If Titus Andronicus is the worst play Shakespeare (co-)wrote, he didn't write a single bad play. I love Titus' arc and Aaron is one of the greatest villains in fiction.
Titus has risen a lot in popularity and appeal these last few decades, I'd personally rank it as a mid tier work, though definitely on the upper end of those.
I love Titus. It's so ridiculous and bloody and fun. Aaron is like a prototype for Iago/Edmund.
Two Gentleman of Verona is awful. The only redeeming characters (Launce and his dog) have barely any stage time, and the ending is atrocious.
Titus Andronicus is to the rest of the canon as a Chicago Hot Dog is to fine French cuisine.
I don’t care if it’s classless. I don’t care if it has nothing to say. I don’t care if it takes less technique. It is still infinitely more satisfying
So many interesting themes about sacrifice and ritualistic killing in that play. Also Aaron seems to have the strongest paternal instinct out of all the parents in the play. Titus kills his son out of anger and Tamora is oblivious enough to let her kids get captured. Meanwhile aaron stores up his villainy as a kind of currency and uses it to purchase his kid’s life.
And the way that the play problematises classical influence is in itself worthy of a dissertation. Is the play a retelling of Tereus and Philomel, or Shakespeare flaunting that he’s just as capable as reading Ovid as a richer scholar? Is it good that Metamorphoses is used as the mechanic for Lavinia to express herself, or is it only further cycles of violence?
this!!!! the tragedy isn’t the love story, the tragedy is the way war and unnecessary conflict affect innocent lives (romeo and juliet) involved. it’s sad because the only way they could peacefully be together is through death, not because they died for each other out of devotion! (although the romantic aspect is pretty legendary and it’s literally scattered throughout all our media to this day)
"Romance" as a genre meant something different in Shakespeare's time. It was closer to what we would call "adventure" - fantastic events often in exotic locales. Romeo and Juliet is definitely not a romance. Genre-wise, it is a tragedy.
I think you're dividing things that don't need to be divided. It's a 'tragedy of love', and I think it is pretty self-evident why the love story between the two lead characters is a central focus throughout. But my larger point is *that love and violence are presented together since the opening of the play,* when Sampson puns about cutting off maiden heads, where an act of love and an act of violence are conflated together in his witticisms.
It's insane he pulled off long term arcs of such richness in a time where such a thing didn't exist. Like that's dedication to long term character building my God.
What do you mean by "pull off"? I'm largely a fan of those plays, but I'm not sure how he could have failed to pull them off, short of just not finishing them?
Basically that. I think of the “marvel cinematic universe” today or the Star Wars movies and all of the moving parts in those, and I’m impressed Shakespeare was able to write and stage so many connected plays.
Jew here. Merchant depicts EXACTLY how antisemitism functions, from the “let’s necessitate this economic niche and then hate the people who occupy it” to the totally unequal application of the laws.
It’s both. It’s certainly less antisemitic than other similar plays at the time. But the happy ending still involves a Jewish woman converting. And Bassanio’s antisemitism never effectively countered or condemned.
And you can’t ignore that because Shylock gets an all time great soliloquy. Shakespeare was good at humanizing villains. He was still a villain
Hard agree. It’s very much a play about different groups (primarily Jews and Christians) being nasty to each other due to social conditioning. I think it retains merit in performance when presented through that lens.
My unpopular opinion: The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic play, and we should treat it like any other art that centres the bigotry of its creators, from Birth of a Nation to Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Don’t ban it or burn it, but if you have a lot of art to spend your time and effort and money on, why not choose something else?
Also, people (not saying you!) who claim Merchant of Venice isn’t antisemitic based on the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech while ignoring the rest of the play are like people who claim Martin Lauther King Jr. opposed affirmative action because of that one line in that one speech while ignoring all o the other things he said and wrote about it.
I think the key line is actually not the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech but “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.” Shylock will be treated like a monster no matter what he does, so he might as well give the people just what they’re asking for.
The Merchant of Venice is one of my favourite plays of his and I think people saying it isn't ultimately anti-semitic are missing the entirely point of the ending.
Yes, Shylock is a great character and the play does show quite fairly how antisemitism has affected him.
Yes, the play does have a balance where the fun at Shylock's expenses is subtly balanced by showing the real suffering behind it (like the bit with the ring).
No, a play that ends celebrating a Jewish character being forced to convert to Christianity "to give him a chance at redemption" while all the Christian characters are whisked away to their own happy ending isn't in favour of the jews. Like I'd argue it does something similiar to what Othello (arguably maybe even The Tempest) does where it's "progressive" because The Other isn't inherently evil because it can be civilised which maybe it was progressive for the time, but it certainly isn't progressive now.
You can easily adapt it to make it not anti semitic by making it the tragedy that it IS, but I don't think that was the author's original intent. Like Shakespeare wanted me to laugh at the crossdressing bickering, not cry at Shylock's being forced to convert. Which, again, it's supposed to be his happy ending by Shakespeare's standards.
I think it’s implausible that Shakespeare, the playwright who was casually antisemitic all over the rest of his plays, living in a country where it had been illegal to be publicly Jewish for a few centuries, wrote a play that everyone saw as having a Jewish villain but was secretly anti-anti-Semitic.
Saying The Merchant of Venice is anti-bigotry because Shakespeare makes him more sympathetic than Marlowe’s play is like saying Richard III is the good guy in his play because he has some charming villain speeches.
I think it’s oversimplified to just go “antisemitic or not,” like there aren’t *degrees* of prejudice. The standard shouldn’t be whether the play (or Shakespeare personally) is 100% free of what would be considered bigotry by 21st-century standards, but whether it was an admirable leap forward in not-racistness compared to the world around him — which it clearly is. Of course Shakespeare would have thought that someone being Jewish was a bigger deal than the average person thinks it is today, but the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech is the most successful anti-prejudicial artistic text ever written and still gets trotted out almost immediately — and effectively — whenever any type of prejudice is being addressed over 400 years later, and that has to count for something.
Compare it to the treatment of women in Shakespeare’s plays: Was Shakespeare super-feminist by modern standards? Of course not, because that would have been impossible. Are his heroines consistently the biggest leaps forward in human history in the artistic depiction of female characters as full human beings who are regularly the equals of, and frequently superior to, the men around them? Yes, duh.
Shouldn’t even be a hot take. You’ll notice the people who say it’s anti-Semitic *always* pull at least one of the following moves:
1. Uncritically equating the Christians’ views with the play’s “views”;
2. Mind-reading Shakespeare himself; or,
3. Arguing that the play must be anti-Semitic because generally people hated Jews in the 17th century.
All terrible arguments in the own right, but additionally bad here because they’re anti-textual.
I don't think this is an unpopular opinion among Shakespeare scholars or enthusiasts, but...
When people notice that I'm reading Shakespeare, they often tell me that this is not right, because "Plays are meant to be watched, not read." I'd go so far as to say this is a popular opinion among the general public when it comes to Shakespeare.
My response to this is that I'm hoping to see multiple productions of these plays, so I want to understand the base material as best I can. I think it gives me a better appreciation of artistic takes or interpretations if I know what they're working off of.
I’ve done my fair share of Shakespeare, and i’d challenge all of you that Shakespeare is best understood when you yourself read it out aloud. Even better when you can get a bunch of friends together and read different characters.
Don’t worry too much about getting it right, speak it trippingly on the tongue, and get through it, meaning will come through
I'm quite sure that nobody goes blind into a Shakespeare and comes out with a decent understanding. When Shakespeare's already often difficult writing is being spoken, it is much harder to follow, and you can't comprehend it as you would the dialogue in say, an Ibsen play. It's pretty much essential to have read the play before going to watch it.
Oh interesting, I actually feel the opposite! I find watching the play easier to follow because I can read actor’s expressions and hear their vocal inflections. I often watch the plays before reading them so I know the story and then can focus more on the words. I can see how not everyone would have the same experience though, that’s just me
I've also had this experience, but I credit my success with this approach entirely to the professor that taught all three of the Shakespeare classes I took in college. He'd have us watch a performance or movie interpretation of any given passage *first,* then we'd read the passages together and analyze as a class. It worked out *so* well for my learning style.
