Earlier today, I finally made it to one of the Shakespeare Allowed! sessions at the public library. This is a monthly gathering hosted by the Nashville Shakespeare Festival where a dozen people sit around a table and read through one of the plays (there are seats against the wall for those who prefer just to listen, or who arrive after all the reading-aloud seats are taken), which today was Richard II. [spoilers in the rest of this post]

It's luck of the draw which lines one gets to read - each person reads the speech of the character that happens to be next - a format I like very much, since it means each part gets a variety of interpretations/inflections, and no one ends up with too many lines or too few, regardless of ability or ambition. my shortest line was the a Keeper's "Help, help, help!," and while none of the major monologues fell to me, I found it especially rewarding to give voice to Mowbray's "No, Bolingbroke, if ever I were traitor..." (1.3), Richard's "Come, come, in sorrow let's be brief (5.1), and the Duchess of York's "Pleads he in earnest?" (5.3). (I also ended up with Northumberland's "Believe me, noble lord" (2.3), which I found harder than the others to read cold, but it was very cute when the woman with Richard's response summarized it as "Aw, shucks!" before launching into the actual text.

The only sour note for me was the choice of one of the guys to read the female parts in falsetto. It got him a laugh every time, but I felt it undermined those lines and distracted folks from paying attention to the actual text.

I hadn't read RII all the way through before, and as is the case with Shakespeare, there was the "oh!" of coming across now-cliches in their original context (or at least an early one), as well as allusions I hadn't recognized as such. At the same time, it is a tragedy-history, and it's a good thing Shakespeare wrote that tender farewell scene between Richard and his Queen, because there were plenty of other spots where I felt like shaking them until their teeth rattled. Then again, the only character I found myself liking unreservedly in the whole thing was the Gardener.

It was interesting to note where people laughed because of the dialogue. Shakespeare sneaks in quite a bit of humor and snark within all the scheming, and then there's outright farce in 4.1, where a gaggle of lords call each other out on their lies, escalating into multiple flinging-downs of gauntlets (one dude even runs out of gloves to throw and has to snatch one from a friend).

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On a side note, how cool is it that the library gets rave reviews on Yelp? I'd meant to see the Wishing Chair production Cinderella this morning, but got caught up in other things (ars longa, verse eleventy-nth), so that'll have to be some other weekend (I did hear someone else at the reading speak highly of it, and come to think of it, I should probably pair it with a lunch date...). Oh, I do so love living here.

In the meantime, it's onwards to the laundry, the dishes, the comma-wrangling, and the ironing of something suitable for church. Tomorrow's guest preacher is the former religion editor of the Tennessean, I'm the lay leader, and there's a strategic planning meeting I'm going to try to sit in on. In other words, a full and fun morning ahead.