The Bard’s Book Club Revisited

It’s been nearly four months since we finished our travels with Shakespeare, and our lives have pretty much returned to normal, or as normal as we get: going to and acting in plays, reading Shakespeare biographies and Dickens novels, attending and photographing sharknado-marred weddings, etc.

But I am pleased to announce a brief return of the Bard’s Book Club! Beginning in mid-October, we will be reconvening with a new member, who sadly couldn’t join us the first time around, to read and discuss Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This will be quite the departure from Shakespeare, in length and format as well as in content and mood. About 330 years separate Shakespeare’s last play from Waugh’s masterpiece. Their worlds were vastly different: while Waugh grew up in the shadow of the Great War and spent his young adulthood at lavish parties before converting to Catholicism and entering World War II, Shakespeare lived in a society in which these elements existed in less-shocking degrees. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wars were commonplace but not devastating or decimating, people had a merry time but also too many daily concerns to organize life around orgies, and religious conversion represented a threat to the social order rather than a personal eccentricity.

Although we don’t intend to compare the two writers in this next study, I point out these general differences to emphasize the newness of our book club’s next endeavor. We are excited to dive into something else and use the reading and discerning skills we’ve strengthened throughout the first phase of the Bard’s Book Club. The key thing is to keep reading, and we have no intention of stopping!

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