see it. (I had a goal to read five Shakespeare plays this year, and this was the first one. I'm going to try and read a few more before we go to England as well.)
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