Day One

I've long wanted to read more Shakespeare than I have.  The task always seemed daunting and I often wondered where to begin: Hamlet?  King Lear?  Comedies?  Histories?  I'd read Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar in high school, enjoyed movie adaptations throughout my life, particularly Baz Luhrmann's and Kurosawa's, but how do you get through it all?  Eventually, I decided to take the challenge of consuming Shakespeare the way I consume music: that is, chronologically.  If I like an album from an artist I've never heard...I go back to the beginning.  The same goes for a new genre.  Reggae?  Let's go back to the 50s and start listening from there.  So, why wouldn't I take the same care with Shakespeare, the most influential dead white man of the last 400 years?

The exact chronology of Shakespeare's work is impossible to determine as his works were not officially published until his buddies decided to get together and publish his work in the first folio seven years after his death.  Records of performances indicate little else than the fact of the performance and are hardly reliable.  Better scholars than myself have created various chronologies, none of which is any more correct than any other, so I'm gonna go with Wikipedia's list which is good enough; plus they have a ton of citations and notes and research already done, so I just have to sit back and read.

First on the dock: Henry VI, Part I.  Here we go.