I am trying to get into reading and I started with Brave New World, I have been reading the book for a year and have about 60 pages remaining. Before anyone mentions I am aware it is a small book that can be finished in a week, I am not used to reading. I normally read short stories, comics, and manga. I finshed the machine stops quickly, but I couldn’t get into Brave New World, it has a lot of boring parts.
After finishing Brave New World should I read the Tempest, the main character made me interested in the story. I only read one other shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet the sparksnote version, it was great.
Countless plays have been meant to be read, though, perhaps even Shakespeare’s. Yours is a purist stance that tells people to avoid reading possibly excellent texts for the sake of looking for some ideal staging. And besides, do you really have great performances of Shakespeare in your city regularly available?
The comparison with Beatles is off the mark. The Beatles were musicians who deliberately created one specific version of their songs that will stay practically the same forever. Shakespeare was a dramatic writer, he set his art down in writing; the staging is outside of his control, and recounting the history of theater from Shakespeare up to today would show that what we see on stage now has surprisingly little to do with “how it was originally meant to be consumed”. Not that it’s inferior or false, but it’s different.