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A review by isabellarobinson7
Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me? by William Shakespeare
Rating: ?? stars
It’s only 100ish pages, won’t take me long, right? WRONG. I underestimated the amount of brain power it would take to read in Shakespeare's poetic meter. A problem I always have when reading Shakespeare is that my brain doesn’t read rhythmically, it just reads monotone. I had to go look up examples of iambic pentameter again (flash back to studying Macbeth) because just saying "da DUM" over an over again in my head wasn’t getting me very far.
So to sum it all up, yeah, it's good poetry… but man, so much of this could be solved so simply. I know these are the soliloquies which are arguably the most dramatic part, (you can just imagine a white middle aged man in a wig spitting all over the front row while saying these) but still. I think the truth it all comes down to for me is that the summaries of Shakespeare's stuff always is more interesting than the actual reading of it. There's so much fluff, so much extra drama (for lack of a better word) in his work, but when you strip that all away, you do actually get a good story. This little collection was made up of all those off-cuts.
It’s only 100ish pages, won’t take me long, right? WRONG. I underestimated the amount of brain power it would take to read in Shakespeare's poetic meter. A problem I always have when reading Shakespeare is that my brain doesn’t read rhythmically, it just reads monotone. I had to go look up examples of iambic pentameter again (flash back to studying Macbeth) because just saying "da DUM" over an over again in my head wasn’t getting me very far.
So to sum it all up, yeah, it's good poetry… but man, so much of this could be solved so simply. I know these are the soliloquies which are arguably the most dramatic part, (you can just imagine a white middle aged man in a wig spitting all over the front row while saying these) but still. I think the truth it all comes down to for me is that the summaries of Shakespeare's stuff always is more interesting than the actual reading of it. There's so much fluff, so much extra drama (for lack of a better word) in his work, but when you strip that all away, you do actually get a good story. This little collection was made up of all those off-cuts.