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As a fourteen-year-old high school freshman, I hated Shakespeare. And just my luck, my ninth grade year ended up being the year of Shakespeare in too many ways. We read Othello in drama class, Romeo and Juliet in English, and the drama department took a trip to a Shakespearean theatre about an hour and a half away from our school, where we (the younger students) watched students from other schools as well as some of the older ones from our school perform snippets of various Shakespearean plays. I hated it. In fact, the only thing I liked was getting out of normal classes for the day. 

Tenth grade saw yet more Shakespeare on the schedule. My English class would be reading Much Ado About Nothing. Wonderful. Not that I was always expecting to love the required reading books for school - don't get me wrong, I love reading - but I was over the archaic, unrelatable, boring stories with dull characters.

And then we read it.

And much like Much Ado's heroine, Beatrice, herself, I found that I had fallen in love with this guy I thought I hated. Maybe Shakespeare wasn't so bad, after all? This story was funny - really, genuinely funny - and I cared about the characters, about precious, innocent Hero who deserves so much and gets treated so awfully, about Beatrice and Benedick, the funny, intelligent, independent spirits who cannot admit that they are in love with each other even though everyone else can see it, about Don Pedro, who may or may not have had his heart broken by Beatrice. Its modernity shocked me. 

I accepted it as an anomaly and didn't think much more about Shakespeare until about February of this year (2016). Now in my second year of college, something triggered the memory of Much Ado, so I went back and read it here and there - not the whole thing, but my favorite parts - and then on May 2, 2016, I decided that I was going to expand my Shakespearean repertoire by filling my summer reading Shakespeare's plays. This summer I'm doing some of his comedies - I didn't have the best luck with enjoying the tragedies (although I will be going back and will eventually read all of them) - and I've given myself the goal of reading and really understanding 10 of them between May 11 (my first full day out of school) and August 24 (the last day of summer break). 

Based on little descriptions I've read of them, I've picked the 10 comedies that sounded the most interesting to me. Here they are in alphabetical order:

• All's Well That Ends Well
• As You Like It
• The Comedy of Errors
• Love's Labours Lost
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• The Tempest
• Twelfth Night

I am reading Much Ado again, and it's the first one I'm going to be doing. Since I already know it pretty well, I can use it to figure out the format I want to study them all.

I'm excited to get started, and I hope you'll join me on my journey to discover Shakespeare!

-Tess