Get Better Educated by Reading the Classics

So you finished school, or maybe you didn’t. You passed your classes, but what you want is to be better educated in the way of the classics, but don’t know where to start. Here’s a little how to guide to give yourself more education in a classical direction.

Start with Shakespeare, England's greatest playwright. But don’t read Shakespeare, watch it. I think plays, and especially Shakespeare's plays weren't meant to be read in schools by people who can't pronounce the words, they were meant to be acted in all their glory on the stage. It is only by seeing a Shakespeare play that you can really appreciate his skill as a writer.

I often wonder what Shakespeare himself would think if he could see his plays acted on the big screen and on DVDs.

Hamlet and MacBeth are two of the most famous Shakespeare plays. There’s a really good Hamlet movie with Kenneth Branagh playing Hamlet, watch that. You’ll discover lots of famous quotes in Hamlet, To be, or not to be, being just one.

There are other movies that take the plot of a Shakespeare play, but use different words. Gnomeo and Juliet are obviously Romeo and Juliet. The King of Texas is the story of King Lear. If you want to get a flavor of Shakespeare, these are a good place to start.

Some other popular Shakespeare plays are Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cesar, Richard III and Henry V. Kenneth Branagh does a really good Henry V, and there are multiple good Richard III's on DVD, but I failed to find a Julius Cesar I really liked. Maybe one will come out soon.

After Shakespeare read something by Dickens. Most of us are famous with A Christmas Carol and have maybe seen the movie Oliver or read David Copperfield as a child. Dickens’s books are very wordy, if this bothers you, read them in large print. There are many that have been made into movies. Usually you should read a book and then watch a movie, but with Dickens you may want to watch the movie and then read the book as the people he writes about are so interestingly complex. To read I suggest A Tale of Two Cities, to watch I suggest Bleak House (2005), or if you can find it Little Dorrit, the version that is in two 3-hour movies directed by Christine Edzard.

To parallel Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities you might like to read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, a lesser known Orwell about the same two cities a hundred and fifty years later. This novel is somewhat autobiographical of Orwell himself.

George Orwell is most known for writing Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm.

For an in depth look at life in Russia in the late nineteenth century, you can read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or, if you have a lot of time on your hands, the enormously long War and Peace, which is set earlier in that century during the Napoleonic Wars.

War and Peace is the story of Russia before and during the famous Napoleonic Wars from the point of view of the Russian aristocracy.

No education is complete without something about the holocaust. Great tragedy produces great art and there are writings from that period in abundance, many of which have been made into movies. I suggest Elie Wiesel’s Night, a comparatively short novel in words but long in emotion.

For a Christian book about the hiding of the Jews, read Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place.

And The diary of Anne Frank is the story of a family in hiding in Holland.

Going a long way back in time, the Ancient Greeks had a lot to say. Plato’s Republic is a picture of an ideal society that is still very relevant today. This is where the word Utopia originated.

Also there is Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

For American Literature there’s Jack London, John Steinbeck and Earnest Hemmingway. I suggest White Fang, The Grapes of Wrath and A Farewell to Arms. These three books cover the Gold Rush, The Great Depression and the First World War.

Jack London also wrote The Call of the Wild.

Steinbeck wrote many books about California in the early years of the Twentieth Century, such as, East of Eden, Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men.

Hemmingway is the superior teller of short stories, I suggest The Complete Short Stories of Earnest Hemmingway.

Benjamin Franklin invents the concept of the American Dream in his book The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was himself the epitome of a self-made-man, who, after learning to read and write opened his own printing company and goes on from there.

If you can ever see a live play by Arthur Miller you are in for a treat. He wrote The Crucible, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, amongst others. Some of Arthur Miller’s plays have been made into movies.