Welcome to my play-reading project. My goal is to read, and write about, a Restoration or Renaissance play every day of 2020.
I have an absurd number of physical copies of plays that I’ve collected (obsessively) over the past couple years, and I haven’t been able to make myself sit down and actually read my way through them.
So this project is as much about habits and discipline as it is about plays. I want to redevelop the habit of reading physical books, and I think the only way to do that is to just do it. So, I’m going to read a play a day. That’s 366 plays (it’s a leap year), which seems like a lot. Maybe too much, in fact.
Still, when I originally started planning for this, I was hoping to read just an act a day, five days a week. That way, I thought, I could spend more time thinking and writing about each play. At five acts a day, I’d have five posts per play. That’s pretty meaty, and I thought it might be enough raw writing to turn into short book chapters. (Writing and publishing books is another goal of mine.)
When I tried this for a few days to see how it would go, though, I realized that I just don’t know enough about plays yet to write about them intelligently for five days straight. All my posts turned into something between a book-report style summary and an academic research paper. And there’s nothing I want to write less than an academic paper. And, honestly, who would want to read it? I can write long, but long and interesting? That's harder.
Besides, if you’re only going to read and write about 50 or so plays (there are 53 weeks in 2020) for a whole year, which 50 should it be? I’ve read enough to know that they’re not all winners! If you don’t want to waste your time, you need to do a hell of a lot of research. Sure, you could pick the obvious choices, but...why bother?
I do think the act-a-day thing will be a good project for me, someday. I like the idea of writing a guide to reading 50 great plays in one year. But I want to spend 2020 building up the breadth of my knowledge, first.
So, what are my goals?
Reading Paper Books. I’ve gradually lost the ability to focus on physical books. Over the past decade I’ve moved from an ereader to reading on my phone, and from there, I’ve gone to just *listening* to books. And that seems...bad...to me.
Books now feel clunky and weird to me. Their font sizes aren’t adjustable, and they don’t have their own back lights, and you can’t rotate them for easy reading in bed, and all of that that makes them awkward. And that makes me sad, but not because I think reading or listening on a phone is bad. On the contrary, I think it’s amazing and wonderful to carry an entire library in my pocket. But I don’t think it’s the same in terms of the experience, or of how much I learn and retain. Books feel more like studying, learning, and absorbing, to me. Screens feel more like skimming, enjoying, and forgetting.
I need to get back to learning.
Justifying My Obsession. This project will force me to actually read all those damned plays I’ve been buying for the past few years. I own have an embarrassing number of books from and about the Restoration--including histories, biographies, diaries, poetry, but the biggest part of them is an entire floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with plays and books about Restoration theater and drama (with a decent number of Jacobean titles, too). I’m working on a list of all the titles I have on hand for reading so far, and, while it’s not at 366 yet, it’s well over 250.
They’ve started weighing on my mind, and it’s making me feel increasingly guilty that I haven’t really read many of them. I’ve somehow managed to watch a shocking amount of television over the past year though. Could there be a connection? I wonder.
Being accountable. As I said earlier, this is about building habits. I’m going to blog about this, because it’s excellent for accountability, and I feel like, at the very least, it might be interesting or useful to someone, somewhere, even if it’s only to just show people all this amazing writing that I think most of them don’t know about, outside of maybe a very few plays.
Reading for writing. I’d like to write some stories and maybe also even--dare I say it--plays informed by this project. I have to hope that somehow all this focused reading might somehow sink in and also help me become a better writer. Yes, writers write, but I’m pretty sure they also read.
Informing other projects. This undertaking should also a huge help for my other projects, of which I have many. I have a long-running intermittent RPG campaign set in a Restoration-era analog world. There’s nothing that really gets me more into the mood for game, really, than reading these plays. Beyond the gaming setting I’m working on, I’d also love to make an actual game based on Restoration comedies, the way the excellent Good Society models Jane Austen’s books. I can’t think of a game people are less likely to play, to be honest, but designing it and dissecting the plays might be a fun, and maybe useful, way to think about these plays.
Learning something. I’m basically reading and writing about a stupid number of plays, and maybe by the end I’ll have a better understanding and appreciation for the period and its drama. I’ll even be squeezing in some books about the theater of the time, and playwriting in general. Will I be an expert on anything at the end of this? Hell no.
I will probably have read more plays from this time than maybe anyone alive who doesn’t do it professionally, though. Will that mean or be worth anything? We’ll see!
Entertaining the hypothetical reader? In addition to what I want to get out of this, I hope there might even be a few people who enjoy reading about me doing it, but I’m not counting on it.
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