Status Updates From The Complete Works of Willi...

The Tempest

Just lovely, of course. As though Shakespeare read Marlowe and said 'nope.' Caliban is a dangerous remainder who does not partake in the resolution; and of course enslaving Ariel is awful. This text in some ways looks at the thought experiment of CoE re: Occam's razor and Quine-Duhem from the other direction. Also: theater as governance.

Sonnets 23-30

A Comedy of Errors
Started: 23/03/2026

Cymbeline

Villainy is defeated so as to bring Britain back within Rome's ambit--it is definitely an odd result. The misogynist gossip about Innogen--that 'her beauty and her brain go not together'--is recognized as true about a different character later--but less about intelligence and more about the familiar shakespearean problem of inferring a person's interior intention from their exterior signs.

Sonnets, 7-22

The first comedy - finally!

Sonnets 1-6, 18

The Tragedy of King Lear

This is the folio version, which is more theatrical and economical. than the earlier 'history.' It has things that the quarto version lacks, and cuts a bit that the earlier presents. The scene progression is substantially identical, so it's not a large difference of plot--more that the local rhetorical changes shade significances differently. It's cool enough to warrant the time.

The Winter's Tale

Sovereignty internalizes Iago, and when jealousy--a property of the oikos--becomes a focus of the polis, we should expect disaster. The well known historical and geographical problems of this text are features of genre; complaining about them is to miss the point somewhat. My reading of the end is that it's deceptive theatricality rather than a supernaturalism.

Coriolanus

Almost single-minded, this one distinguishes itself by excluding almost all secondary matter, underplots, and suchlike, focusing instead on the principle class conflict in Rome. Though it is working itself out in the political process, the protagonist can't adapt to the theatricality of civic governance and must revert to soldierly virtues. Politics as extension of war by other means, maybe?

The plot of Twelfth Night again leads me to wonder how easy it might have been to bamboozle an Elizabethan Englishman with a clever disguise. But rather than call it "unrealistic," I'll just say it's amazing what people will believe in spite of what's right in front of them.