If you're out there Dr. Spotswood, you're amazing and I still treasure memories of your classes fondly!!
this! certainly for some, but not everyone. As an example, I find it easier to hear an audiobook or watch the play for understanding, but my partner is usually dependent on captions when watching shows, so watching any play, especially Shakespeare, can be difficult to follow without knowing the words or previously reading the dialogue.
I agree. I had professor back in college that always said the plays are meant to be both read and performed. The plays were published in print for a reason and that was to be read and they are texts. That always made a lot of sense to me. Plus if you are out camping or enjoying yourself and you want to read Shakespeare do you really need to only seek out performances? Seems gatekeepy for no reason.
I enjoy both. One thing I enjoy about seeing a production is that it's a way to see how others interpret the play in a non-academic setting. It allows me to see things I wouldn't normally consider since a production has so many people interpreting things.
How the director, each actor, the set designers, the costume designers, and lighting teams interpret things is fascinating to me. I love seeing what they all add to the production (and I know the roles I listed are not comprehensive!)
With so little stage direction from Shakespeare, there's a ton of room for interpretation. Even if he did have stage direction, he obviously would not have included any stage direction that would include modern techniques and technology. This adds great ways to interpret things that weren't possible in his time.
I dislike when people say this. I do agree that seeing a production of a play can help you to engage with it better and like it more but reading a play is a valuable exercise in itself. Analysing and understanding media is important, and I can do that better through studying its text.
I think people who say “plays aren’t meant to be read” lack imagination. I say this as an Actor and an aspiring playwright. Performances are a pile of creative vision, which while that may be able to see something you wouldn’t have before, or come to a different conclusion. However, performances are constantly changing. A script is the purest form of a piece, and can be enjoyed as such.
You might be on to something, although I've always assumed ol' Billy was referencing the time Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-time-julius-caesar-was-captured-by-pirates
Shakespeare is a better poet, but Kit Marlowe's plays were extremely bold, queer, better-paced, and interesting. People who are fans of Shakespeare do themselves a disservice by not digging into his contemporaries.
Personally, I disagree about Marlowe's plays being better paced, but I do think he was an interesting writer and worthy of attention, and I applaud the general proposition that the works of Shakespeare's fellow dramatic writers should be more widely read. For myself, I last read all of Marlowe's plays in *Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays* edited by Mark Thornton Burnett (Everyman's Library) in 2022 and I reread *Edward II* earlier this year because it was part of the *Harvard Classics*, Vol. 46. The rest of the plays in that volume are by Shakespeare: *Hamlet*, *King Lear*, *Macbeth*, and *The Tempest*.
I'm also in the middle of a reading of all of the public theatre plays of Ben Jonson, reading a collection of five plays by Thomas Heywood, and I'm reading a new-to-me collection of John Webster's plays with one of Thomas Middleton's (*The White Devil*, *The Duchess of Malfi*, and *Appius and Virginia* by Webster and *The Revenger's Tragedy* by Middleton – all of them except for *Appius and Virginia* are ones I've read before).
He had two daughters, you know. And his eldest daughter, Susanna, left two extant signatures in a well-formed Italic hand, which is prima facie evidence of literacy; she was capable of describing the contents of one of her late husband's books to a prospective buyer even though it was in Latin; she probably wrote the Latin epitaph that honors her mother Anne Shakespeare (it addresses her familiarly in Latin and from the perspective of a child as "tu mater"); and her own epitaph said that she was "witty \[i.e., learned\] above her sex".
Admittedly, we don't have as much good evidence for Judith's literacy and she only left a mark, but it doesn't follow that because she a left a mark she must have been illiterate. Plenty of literate people left marks for various reasons, whether for sheer convenience or because no signature was strictly necessary or because of some impediment that had nothing to do with their ability to read. At most we can only say that she *may* not have been able to read, but the evidence is ambiguous.
The theories about someone other than Shakespeare writing the plays are based in a elitist mindset, the 'Real' author is always an aristocratic or university wit.
They can't accept a kid from Stratford who never made it past primary school could possibly be the genius who wrote Hamlet, Lear, etc.
Louder!!! I agree. Shakespeare being an uneducated kid from nowhere who turned out to be a genius and the most important writer in the history of the English language is probably my favourite thing about him.
People making that argument seem to forget that by the time his career got going, Shakespeare was rubbing elbows with a lot of high nobility and had plenty of opportunities to observe and understand elite culture and every incentive to flatter the prejudices of his aristocratic patrons.
In particular, they forget the names of his playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, indicating his major patrons. And the Lord Chamberlain in question, Henry Carey, was Queen Elizabeth's first cousin on the Boleyn side as well as being part of her inner circle.
Measure for Measure is one of his best plays, and should be talked about way more.
There’s nothing wrong with people interpreting basically any character as gay, interpretations of the text are valid and anything that helps people connect further with the text is wonderful.
Modern interpretations, adaptions, retellings, and translations are good, fun, and deserve to be analyzed in professional academic settings just as much as more traditional adaptions of the plays.
yes! I love how when I studied Shakespeare we watched modern interps as well, and even saw a very modern meta Hamlet play (Motive and the Cue). The whole magic of Shakespeare is that the characters and situation can be universal in how they present the human experience
Goneril is a victim of a misreading. Lear was being unreasonable (hence his craziness) and she didn't cast out her father, she just asked him to control his HUNDRED ROWDY SOLDIERS who were harassing her staff and being disruptive. She compares her palace to a "tavern or a brothel" As QUEEN of her barony, this should have been within her rights -- Lear had GIVEN her that rule but felt that it was a given that it was conditional. He was not cast out, he left in a huff. She then follows him in concern to Regan's keep and asks him to be reasonable, and also reminds him that it was his choice to leave. If she had been the oldest son, she would have been rightfully given the entire kingdom, not forced to share it with her sister, and then weirdly her brother-in-law and husband shared a third as well. It is clear from the subtext that her husband was chosen for her by her father in the first place, so I don't really blame her for stepping out with Edmund, someone she had clearly known her entire life and who was scheming to seduce her from the getgo. She also demphasizes a potential hanging with Gloucester by saying that instead of hanging him instantly, he could be blinded instead (which I see as a mercy -- a traitor should have by rights be executed). Her biggest sin is that she doses her sister when she learns that Regan is pregnant with Edmund's child, but when Regan actually dies, Goneril is so distraught that she commits suicide. She's just a tragic and absolutely complex character, teeming with Daddy issues and fighting to be a lady boss despite everyone asserting dominance over her, despite her title.
Again, if she'd been a son, none of this would have happened -- she could have slept with whomever she pleased and everyone would have shrugged.
You have a good point, and if you’ve ever seen the Peter Brooks film with Paul Scofield as Lear they actually really emphasize that visually – Lear is saying that his men are well/behaved and they are ripping up the whole hall behind him! But we’re not supposed to think that Lear is wise at any point, and his inability to let go of the pomp of the king along with the title is one of his central mistakes from the beginning.
So, I agree with the broad point that Goneril (and Regan to a lesser extent) are actually justified in a number of things they do in the first two acts; that their concerns about their father's senility are well-placed and frankly even relatable to a number of folk today. *However*, she's a deceptive manipulator from the beginning.
This is easy to miss in the short scene, Act One, Scene Three.
She commands Oswald to *Put on what weary negligence you please* and soon after says *I would breed from hence occasions*. In other words, she's commanding Oswald to provoke Lear--in hopes of getting a response out of him which she can then use against him as reason for her treatment of him.
After Oswald does just this in the next scene, she reveals she already has had a letter pre-written detailing Lear's behavior (she knows this in advance because she had Oswald instigate it). She even tells Oswald to *add such reasons of your own / as may compact it more.* In other words, he's free to devise additional injustices Lear has done, real or imaginary, so long as they fit the theme of him being unruly and unstable. That theme has been a goal Goneril has had from the beginning, and we can trace the ways she purposefully "stages the scene" to incite Lear.
1. Twelfth Night is underrated.
2. I love Macbeth but I don’t love the 1977 Ian McKellen / Judi Dench production. IMO it’s too cryptic and the pacing is off.
3. William at the very least had one homosexual fling in his life but I will not speculate to what degree.
I’ll see myself out.
