The New Lifetime Reading Plan

He is not a great original thinker. Few poets are—that is not their business. Those who seek ideas that have changed the world should not go to Shakespeare; they will be disappointed.

Finally, we ali (including this writer) feel we "know" Shakespeare, when what we probably know is merely what we are supposed to think about him. Hard though it is, we must try to clear our minds of the formulas inherited from the aver- age high school or college English class. Approaching the plays as "classics" is less fruitful than approaching them with the fresh expectancy with which we attend the opening per­formance of a new play.

This brief note therefore does not at ali suggest what to look for. Even if you are not looking for anything in Shakespeare you will find something.

Read, do not study him. And of course reread him, for the simple approach I have advised will disclose only a part of a complex artist. Many men have spent almost their entire lives on Shakespeare and felt no regret.

To read ali of Shakespeare is well worth, let us say, a half- year out of the ordinary three score and ten. Yet few of us pos- sess the necessary curiosity. Judgments vary, but of the thirty- seven plays the following dozen may be recommended as minimum reading, to be done not as a block but in the course of your lifetime: The Merchant ofVenice, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV (Parts I and 2), Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Tempest.

Shakespeare also wrote a sonnet sequence, some of the poems being clearly addressed to a young man, others to an unidentified "Dark Lady." Though the whole forms a kind of loose progres- sion, the sonnets may be read singly with perfect satisfaction. Some of the more famous: numbers 18, 29, 30, 33, 55, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 73, 94, 98,106, 107, 116,129, 130, 144, and 146.

C.F.

40

JOHN DONNE

1573-1631 Selected Works

Had the Lifetime Reading Plan been compiled in 1900, Donne and Blake [63] might have been omitted. The shift in emphasis

is more than a matter of fashion, though both men do happen to be fashionable in literary circles. It is a matter of taste; but taste, when it mirrors a real change in our view of ourselves, can be a profound thing.

Neglected for some generations after his death, Donne impresses us today because he speaks to our condition, as Milton [45] does not. In another fifty years or so this may no longer be true. At the moment, however, Donne seems to us a great writer, not merely because he has so powerfully influ- enced modern poetry, but because his voice is that of a mod­ern man. It is no accident that in 1940 Hemingway [119] should have drawn the title of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls from one of Donne's Devotions, published in 1624.

Born of a Roman Catholic family, Donne was on his mothers side related to the martyr Sir Thomas More. Some years at Oxford and Cambridge were followed by the study of law, by a period of worldly and amorous adventure in London, by foreign service, and by a marriage—injudicious from the practical viewpoint—with the highborn niece of his employer, Sir Thomas Egerton. Donne's career prospects darkened and for a decade the young couple endured discouragement and poverty. At forty-two, after much serious reflection, Donne forsook the family faith and took orders in the Anglican church. He rose until he became Dean of St. PauPs in London, and the most famous preacher of his time. The daring young spark of the earlier love poems was now a God-tormented man, assailed by visions of death and the indignities of illness. He rejected "the mistress of my youth, Poetry" in favor of "the wife of mine age, Divinity." His obsession with mortality grew with the years. Today you may visit the crypt in St. PauPs and see Donne's statue, sculpted during his lifetime, wrapped in a winding sheet. As his last hour neared he contemplated from his bedside a painting of himself in a shroud, his eyes closed as if death had already touched him.

Donne's Devotions and Sermons are quite unlike conven- tional religious literature. They are works of art, combining an

almost frightening spiritual intensity with cunning elaboration of rhythm and metaphor. The Devotions are addressed to him­self. The sermons were delivered before large audiences, often before the king. No Sunday pieties, they were designed delib- erately to work upon the emotions. They can still do so, with their art if not their doctrine.