Binge Reading Shakespeare
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
We binge watch. Why not binge read?
When you change the context of writing, you change its meaning. To binge watch a TV series is to experience the episodes together, as if they were a single work, to enjoy them in a new way. In the old days, the only choice for watching series was broadcast television. Typically, 22 episodes constituted a season, and the episodes were broadcast one per week, with the time slots for the rest of the year were filled with reruns. It was a stop-start experience, often with cliff-hanger stories to lure viewers to back.
The advent of video recorders changed that experience. You could save episodes and watch them at will. You could rent or buy. You were no longer constrained by the schedule of the network or local station. You could fast-forward past commercials. You could pause. You could rewind and rewatch. You were in control.
Then came cable with video on demand and DVRs, giving you even more convenient control. Programming to record was far easier.
Now with streaming, you don’t have to plan ahead. You can watch one episode after another, from the first episode of the series through the last one, without commercials. Watching in that mode, you can get deeply involved in the story. You can identify with the characters and see the actors growing up and aging — like time-lapse photography, where what normally takes days or months or years unfolds for you fast enough for you to enjoy the spectacle of change. Or you can choose to watch in stop-start mode to suit your personal schedule and lifestyle.
My favorite instance of binge watching is Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin, which originally aired on Showtime from 2012 to 2014, twenty-five episodes spread across three seasons. Viewed in its entirety, it has a beginning, middle, and end. While each episode is satisfying in and of itself, the series as a whole is a single work of art, deliberately written to be experienced that way.
Getting warmed up to write an historical novel set in the time of Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Twin Sister), I decided to binge read his complete works, one play every day or two. That’s 38 plays, written over the course of about 19 years. It was a delightful experience.
I read those plays aloud to get a feel for the rhythm. As I became familiar with the vocabulary and the syntax, I didn’t have to go running to the footnotes all the time. His language began to feel natural rather than alien, as I became familiar with stock phrases and images and allusions, as well as the range of reactions of characters experiencing love, jealousy, hate, vengeance, temptation, ambition.
The histories, in particular, make much more sense read together. The complexities of genealogy and royal succession fell into the background as I became familiar with them, freeing me to focus on the characters and the spectacle and the pageant.
Now I’m tempted to binge-read the complete works of other authors, sets of books that gain from being read one after the other: Balzac and Zola, who deliberately set out to tell multi-volume stories; then Faulkner, Michener, and Somerset Maugham.
This binge-reading experience prompts me to think differently about what I write and why I write. I write what I need to write rather than responding to editors or markets. Because my novel are so personal, over time, they will probably fit together and form a single coherent story. And, for me, the main purpose of writing is to discover that story and tell it.