The scansion adds a dimension of significance and meaning that communicates a ton, sometimes just as much as the words do, and you're missing half the text if you disregard it. (Whether by forcing a different rhythm, or simply by neglecting to muse upon the effect of the rhythm on the words and lines.) I have come to learn that some people disagree, but I can't speak to exactly how hot of a take this is.
It’s sad that more people don’t understand that. The rhythm of the verse is where the meaning hides. Ignore it and you have a boring production. It’s written that way on purpose so that actors could learn it quickly.
Anyone who contends that the plays of Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare should be beaten senseless with a copy of the Riverside collected works. When they come to, beat ‘em again. 😆
I am a docent at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC. You’d be surprised at how many people come through there just itching to expound their Oxfordian screeds. Tourists, mind you. The docents smile and nod — our stock answer is that “we believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone who went by the name of William Shakespeare.” Weak sauce, to be sure, but it tends to deflate their sea-lion impulses.
I went to a virtual panel where someone posed the authorship question (and someone posed the question of why people ask the authorship question, and the moderator read them both at once) and the president of the American Shakespeare Society gave my personal answer as well, that he doesn't ultimately care who wrote them because we have the works at the end of the day. The very British moderator brilliantly declared, "Well, there you have it, the answer from the president of the American Shakespeare Society: "I don't care."" It was great.
I do a lot of community theatre including annual shakespeare in the park. I talk to a lot of people about shakespeare but I’m guessing the actor crowd is probably more reverential than the tourists
Mercutio is in love with Romeo.
Hamlet does NOT have an Oedipus Complex.
Merry Wives of Windsor’s only redeeming quality is that it inspired the opera version.
I always hated the Hamlet Oedipus complex argument. He's just pissed that his mum got with his uncle, and then he's internalised his own 'feminine' passivity into misogyny (I will defend him till the day I die 😌)
I've been going through the thread disagreeing with some takes but understanding them until this post. You have won my award for most controversial opinion.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, even when performed by professionals, still feels like it was written to be performed by high schoolers.
Taming of the Shrew has an awful message and modern adaptations that use blocking to try and reinterpret the message don't work. The prologue could possibly help redeem it but it is never done and would be clunky anyway.
I love (some) Shakespeare and I studied him at high school in the UK, and later at uni, back in the nineties
As a fully bilingual person with a background from the Middle-East, who also studied non-English language and literature at the university level, I am fully aware that his global prestige comes from the cultural hegemony of the UK and is a legacy of colonialism.
Oh, and I see young people refusing to study and engage with Shakespeare because it has been put on their curriculum with no proper context or understanding, simply because it was always there, and this gives me satisfaction. Either he stands up on his own merits, or he dies out (I think he will survive).
What's strange to me is that the French had a similarly powerful colonial apparatus, and yet Molière doesn't seem to have quite the same global reach as Shakespeare managed. (Take this with a grain of salt, though... I haven't spent much time in the Francophone world.) I sometimes wonder how much English literature helped to prop up their colonial project rather than the other way around!
I do not say this to discount your points, for the record. I'm in agreement with you.
To add to your point, I think Shakespeare is special. There's a lot to be said about how storytelling, education, and the exportation of culture relates to the building of a nation's identity; however, the Spanish and the Dutch have had colonialists empires that were at times bigger than England's, but I rarely run into people who have read Cervantes or Joost van den Vondel.
Did Molière write any tragedies? I think that while several of Shakespeare’s comedies are quite good, he’s mainly celebrated for works like Hamlet and R&J. I think if he only wrote comedies he wouldn’t be held in as high esteem, just because comedies tend to be treated as less important than “serious”’works.
Moliere was something completely else. There’s a 3rd Rock from the Sun episode (actually two I think) where Dick dates a woman who will only speak in Moliere rhymes. It’s brilliant and worth the watch.
I scrolled down a bit to look for this.
Don't get me wrong, I think Shakespeare is talented, but a lot of people act like he's the ONLY talented writer out there, as if his global acclaim isn't at least part due to the self-fulfilling prophecy that if you keep only teaching his plays, not a lot of other folks are going to get recognized.
I see him as like the Elizabethan Era's Taylor Swift.
Like good at what they do, fantastic PR, but has gone famous way past the point where it's talent alone, and hard-core fans tend to dismiss all criticism of him.
Shakespeare was writing and rewriting quickly for productions, which is why there are some very odd time jumps, plot holes, and tonal shifts in the plays. The genius stuff is a lucky side effect of a guy just writing for his life. To treat these plays as fixed masterpieces gives them an authority that they do not merit. They are (mostly) good plays with varying degrees of masterwork throughout.
I respect you for posting an opinion that fits what this post is asking for and I will over you an upvote but you are wrong and I hate you.
Branagh's Hamlet is pretty much the sole reason I got into Shakespeare at all.
When you see a good production of any of his historical plays, they’re definitely epic!
The Utah Shakespeare Festival was going through all of his works, and it was an amazing way to see the history plays. Really helped to understand the timeline too as they got the same actors to come back and play their character in the next play, and carried some of the set design elements over when applicable too.
If Hamlet the play disliked Hamlet the character as much as Coriolanus the play dislikes Coriolanus the character, I would have no issue with it. Alas, that's not the case.
The history genre is quite arbitrary, and could easily be divvied up amongst the tragedies and comedies.
I only half-believe this, and don't think it's practical, but I like to declaim it.
Radical Opinion: The Ghost in Hamlet is just a person wearing a sheet and yelling, "Boo!"
It's 100% clear to the audience that the ghost in Hamlet is REAL and not a figment of Hamlet's imagination, and there are multiple witnesses. There are plenty of supernatural events in WS plays, so it being an actual spirit from beyond the grave isn't really a stretch.
But what if it's someone trying to gaslight Hamlet by wearing a sheet?
Who has a motive to want Claudius dead? Or do they simply want to set up Hamlet and Claudius is collateral damage?
Plenty of suspects, but I can never decide who it is.
What if it's Claudius? He's trying to convince Hamlet that his father was killed by Claudius, and that he should have his revenge. But Claudius knows that Hamlet plots very badly, so he hopes that he can catch Hamlet in the act of trying to kill him, and imprison him in that excuse. So all his opposition is removed.
Wow.
King Lear and Titus Andronicus can be considered "grimdark" (which to me is Dystopia + Tragedy)
Antony and Cleopatra is underrated.
All Too Well 10 Minute Version (Taylor Swift) is better than All's Well That Ends Well.
I saw a Filipino rendition of King Lear in a local theater during my visit in Manila that made use of futuristic and dystopian elements reminiscent of 1984/Brave New World. It worked wonders.
The most remarkable aspect was that the flatterers spoke English but Cordelia and the others who were never out for usurping Lear spoke Tagalog.
Also, please stop cutting the Hecate scene out of the play! It lets us know that the picking of Macbeth by the witches was a nothing but a random, cruel joke that ended in tragedy. And it contains one of the best lines in the whole play: “And we all know, security/Is mortals’ chiefest enemy”.
Coriolanus is his best tragedy, and perhaps best play and/or character study he ever wrote. The only reason it isn’t widely considered so is the classically-designed characters unlike his other plays and the lack of worldwide-performances.
Romeo and Juliet is his best play. It’s the most ingrained in our cultural consciousness and has permeated nearly every love narrative since. The way he constructed a dramedy (first half raunchy rom-com/second half gutting tragedy) is still a sacred construction, specifically the way he did it: some characters almost aware they’re in a comedy and beg the other characters—from foot soldiers all the way up to the two protagonists—to just “keep the peace.”
It’s also one of the only classic tragedies where the author grants the most tragic figure (Juliet obvy—this is her play) a wish. Juliet begged god to just take them out of the world of the play, strip them of their family names, and emblazon them in the stars for people to wish on for love.
Name a more pervasive romantic couple in our consciousness than these two.
Oh. And we rarely use their last names outside of the play when we talk about them. Wish granted.
