Saturday, January 21
6:00 am
It is -13 °C, with a high forecast of +4 °C.
From the Environment Canada website:
Today Cloudy with 40 percent chance of flurries early this morning then a mix of sun and cloud. Risk of freezing rain early this morning. Wind becoming west 40 km/h gusting to 60 late this morning. High plus 4.
Tonight Cloudy. 40 percent chance of flurries late this evening and overnight. Wind west 40 km/h gusting to 60. Low minus 3.
Normals: Max. -1 °C Min. -14 °C.
This is the important data. The long term normal Max has moved up a degree, for the first time in a few months. There is now reason for a little optimism that Spring is on the horizon.
4:00 PM Literature
I began the day by deciding whether to read Garber's chapter on "The Two Gentlemen From Verona" from her huge book "Shakespeare After All" or to read the play first and follow that with Garber's commentary.
I opted to read Garber's chapter first. This is the opposite of what I would do if I were about to read a novel. I think it was a good decision.
With Garber's comments in mind I was able to focus on the actual writing of the play since I already had a good sense of the overall plot. The wit and word play was a delight. I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading the play.
I like Garber's idea of ordering her chapters for each play by the order in which the plays were written rather than the more common approach of grouping all of the plays by genre (tragedy, comedy, romance, etc.). Thus I now have an immediate appreciation of just how skillful Shakespeare was as a wordsmith right from the beginning. The structure of the play itself was a little weaker with all the loose ends tidied up in a rush at the end. Basically the play was a clever mixing of two rather inept gentlemen and their early attempts at love. The women are much more sensible. It is a light play and lots of fun. I can imagine all of the people at the Globe theatre having a very enjoyable afternoon with lots of laughter and guffaws at both the dialogue and the efforts of the actors.
As an aside, with each book being close to a thousand pages, it was a much lighter task reading them as ebooks on my iPad2.