Mariam-In which we decide to watch all of Shakespeare's plays on film

Every year, the night summer turns to fall, I feel the nostalgia of school days, walking to school crunching leaves in a freshly ironed uniform carrying new crayons and crisp notebooks in my backpack. The irony of this nostalgia is that I am actually in school this year. But the truth is, underneath a thick layer of science armor, I have a humanities core and I had a yearning for pens, lined paper, and literature.

In an entirely unrelated event, I happened to watch a performance of The Tempest at the Shakespeare Festival in Frederick this year and as I was telling Missy all about it, she had the greatest idea. Let's watch all the plays on film, together!

For treating back-to-school nostalgia, it was perfect.

We are a good pair. Missy is actually an informal Shakespeare scholar and I am easily excitable and know how to read.

We went back and forth on the order in which to read them then decided against chronological order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Shakespeare%27s_plays) because that either starts with Titus (gory according to Missy) or the Henrys (intimidating, suspiciously boring sounding according to me).

We have decided to go roughly with this guy's suggestions: https://benjaminmcevoy.com/read-complete-works-shakespeare-year-recommended-reading-order/ but will try to keep the Elizabethan and Jacobean ones sort of together. 

There's my first Shakespeare lesson by Missy. Shakespeare worked for and during two monarchs' time. The first was Elizabeth who lived almost forever (not to be confused with the recent Elizabeth that also lived almost forever) and liked comedies and romances. The second was James, her heir and nephew who was paranoid and morose and an altogether gloomy sounding man. He's the one Shakespeare wrote all the tragedies for. HIS era is called Jacobean. Why, those of you like me who have no European culture, may ask? Because Jacobus is Latin for James. They might footnote things like that when they're teaching us in school. I'd always wondered who the Jacob dude was and I had vaguely concluded that a Jacob was some type of a Christian. 

Today, Missy and I went to Wonder Book and searched for Arden versions of Shakespeare, the Riverside collection, and the Asimov commentary. I came away with the Asimov, a Shakespeare biography and as many Folger's as I could find. Missy placed some orders. 

(I am losing my millennial zeal with age. There are not many pictures of this occasion but it was a wonderful afternoon. We had falafel and shawarma.)

We shall begin with Mel Gibson's Hamlet. 

By the way, it turns out that Bollywood is a little obsessed with Shakespeare. The Bollywood adaptation of Hamlet is called Haider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haider_(film). 

And we're off to Denmark where it seems something is rotten.