Hamlet is extremely overrated, to the point of frustration. Characters just stand around talking about doing things instead of doing things, the whole ghost thing is wildly inconsistent despite making only 2 (?) appearances, and the cast is full of "yes men" like Horatio who just do what they're told without thought. In college, I learned that other writers like TS Eliot (read Hamlet and His Problems) and Leo Tolstoy felt similarly. I honestly think that celebrating Hamlet as Shakespeare's masterpiece has done more harm than good and that most people who think they hate Shakespeare only do so because they read Hamlet in high school.
Came here to say this! I find that the tragedy is often dulled when modern productions focus too much on drawing parallels to present day and more contemporary racial dynamics. In my opinion, Othello is far more about misogyny than about racism.
The misogyny in Othello is the most interesting element to me by far. Othello's status as a 'moor' obviously plays a part but I think the misogyny present in the play is far more complex than the occasional casual racism towards Othello.
-The Merchant of Venice is not a "correction" to The Jew of Malta. In a few ways, it's an even more antisemitic text. Barrabas gets many digs at Christians, we see the bigoted disposession that ellicits his act of revenge, the other Jews of the text are ostensibly decent people, and even though the Christians win, they lost all pretensions of moral grandstanding from the start of a play that deems religion "a childish toy"; in comparison, The Merchant of Venice's endorsement of conversion (forced or not) and appeals to ongoing theological disputes strike me as far more insidious and damaging.
-We really don't emphasise the need for annotations enough. "Just watch the play [and you'll miraculously get everything they're saying]" isn't bad advice, but it's insufficient and can lead to misunderstandings or to miss important nuances.
I once read a take that the key difference between his comedies and his tragedies is the degree of agency the women have - like, Othello and Much Ado About Nothing have basically the same driving conflict, just with different levels of agency given to the female characters.
Anyone who claims Shakespeare had no concept of homosexuality & didn’t include it in his plays is being willfully ignorant. There were laws against sodomy in England when Shakespeare was born—while the Elizabethans may not have had a modern definition of queerness, they did conceptualize it. And I defy anyone to find a heterosexual reading of Coriolanus… pisses me off when people try to tell me Shakespeare wouldn’t have known about homosexuality or didn’t include any queer characters, there are sooo many examples.
1. He has plenty of bad or mediocre plays
2.. Taming of the Shrew is a brilliant comedy and should continue to be performed, especially with the prologue included
3. Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice are masterful, complex works that should never been "shelved"
4. Macbeth is truly great, but slightly overrated. I wish it were more of an ensemble play
I don't like Falstaff. I don't hate him, but I don't get the adoration from so many, including a lot of smart people like Harold Bloom. It's not that I hate all buffoon characters. Toby Belch I don't mind, but I just don't get the love for Falstaff.
When Falstaff is a highway robber and screams out, as he about to set upon the travelers, "They hate us youth!" -- idk its just got a level of transcendental audacity that's missing in the fools and clowns, however much wit and wisdom the former, or pathetic hilarity the latter have to offer.
Shakespeare should never be done in modern dress because the plots don't work in the modern world. Create a world for it with its own style of dress and its own rules. Remove the dramaturgical inconsistency, give the designers license to go nuts.
Richard III is, technically, a history/tragedy but my reading of it came off as more comedic. The very opening is Richard reciting his evil plans and then immediately having to pretend as if he has no such evil plans to Clarence. It’s wildly hilarious because while you can understand why Richard has such motivations, Shakespeare truly paints him as such an outrageous cartoonish villain it’s hard not to laugh at the dramatic irony. It might also be the fastest I’ve ever seen a villain give a dramatic monologue in a play before, though I could be wrong on that.
Second unpopular opinion is that, as an educator who has taught at both the k-12 and college level, it is wildly irresponsible not to have high schoolers read the original Shakespeare when doing the plays. I get that the modernized/condensed versions are to ascertain basic plot and character details, but it truly robs them of the poetry and meaning of the text when it’s diluted in that way. It also doesn’t prepare them for college when they encounter it again and professors there are not willing to give them the baby versions but expect they know how to read the original text. I don’t see why both versions could not be available for high schoolers to learn side-by-side but I also understand that even some teachers don’t care for the original, and the limitations of the public education system make doing that harder.
King Lear is about a king suffering from dementia, and should be taught as a cautionary tale about arranging long term care plans BEFORE you enter cognitive decline
Shakespeare needs to stop being taught in high schools, other than in AP classes or college equivalent electives. Not because it isn't valuable, but because students simply lack the life experience to appreciate what's being said. Doing Shakespeare as part of undergraduate drama coursework COMPLETELY changed how I view The Bard. Everyone was old enough to really take in every single word and appreciate the depth of what Shakespeare poured into every scene and dialogue. High school instructors and their European equivalents have ruined Shakespeare for the vast majority of teenagers.
I applaud you for the boldness of this one. Horrid take though. Classist even. I was not in AP english and consider learning Shakespeare in High School absolutely pivotal for me. Yes, for most students it was droll work, but that does not mean every other student who can and will soak it in proper should be deprived. Completely changed how I think about language. Teachers just need to be paid more.
I took regular english over the honors course my freshman year because of the stellar reputation of the freshman english teacher. I still credit him personally with my love of Shakespeare. Teaching Shakespeare to the non-honors courses is hard but the alternative is a mass culture missing lots of wisdom.
My Lear UOs: Goneril should have inherited the entire kingdom, and would have made a pretty good queen: at the start of the play she’s an efficient, organized head of her house, treats her staff with respect, has a sense of diplomacy and tries her best to make her father reason. He manages to destroy all of these qualities in her by the end of the play, starting with the horrific curse he hurls on her in 1:3. Also, Lear doesn’t learn a single thing by the end, still acting like a victim and blaming his daughters for his demise. The only character in the play with a redeeming arc is Edgar.
Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech has more dramatic effect if it’s moved to Act 2, Sc 2.
It fits better. It helps with the development of Hamlet’s character. It increases the pacing and tension, as moving it places it the misted of increasing tension and contributes to the urgency. There’s more momentum.
Additionally, knowing Hamlet’s deep existential concerns earlier colors the interpretation of his interactions with other characters and his seemingly erratic behavior, and emphasizes his pervasive sense of uncertainty and doubt.
i don’t feel any sympathy for othello, it’s such a leap of logic from “my wife is cheating” to “i need to murder her”, and when you read the play with that context it’s clear he never loves her as much as she loves him
If you're going to teach a Shakespeare play in high school, it should be Henry IV Part 1. The frustrated dynamic between father and son of Henry IV and Hal is especially relatable for kids that age, and you still get a lot of the iconic Shakespeare themes and techniques to discuss.
As You Like It sucks. I know a lot of people love some of the monologues and the character work in it.
But it's boring, the humor doesn't work anymore, and the plot just kind of meanders until the driving conflict is just solved off screen.
If Titus Andronicus is the worst play Shakespeare (co-)wrote, he didn't write a single bad play. I love Titus' arc and Aaron is one of the greatest villains in fiction.
Titus has risen a lot in popularity and appeal these last few decades, I'd personally rank it as a mid tier work, though definitely on the upper end of those.
I love Titus. It's so ridiculous and bloody and fun. Aaron is like a prototype for Iago/Edmund. Two Gentleman of Verona is awful. The only redeeming characters (Launce and his dog) have barely any stage time, and the ending is atrocious.
Titus Andronicus is to the rest of the canon as a Chicago Hot Dog is to fine French cuisine. I don’t care if it’s classless. I don’t care if it has nothing to say. I don’t care if it takes less technique. It is still infinitely more satisfying
So many interesting themes about sacrifice and ritualistic killing in that play. Also Aaron seems to have the strongest paternal instinct out of all the parents in the play. Titus kills his son out of anger and Tamora is oblivious enough to let her kids get captured. Meanwhile aaron stores up his villainy as a kind of currency and uses it to purchase his kid’s life.
And the way that the play problematises classical influence is in itself worthy of a dissertation. Is the play a retelling of Tereus and Philomel, or Shakespeare flaunting that he’s just as capable as reading Ovid as a richer scholar? Is it good that Metamorphoses is used as the mechanic for Lavinia to express herself, or is it only further cycles of violence?
Nah, Timon of Athens is the worst.
Blasphemy!
