Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I'm not sure anything makes me insecure about my intelligence as much as Shakespeare. And yet, like an absolute sucker, I keep coming back to it like it's some kind of difficult video game level to get past.

I saw Joel Coen's wonderful film adaptation of this recently and felt inspired to try again, thinking that maybe having the plot fresh in my mind would help. This was not a correct assumption, because the plot isn't really the issue here. Every single Shakespeare plot has been gone over a million times in a million different story formats at this point, so it's not a matter of understanding the gist of the story.

No, the issue is just comprehending a few fucking lines in a row.

The Arden versions of Shakespeare are both a blessing and a curse; they contain so many footnotes that it's hard to resist the temptation to look down after every other word and get additional context about the words themselves, their historical meanings, the different interpretations of the affects of certain punctuation, the way stage directions were decided in various productions, it's all a bit too much, and not really the best way to go about reading something. And yet they are right there on the page, so it's hard to ignore completely.

And really, it's not even possible to understand certain sentences or phrases without historical knowledge or additional information. The words used either don't exist anymore or have completely changed meaning over time.

So I dunno. I really wish I could straight up enjoy reading Shakespeare, but maybe it's not for me and my dumb brain. That being said, I'm sure I'll see another good adaptation in a year or two and try it again. Sigh.