I have three goals for this year: Go back to Paris; support the Iranian protestors, the people of Ukraine, and the women in Afghanistan; and read all of Shakespeare. To that end, I found a reading schedule that I like. The readings aren’t chronological in terms of the order in which the plays were written (not a lot of agreement about this) or published/performed (ditto). Instead, the schedule is a mixture of chronology and time of year in which the plays take place.

These are, after all, plays, so I’m also going to watch them on the Globe Player. The Globe Theater has a library of many of the productions and they are stellar.

For example—and first up—is Twelfth Night—about which I knew nothing, but is all about gender and gender bending and is one of those crazy Shakespeare plays about people pretending to be other genders and other people. I watched this amazing version with men playing women (who are pretending to be men in the play).

Twelfth Night was first performed in 1601 or 1602 on twelfth night, the Christmas holiday.

Here’s a funny scene where Malvolio (played by Steven Fry) is revealing himself as a suitor to Olivia (played by Mark Rylance). Malvolio is a hypocritical Puritan who is humiliated in the end. You’ll notice the pun on the word “coming” in the second sentence of this play; the whole play is hilarious and low-rent in its humor. There is a character named Toby Belch, for example.

One reason I wanted to read/watch/listen to all of Shakespeare is because I don’t know in which play his most famous lines appear. Twelfth Night opens with one: If music be the food of love, play on. And there are others: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em and Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.