I've seen all of them at least once, and the one I would never go back to is King John
*Titus* slaps. Love that play
Romeo and Juliet is not a romance, it is a parable about violence. And so many productions miss the mark by focusing on the romance.
this!!!! the tragedy isn’t the love story, the tragedy is the way war and unnecessary conflict affect innocent lives (romeo and juliet) involved. it’s sad because the only way they could peacefully be together is through death, not because they died for each other out of devotion! (although the romantic aspect is pretty legendary and it’s literally scattered throughout all our media to this day)
I will never not hate Juliet's father for doing to her everything he did that forced her to choose death rather than endure his will.
"Romance" as a genre meant something different in Shakespeare's time. It was closer to what we would call "adventure" - fantastic events often in exotic locales. Romeo and Juliet is definitely not a romance. Genre-wise, it is a tragedy.
Yes to clarify I meant romance in the modern meaning of the term, boy meets girl kind of deal.
Well it \*is\* a boy meets girl kind of deal, but it is still a tragedy.
very true, i think the general public perception is that it’s a romance in the modern sense though (which is wrong!)
I think you're dividing things that don't need to be divided. It's a 'tragedy of love', and I think it is pretty self-evident why the love story between the two lead characters is a central focus throughout. But my larger point is *that love and violence are presented together since the opening of the play,* when Sampson puns about cutting off maiden heads, where an act of love and an act of violence are conflated together in his witticisms.
You’re all cowards, and I DO bite my thumb at all of you!
DO YOU BITE YOUR THUMB AT ME SIR?!
The fact that Shakespeare was able to pull off the Henriad doesn't get enough credit.
It's insane he pulled off long term arcs of such richness in a time where such a thing didn't exist. Like that's dedication to long term character building my God.
What do you mean by "pull off"? I'm largely a fan of those plays, but I'm not sure how he could have failed to pull them off, short of just not finishing them?
Basically that. I think of the “marvel cinematic universe” today or the Star Wars movies and all of the moving parts in those, and I’m impressed Shakespeare was able to write and stage so many connected plays.
MERCHANT OF VENICE, while full of anti-semitism, is not an antisemitic play
Jew here. Merchant depicts EXACTLY how antisemitism functions, from the “let’s necessitate this economic niche and then hate the people who occupy it” to the totally unequal application of the laws.
It’s just incredible.
It’s both. It’s certainly less antisemitic than other similar plays at the time. But the happy ending still involves a Jewish woman converting. And Bassanio’s antisemitism never effectively countered or condemned. And you can’t ignore that because Shylock gets an all time great soliloquy. Shakespeare was good at humanizing villains. He was still a villain
That is definitely an unpopular take, well done.
Hard agree. It’s very much a play about different groups (primarily Jews and Christians) being nasty to each other due to social conditioning. I think it retains merit in performance when presented through that lens.
My unpopular opinion: The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic play, and we should treat it like any other art that centres the bigotry of its creators, from Birth of a Nation to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Don’t ban it or burn it, but if you have a lot of art to spend your time and effort and money on, why not choose something else? Also, people (not saying you!) who claim Merchant of Venice isn’t antisemitic based on the “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech while ignoring the rest of the play are like people who claim Martin Lauther King Jr. opposed affirmative action because of that one line in that one speech while ignoring all o the other things he said and wrote about it.
I think the key line is actually not the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech but “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.” Shylock will be treated like a monster no matter what he does, so he might as well give the people just what they’re asking for.
The Merchant of Venice is one of my favourite plays of his and I think people saying it isn't ultimately anti-semitic are missing the entirely point of the ending. Yes, Shylock is a great character and the play does show quite fairly how antisemitism has affected him. Yes, the play does have a balance where the fun at Shylock's expenses is subtly balanced by showing the real suffering behind it (like the bit with the ring). No, a play that ends celebrating a Jewish character being forced to convert to Christianity "to give him a chance at redemption" while all the Christian characters are whisked away to their own happy ending isn't in favour of the jews. Like I'd argue it does something similiar to what Othello (arguably maybe even The Tempest) does where it's "progressive" because The Other isn't inherently evil because it can be civilised which maybe it was progressive for the time, but it certainly isn't progressive now. You can easily adapt it to make it not anti semitic by making it the tragedy that it IS, but I don't think that was the author's original intent. Like Shakespeare wanted me to laugh at the crossdressing bickering, not cry at Shylock's being forced to convert. Which, again, it's supposed to be his happy ending by Shakespeare's standards.
Actual jewish critics, Paul Cantor for one, have argued it’s not antisemitic because of its characterization of Shylock and complexity.
I think he wrote it to confront the audience with their own antisemitism.
I think it’s implausible that Shakespeare, the playwright who was casually antisemitic all over the rest of his plays, living in a country where it had been illegal to be publicly Jewish for a few centuries, wrote a play that everyone saw as having a Jewish villain but was secretly anti-anti-Semitic. Saying The Merchant of Venice is anti-bigotry because Shakespeare makes him more sympathetic than Marlowe’s play is like saying Richard III is the good guy in his play because he has some charming villain speeches.
I do not agree with that at all. But that’s why I listed that on this thread. I am not surprised to find a sword at my throat!
Yes. He humanizes the villain because that's something good fiction needs to do.
I think it’s oversimplified to just go “antisemitic or not,” like there aren’t *degrees* of prejudice. The standard shouldn’t be whether the play (or Shakespeare personally) is 100% free of what would be considered bigotry by 21st-century standards, but whether it was an admirable leap forward in not-racistness compared to the world around him — which it clearly is. Of course Shakespeare would have thought that someone being Jewish was a bigger deal than the average person thinks it is today, but the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech is the most successful anti-prejudicial artistic text ever written and still gets trotted out almost immediately — and effectively — whenever any type of prejudice is being addressed over 400 years later, and that has to count for something. Compare it to the treatment of women in Shakespeare’s plays: Was Shakespeare super-feminist by modern standards? Of course not, because that would have been impossible. Are his heroines consistently the biggest leaps forward in human history in the artistic depiction of female characters as full human beings who are regularly the equals of, and frequently superior to, the men around them? Yes, duh.
Shouldn’t even be a hot take. You’ll notice the people who say it’s anti-Semitic *always* pull at least one of the following moves: 1. Uncritically equating the Christians’ views with the play’s “views”; 2. Mind-reading Shakespeare himself; or, 3. Arguing that the play must be anti-Semitic because generally people hated Jews in the 17th century. All terrible arguments in the own right, but additionally bad here because they’re anti-textual.
I don't think this is an unpopular opinion among Shakespeare scholars or enthusiasts, but... When people notice that I'm reading Shakespeare, they often tell me that this is not right, because "Plays are meant to be watched, not read." I'd go so far as to say this is a popular opinion among the general public when it comes to Shakespeare. My response to this is that I'm hoping to see multiple productions of these plays, so I want to understand the base material as best I can. I think it gives me a better appreciation of artistic takes or interpretations if I know what they're working off of.
I’ve done my fair share of Shakespeare, and i’d challenge all of you that Shakespeare is best understood when you yourself read it out aloud. Even better when you can get a bunch of friends together and read different characters. Don’t worry too much about getting it right, speak it trippingly on the tongue, and get through it, meaning will come through
I'm quite sure that nobody goes blind into a Shakespeare and comes out with a decent understanding. When Shakespeare's already often difficult writing is being spoken, it is much harder to follow, and you can't comprehend it as you would the dialogue in say, an Ibsen play. It's pretty much essential to have read the play before going to watch it.
Oh interesting, I actually feel the opposite! I find watching the play easier to follow because I can read actor’s expressions and hear their vocal inflections. I often watch the plays before reading them so I know the story and then can focus more on the words. I can see how not everyone would have the same experience though, that’s just me
I've also had this experience, but I credit my success with this approach entirely to the professor that taught all three of the Shakespeare classes I took in college. He'd have us watch a performance or movie interpretation of any given passage *first,* then we'd read the passages together and analyze as a class. It worked out *so* well for my learning style. If you're out there Dr. Spotswood, you're amazing and I still treasure memories of your classes fondly!!
this! certainly for some, but not everyone. As an example, I find it easier to hear an audiobook or watch the play for understanding, but my partner is usually dependent on captions when watching shows, so watching any play, especially Shakespeare, can be difficult to follow without knowing the words or previously reading the dialogue.
