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Feb. 10th, 2009 12:39 pmOkay. In my Shakespeare class (I am taking a Shakespeare class, which I have only wanted to do for like ten years! but I digress), we are reading As You Like It. For some reason, the campus bookstore ran out of copies, so I have had a bit of an epic battle in the past couple of days trying to locate a copy. Borders had, I swear, EVERY SINGLE ONE of his plays EXCEPT AYLI. And an entire SHELF of Hamlet. WHATEVER, BORDERS.
So yesterday I went to the campus library, which I do not do much because it is gigantic and does not use the Dewey Decimal system (and, okay, the giant posters on the wall explaining how things are categorized aren't that hard to read, but it is still off-putting), and found the world's most antiquated edition of As You Like It. It's a 1963 reprinting of an edition first published in 1890. The "footnotes" frequently take up entire PAGES of the text, and always fill at least half a page, which is distracting and makes it hard to read the play itself.
And I NEED to concentrate on the play itself, because it is published with Elizabethan spelling intact. It's perfectly readable, but disorienting, and if you tell me that it would not take you a good thirty seconds to figure out the word "deuife" even with Obvious Context, you are a LIAR.
. . . so I think I'm gonna order a copy off Amazon, which I was avoiding because I didn't want to lose too much time waiting for it. We have vacation next week, so it'll still get here in time to get plenty of use out of it. I'll just make do with with this crazy edition until then. It's neat and all and I'd hang on to it if I was just reading for fun, but since it's for school, I'd like an edition that as immediately accessible as possible.
So yesterday I went to the campus library, which I do not do much because it is gigantic and does not use the Dewey Decimal system (and, okay, the giant posters on the wall explaining how things are categorized aren't that hard to read, but it is still off-putting), and found the world's most antiquated edition of As You Like It. It's a 1963 reprinting of an edition first published in 1890. The "footnotes" frequently take up entire PAGES of the text, and always fill at least half a page, which is distracting and makes it hard to read the play itself.
And I NEED to concentrate on the play itself, because it is published with Elizabethan spelling intact. It's perfectly readable, but disorienting, and if you tell me that it would not take you a good thirty seconds to figure out the word "deuife" even with Obvious Context, you are a LIAR.
. . . so I think I'm gonna order a copy off Amazon, which I was avoiding because I didn't want to lose too much time waiting for it. We have vacation next week, so it'll still get here in time to get plenty of use out of it. I'll just make do with with this crazy edition until then. It's neat and all and I'd hang on to it if I was just reading for fun, but since it's for school, I'd like an edition that as immediately accessible as possible.