I signed up for the Shakespeare 2020 Project to read all of the plays in one year.  They provide a schedule, weekly videos and scholarly articles about the plays, and a discussion forum to connect with other people reading the plays on the same schedule. 

I just finished the first play, "Twelfth Night," ahead of schedule. On the surface, this is a simple comedy employing all kinds of typical antics around twins, mistaken identity, cross-dressing, and the ensuing romantic missteps, and it was a quick & easy one to read. But the videos and resources posted for each play are deepening my understanding of the layers and nuances, and I think the play is darker and more transgressive than it first appears. 

This play is the source of the well-known quote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."  Among others.  

I just learned that there was a 1996 Twelfth Night film starring Helena Bonham Carter, so I'm going to look for that later today.
On to Henry VI. 

 I'm also starting Romeo & Juliet with my 9th graders on Monday, so this independent reading project is providing additional context for teaching Shakespeare, in general.  To that end, I also started re-reading Stephen Greenblat's 2004 cultural biography, "Will in the World."  The introductory pages would be great to read aloud to students to set up study of the plays. 

I'm not entirely in teacher mode on this project, though.  Most of the plays I will be reading for the first time and it is difficult to get a full understanding from just one reading.  But I want to have a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's body of work and a greater facility with his language, for my own literary and writing purposes. This is one of my self-improvement goals for 2020.