I agree. I had professor back in college that always said the plays are meant to be both read and performed. The plays were published in print for a reason and that was to be read and they are texts. That always made a lot of sense to me. Plus if you are out camping or enjoying yourself and you want to read Shakespeare do you really need to only seek out performances? Seems gatekeepy for no reason.
I enjoy both. One thing I enjoy about seeing a production is that it's a way to see how others interpret the play in a non-academic setting. It allows me to see things I wouldn't normally consider since a production has so many people interpreting things. How the director, each actor, the set designers, the costume designers, and lighting teams interpret things is fascinating to me. I love seeing what they all add to the production (and I know the roles I listed are not comprehensive!) With so little stage direction from Shakespeare, there's a ton of room for interpretation. Even if he did have stage direction, he obviously would not have included any stage direction that would include modern techniques and technology. This adds great ways to interpret things that weren't possible in his time.
I dislike when people say this. I do agree that seeing a production of a play can help you to engage with it better and like it more but reading a play is a valuable exercise in itself. Analysing and understanding media is important, and I can do that better through studying its text.
I think people who say “plays aren’t meant to be read” lack imagination. I say this as an Actor and an aspiring playwright. Performances are a pile of creative vision, which while that may be able to see something you wouldn’t have before, or come to a different conclusion. However, performances are constantly changing. A script is the purest form of a piece, and can be enjoyed as such.
Hamlet wasn't actually captured by pirates. He made up the whole story to seem stronger to the king and, thus, more capable of killing him.
Ooooh. Nice.
You might be on to something, although I've always assumed ol' Billy was referencing the time Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-time-julius-caesar-was-captured-by-pirates
Timon of Athens is fire
YOU get a gold coin! And YOU get a gold coin! And YOU get a gold coin!
Shakespeare is a better poet, but Kit Marlowe's plays were extremely bold, queer, better-paced, and interesting. People who are fans of Shakespeare do themselves a disservice by not digging into his contemporaries.
Serious question: besides Faustus, what of Marlow's plays would you recommend?
Edward II and Dido, Queen of Carthage are fantastic and very accessible if you’re familiar with Shakespeare.
Personally, I disagree about Marlowe's plays being better paced, but I do think he was an interesting writer and worthy of attention, and I applaud the general proposition that the works of Shakespeare's fellow dramatic writers should be more widely read. For myself, I last read all of Marlowe's plays in *Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays* edited by Mark Thornton Burnett (Everyman's Library) in 2022 and I reread *Edward II* earlier this year because it was part of the *Harvard Classics*, Vol. 46. The rest of the plays in that volume are by Shakespeare: *Hamlet*, *King Lear*, *Macbeth*, and *The Tempest*. I'm also in the middle of a reading of all of the public theatre plays of Ben Jonson, reading a collection of five plays by Thomas Heywood, and I'm reading a new-to-me collection of John Webster's plays with one of Thomas Middleton's (*The White Devil*, *The Duchess of Malfi*, and *Appius and Virginia* by Webster and *The Revenger's Tragedy* by Middleton – all of them except for *Appius and Virginia* are ones I've read before).
It bothers me that his daughter was apparently never taught how to read and write.
He had two daughters, you know. And his eldest daughter, Susanna, left two extant signatures in a well-formed Italic hand, which is prima facie evidence of literacy; she was capable of describing the contents of one of her late husband's books to a prospective buyer even though it was in Latin; she probably wrote the Latin epitaph that honors her mother Anne Shakespeare (it addresses her familiarly in Latin and from the perspective of a child as "tu mater"); and her own epitaph said that she was "witty \[i.e., learned\] above her sex". Admittedly, we don't have as much good evidence for Judith's literacy and she only left a mark, but it doesn't follow that because she a left a mark she must have been illiterate. Plenty of literate people left marks for various reasons, whether for sheer convenience or because no signature was strictly necessary or because of some impediment that had nothing to do with their ability to read. At most we can only say that she *may* not have been able to read, but the evidence is ambiguous.
his wife also had no idea, but imagine if she could and read the sonnets .. ignorance is bliss
She could have been severely dyslexic for all we know. Teaching isn't the only factor in whether someone else up able to read or write.
Yes, or perhaps she knew how to write but used a sign anyway because that was what everyone else was doing. Impossible to know for now.
The theories about someone other than Shakespeare writing the plays are based in a elitist mindset, the 'Real' author is always an aristocratic or university wit. They can't accept a kid from Stratford who never made it past primary school could possibly be the genius who wrote Hamlet, Lear, etc.
Louder!!! I agree. Shakespeare being an uneducated kid from nowhere who turned out to be a genius and the most important writer in the history of the English language is probably my favourite thing about him.
I find that the anti-Stratfordians themselves lack imagination (though as a group they're pretty creative)
People making that argument seem to forget that by the time his career got going, Shakespeare was rubbing elbows with a lot of high nobility and had plenty of opportunities to observe and understand elite culture and every incentive to flatter the prejudices of his aristocratic patrons. In particular, they forget the names of his playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men, indicating his major patrons. And the Lord Chamberlain in question, Henry Carey, was Queen Elizabeth's first cousin on the Boleyn side as well as being part of her inner circle.
Measure for Measure is one of his best plays, and should be talked about way more. There’s nothing wrong with people interpreting basically any character as gay, interpretations of the text are valid and anything that helps people connect further with the text is wonderful.
Modern interpretations, adaptions, retellings, and translations are good, fun, and deserve to be analyzed in professional academic settings just as much as more traditional adaptions of the plays.
yes! I love how when I studied Shakespeare we watched modern interps as well, and even saw a very modern meta Hamlet play (Motive and the Cue). The whole magic of Shakespeare is that the characters and situation can be universal in how they present the human experience
Measure for Measure is his best play 🤪
It's definitely got one of the best endings of any play! So many ways to interpret it!
Goneril is a victim of a misreading. Lear was being unreasonable (hence his craziness) and she didn't cast out her father, she just asked him to control his HUNDRED ROWDY SOLDIERS who were harassing her staff and being disruptive. She compares her palace to a "tavern or a brothel" As QUEEN of her barony, this should have been within her rights -- Lear had GIVEN her that rule but felt that it was a given that it was conditional. He was not cast out, he left in a huff. She then follows him in concern to Regan's keep and asks him to be reasonable, and also reminds him that it was his choice to leave. If she had been the oldest son, she would have been rightfully given the entire kingdom, not forced to share it with her sister, and then weirdly her brother-in-law and husband shared a third as well. It is clear from the subtext that her husband was chosen for her by her father in the first place, so I don't really blame her for stepping out with Edmund, someone she had clearly known her entire life and who was scheming to seduce her from the getgo. She also demphasizes a potential hanging with Gloucester by saying that instead of hanging him instantly, he could be blinded instead (which I see as a mercy -- a traitor should have by rights be executed). Her biggest sin is that she doses her sister when she learns that Regan is pregnant with Edmund's child, but when Regan actually dies, Goneril is so distraught that she commits suicide. She's just a tragic and absolutely complex character, teeming with Daddy issues and fighting to be a lady boss despite everyone asserting dominance over her, despite her title. Again, if she'd been a son, none of this would have happened -- she could have slept with whomever she pleased and everyone would have shrugged.
You have a good point, and if you’ve ever seen the Peter Brooks film with Paul Scofield as Lear they actually really emphasize that visually – Lear is saying that his men are well/behaved and they are ripping up the whole hall behind him! But we’re not supposed to think that Lear is wise at any point, and his inability to let go of the pomp of the king along with the title is one of his central mistakes from the beginning.
So, I agree with the broad point that Goneril (and Regan to a lesser extent) are actually justified in a number of things they do in the first two acts; that their concerns about their father's senility are well-placed and frankly even relatable to a number of folk today. *However*, she's a deceptive manipulator from the beginning. This is easy to miss in the short scene, Act One, Scene Three. She commands Oswald to *Put on what weary negligence you please* and soon after says *I would breed from hence occasions*. In other words, she's commanding Oswald to provoke Lear--in hopes of getting a response out of him which she can then use against him as reason for her treatment of him. After Oswald does just this in the next scene, she reveals she already has had a letter pre-written detailing Lear's behavior (she knows this in advance because she had Oswald instigate it). She even tells Oswald to *add such reasons of your own / as may compact it more.* In other words, he's free to devise additional injustices Lear has done, real or imaginary, so long as they fit the theme of him being unruly and unstable. That theme has been a goal Goneril has had from the beginning, and we can trace the ways she purposefully "stages the scene" to incite Lear.
