Happy New Year to all of our Center readers and supporters. Elizabeth and I are excited for all of our sundry Center programs in 2026 and we will be communicating these to you by and by.
As a bit of a diversion, though one connected to the themes and aspirations of our Center, I thought I would tell our readers about a little project of my own that I hope to share with you regularly: to read through the work of William Shakespeare this year. My old friend, Matthew Franck, has put together this very handy “Shakespeare in a Year” schedule for 2026, and I have not (yet) strayed from his rigorously laid path. Matt recommends the Oxford edition, but I was given a gift of the complete works published by the Easton Press, so this is what I am using. Of course, I am not a Shakespeare scholar, so nothing I am going to say will not have been said before, and better, by others with real knowledge. I intend this as a kind of log of thoughts about these works, read in dedicated succession, and with the hope of getting in front of my eyes and others’ some of this wonderful literature.
Over the last few days, I’ve been enjoying the first couple of acts of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” as well as the opening lines of “Venus and Adonis” and the first two Sonnets.
A recurring theme in this early work is the intensity, but also the evanescence, of love and beauty. Protheus’s love for Julia (and then Silvia…he is rather inconstant) in “Gentlemen,” Venus’s unquenchable and utterly unrequited love for Adonis (the guy would much rather be hunting boars than suffering Venus’s tender ministrations), and the importance of having children to answer the blow of lost beauty as one ages. Here is Sonnet #2:
When fortie Winters shall besiege brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauties field,
Thy youths proud liverie so gaz’d on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed of smal worth held:
Then being ask’d, where all thy beautie lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lustie daies;
To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftlesse praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauties use,
If thou couldst answere: This faire child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse:
Prooving his beautie by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art ould,
And see thy blood warme when thou feel’st it could,
The sequence continues in Sonnet 3, which is the reason that Sonnet 2 ends in a comma. But the entire sequence, as well as the opening of “Venus and Adonis,” are about the urgency of youth for seizing on love and beauty while they last, to make the most of them before the onset of age, decay, and death.