1. Twelfth Night is underrated. 2. I love Macbeth but I don’t love the 1977 Ian McKellen / Judi Dench production. IMO it’s too cryptic and the pacing is off. 3. William at the very least had one homosexual fling in his life but I will not speculate to what degree. I’ll see myself out.
ONE fling? Jesus, judging by a lot of the poems our boy was deffo bi at the very least.
Twelfth Night is one of the most frequently produced and discussed ones in my experience. I think it's... rated, at least as far as I know.
twelfth night will always hold a special place in my heart, i wish it got more recognition
The scansion adds a dimension of significance and meaning that communicates a ton, sometimes just as much as the words do, and you're missing half the text if you disregard it. (Whether by forcing a different rhythm, or simply by neglecting to muse upon the effect of the rhythm on the words and lines.) I have come to learn that some people disagree, but I can't speak to exactly how hot of a take this is.
It’s sad that more people don’t understand that. The rhythm of the verse is where the meaning hides. Ignore it and you have a boring production. It’s written that way on purpose so that actors could learn it quickly.
For a quick and easy example: in Juliet's soliloquoy, Romeo's name breaks iambic pentameter. That's intentional: his name is the problem
Anyone who contends that the plays of Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare should be beaten senseless with a copy of the Riverside collected works. When they come to, beat ‘em again. 😆
This might not be a hot take. I’ve never actually encountered an anti-stratfordian in the wild
I am a docent at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC. You’d be surprised at how many people come through there just itching to expound their Oxfordian screeds. Tourists, mind you. The docents smile and nod — our stock answer is that “we believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone who went by the name of William Shakespeare.” Weak sauce, to be sure, but it tends to deflate their sea-lion impulses.
I went to a virtual panel where someone posed the authorship question (and someone posed the question of why people ask the authorship question, and the moderator read them both at once) and the president of the American Shakespeare Society gave my personal answer as well, that he doesn't ultimately care who wrote them because we have the works at the end of the day. The very British moderator brilliantly declared, "Well, there you have it, the answer from the president of the American Shakespeare Society: "I don't care."" It was great.
I do a lot of community theatre including annual shakespeare in the park. I talk to a lot of people about shakespeare but I’m guessing the actor crowd is probably more reverential than the tourists
Shakespeare’s brilliance lies in the poetic texture of his language and not in the dramatic structure of his plays or in his ability as a playwright
Unironic use of the term "the Bard" makes you a worse person than if you just say Shakespeare.
Hamlet is nowhere near Shakespeare's best play. I can think of at least ten that are better.
Right??? King Lear is right there!
Mercutio is in love with Romeo. Hamlet does NOT have an Oedipus Complex. Merry Wives of Windsor’s only redeeming quality is that it inspired the opera version.
I always hated the Hamlet Oedipus complex argument. He's just pissed that his mum got with his uncle, and then he's internalised his own 'feminine' passivity into misogyny (I will defend him till the day I die 😌)
I LOL’d because my ninth graders always end up suggesting your Mercutio take, every class, every year, like the weather.
As someone who absolutely adores the work of Shakespeare, sonnets, plays, you name it.... Marlowe was a better writer OKAY I'M RUNNING AWAY NOW
Falstaff and all Falstaff related content is boring.
OH MY GOD THANK YOU
I hate the Tempest.
I've been going through the thread disagreeing with some takes but understanding them until this post. You have won my award for most controversial opinion.
Hating The Tempest is pretty mainstream. Try telling the folk in here you hate A Midsummer Night's Dream, *that's* how you rile them up.
The "authorship" conspiracy thing is specious at best and classist at worst
A Midsummer Night's Dream, even when performed by professionals, still feels like it was written to be performed by high schoolers. Taming of the Shrew has an awful message and modern adaptations that use blocking to try and reinterpret the message don't work. The prologue could possibly help redeem it but it is never done and would be clunky anyway.
Agreed. And will add that I’m highly uncomfortable with having high schoolers depict what is essentially magic assisted sexual assault.
I love (some) Shakespeare and I studied him at high school in the UK, and later at uni, back in the nineties As a fully bilingual person with a background from the Middle-East, who also studied non-English language and literature at the university level, I am fully aware that his global prestige comes from the cultural hegemony of the UK and is a legacy of colonialism. Oh, and I see young people refusing to study and engage with Shakespeare because it has been put on their curriculum with no proper context or understanding, simply because it was always there, and this gives me satisfaction. Either he stands up on his own merits, or he dies out (I think he will survive).
What's strange to me is that the French had a similarly powerful colonial apparatus, and yet Molière doesn't seem to have quite the same global reach as Shakespeare managed. (Take this with a grain of salt, though... I haven't spent much time in the Francophone world.) I sometimes wonder how much English literature helped to prop up their colonial project rather than the other way around! I do not say this to discount your points, for the record. I'm in agreement with you.
To add to your point, I think Shakespeare is special. There's a lot to be said about how storytelling, education, and the exportation of culture relates to the building of a nation's identity; however, the Spanish and the Dutch have had colonialists empires that were at times bigger than England's, but I rarely run into people who have read Cervantes or Joost van den Vondel.
Did Molière write any tragedies? I think that while several of Shakespeare’s comedies are quite good, he’s mainly celebrated for works like Hamlet and R&J. I think if he only wrote comedies he wouldn’t be held in as high esteem, just because comedies tend to be treated as less important than “serious”’works.
Moliere was something completely else. There’s a 3rd Rock from the Sun episode (actually two I think) where Dick dates a woman who will only speak in Moliere rhymes. It’s brilliant and worth the watch.
I scrolled down a bit to look for this. Don't get me wrong, I think Shakespeare is talented, but a lot of people act like he's the ONLY talented writer out there, as if his global acclaim isn't at least part due to the self-fulfilling prophecy that if you keep only teaching his plays, not a lot of other folks are going to get recognized. I see him as like the Elizabethan Era's Taylor Swift. Like good at what they do, fantastic PR, but has gone famous way past the point where it's talent alone, and hard-core fans tend to dismiss all criticism of him.
King Lear is not all that
Richard II is the best of the histories.
Midsummer nights dream is over produced and the world needs a twenty year break from it
Let’s give it 120.
Coriolanus is a top 5 play
Shakespeare was writing and rewriting quickly for productions, which is why there are some very odd time jumps, plot holes, and tonal shifts in the plays. The genius stuff is a lucky side effect of a guy just writing for his life. To treat these plays as fixed masterpieces gives them an authority that they do not merit. They are (mostly) good plays with varying degrees of masterwork throughout.
Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet = Bad.
I respect you for posting an opinion that fits what this post is asking for and I will over you an upvote but you are wrong and I hate you. Branagh's Hamlet is pretty much the sole reason I got into Shakespeare at all.
Thank god someone said it!
I likes it. But there's DEFINITELY better ones. I think Andrew Scott's is the best tbh
Shakespeare's most interesting plays are his histories*. *with the exception of Henry VIII: All Is True, that play is hella boring.
When you see a good production of any of his historical plays, they’re definitely epic! The Utah Shakespeare Festival was going through all of his works, and it was an amazing way to see the history plays. Really helped to understand the timeline too as they got the same actors to come back and play their character in the next play, and carried some of the set design elements over when applicable too.
The tragedies are a gift from up high and the comedies are just meh
Coriolanus better than Hamlet. Fight me Hamlet simps
If Hamlet the play disliked Hamlet the character as much as Coriolanus the play dislikes Coriolanus the character, I would have no issue with it. Alas, that's not the case.
o that this too too solid flesh would melt 😔
The history genre is quite arbitrary, and could easily be divvied up amongst the tragedies and comedies. I only half-believe this, and don't think it's practical, but I like to declaim it.
Hamlet is a dick
He wrote them all.
You shouldn't have opinions on plays you haven't read cover to cover.
Radical Opinion: The Ghost in Hamlet is just a person wearing a sheet and yelling, "Boo!" It's 100% clear to the audience that the ghost in Hamlet is REAL and not a figment of Hamlet's imagination, and there are multiple witnesses. There are plenty of supernatural events in WS plays, so it being an actual spirit from beyond the grave isn't really a stretch. But what if it's someone trying to gaslight Hamlet by wearing a sheet? Who has a motive to want Claudius dead? Or do they simply want to set up Hamlet and Claudius is collateral damage? Plenty of suspects, but I can never decide who it is.
What if it's Claudius? He's trying to convince Hamlet that his father was killed by Claudius, and that he should have his revenge. But Claudius knows that Hamlet plots very badly, so he hopes that he can catch Hamlet in the act of trying to kill him, and imprison him in that excuse. So all his opposition is removed. Wow.
He existed and it’s a dumb topic to debate.
King Lear and Titus Andronicus can be considered "grimdark" (which to me is Dystopia + Tragedy) Antony and Cleopatra is underrated. All Too Well 10 Minute Version (Taylor Swift) is better than All's Well That Ends Well.
I saw a Filipino rendition of King Lear in a local theater during my visit in Manila that made use of futuristic and dystopian elements reminiscent of 1984/Brave New World. It worked wonders. The most remarkable aspect was that the flatterers spoke English but Cordelia and the others who were never out for usurping Lear spoke Tagalog.
The porter is one of the most important characters in Macbeth and his speech should be studied as much as the 'is this a dagger...' speech.
Also, please stop cutting the Hecate scene out of the play! It lets us know that the picking of Macbeth by the witches was a nothing but a random, cruel joke that ended in tragedy. And it contains one of the best lines in the whole play: “And we all know, security/Is mortals’ chiefest enemy”.
Please, stop teaching Romeo and Juliet, and billing it as a great love story. Tell the truth, damn it
Most of the comedies I've read are just meh.
Coriolanus is his best tragedy, and perhaps best play and/or character study he ever wrote. The only reason it isn’t widely considered so is the classically-designed characters unlike his other plays and the lack of worldwide-performances.
I feel like Richard III was relatively justified in what he did. It's kind of relatable as I'm also disabled.
Macbeth could/should be taught to 12 year olds; you have to be 35+ to fully understand Romeo and Juliet.
Romeo and Juliet is his best play. It’s the most ingrained in our cultural consciousness and has permeated nearly every love narrative since. The way he constructed a dramedy (first half raunchy rom-com/second half gutting tragedy) is still a sacred construction, specifically the way he did it: some characters almost aware they’re in a comedy and beg the other characters—from foot soldiers all the way up to the two protagonists—to just “keep the peace.” It’s also one of the only classic tragedies where the author grants the most tragic figure (Juliet obvy—this is her play) a wish. Juliet begged god to just take them out of the world of the play, strip them of their family names, and emblazon them in the stars for people to wish on for love. Name a more pervasive romantic couple in our consciousness than these two. Oh. And we rarely use their last names outside of the play when we talk about them. Wish granted.
Olivier wasn’t half as good as people make of him, and not a hundredth as good as he thought he was.
Hamlet is extremely overrated, to the point of frustration. Characters just stand around talking about doing things instead of doing things, the whole ghost thing is wildly inconsistent despite making only 2 (?) appearances, and the cast is full of "yes men" like Horatio who just do what they're told without thought. In college, I learned that other writers like TS Eliot (read Hamlet and His Problems) and Leo Tolstoy felt similarly. I honestly think that celebrating Hamlet as Shakespeare's masterpiece has done more harm than good and that most people who think they hate Shakespeare only do so because they read Hamlet in high school.
omg... my soul hurts from this, upvote for the hot take
Othello is not about racism.
Came here to say this! I find that the tragedy is often dulled when modern productions focus too much on drawing parallels to present day and more contemporary racial dynamics. In my opinion, Othello is far more about misogyny than about racism.
The misogyny in Othello is the most interesting element to me by far. Othello's status as a 'moor' obviously plays a part but I think the misogyny present in the play is far more complex than the occasional casual racism towards Othello.
Midsummer Night’s Dream is overrated. Mid, if thou wilt
Mid is generous.
-The Merchant of Venice is not a "correction" to The Jew of Malta. In a few ways, it's an even more antisemitic text. Barrabas gets many digs at Christians, we see the bigoted disposession that ellicits his act of revenge, the other Jews of the text are ostensibly decent people, and even though the Christians win, they lost all pretensions of moral grandstanding from the start of a play that deems religion "a childish toy"; in comparison, The Merchant of Venice's endorsement of conversion (forced or not) and appeals to ongoing theological disputes strike me as far more insidious and damaging. -We really don't emphasise the need for annotations enough. "Just watch the play [and you'll miraculously get everything they're saying]" isn't bad advice, but it's insufficient and can lead to misunderstandings or to miss important nuances.
The women in the tragedies are thinly written characters, yes even that one.
I once read a take that the key difference between his comedies and his tragedies is the degree of agency the women have - like, Othello and Much Ado About Nothing have basically the same driving conflict, just with different levels of agency given to the female characters.
Prospero isn’t a hero Timon of Athens is really good Titus Andronicus is hilarious
Shakespeare is the only author that will live forever.
In his plays, he shakes a lot more swords than spears. Liar
Much Ado About Nothing is his best play.
The Winter's Tale is lovely and heartbreaking. I love the ending, fight me.
Pericles is terribly underrated and is more enjoyable and engaging than both The Tempest and The Winter's Tale.
I disagree with 80% of what Harold Bloom says about Shakespeare
I’m terrified for Hero at the end of Much Ado, Claudio is an overly jealous, violent, asshole, who has the potential to become abusive. Girl run!
Hamlet is bad compared to most of his other works
Anyone who claims Shakespeare had no concept of homosexuality & didn’t include it in his plays is being willfully ignorant. There were laws against sodomy in England when Shakespeare was born—while the Elizabethans may not have had a modern definition of queerness, they did conceptualize it. And I defy anyone to find a heterosexual reading of Coriolanus… pisses me off when people try to tell me Shakespeare wouldn’t have known about homosexuality or didn’t include any queer characters, there are sooo many examples.
1. He has plenty of bad or mediocre plays 2.. Taming of the Shrew is a brilliant comedy and should continue to be performed, especially with the prologue included 3. Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice are masterful, complex works that should never been "shelved" 4. Macbeth is truly great, but slightly overrated. I wish it were more of an ensemble play
I don't like Falstaff. I don't hate him, but I don't get the adoration from so many, including a lot of smart people like Harold Bloom. It's not that I hate all buffoon characters. Toby Belch I don't mind, but I just don't get the love for Falstaff.
You lost me at "smart people like Harold Bloom"
For real
When Falstaff is a highway robber and screams out, as he about to set upon the travelers, "They hate us youth!" -- idk its just got a level of transcendental audacity that's missing in the fools and clowns, however much wit and wisdom the former, or pathetic hilarity the latter have to offer.
Shakespeare should be done in modern dress unless you have a good reason to do it in period clothing
Shakespeare should never be done in modern dress because the plots don't work in the modern world. Create a world for it with its own style of dress and its own rules. Remove the dramaturgical inconsistency, give the designers license to go nuts.
Hamlet is kinda overrated. It's great, but I think some of this other tragedies (like Macbeth) are just as good.
Henry V is good but overrated, Henry VI trilogy is not as bad as people make it out to be
Harold Bloom is a shit scholar.
Richard III is, technically, a history/tragedy but my reading of it came off as more comedic. The very opening is Richard reciting his evil plans and then immediately having to pretend as if he has no such evil plans to Clarence. It’s wildly hilarious because while you can understand why Richard has such motivations, Shakespeare truly paints him as such an outrageous cartoonish villain it’s hard not to laugh at the dramatic irony. It might also be the fastest I’ve ever seen a villain give a dramatic monologue in a play before, though I could be wrong on that. Second unpopular opinion is that, as an educator who has taught at both the k-12 and college level, it is wildly irresponsible not to have high schoolers read the original Shakespeare when doing the plays. I get that the modernized/condensed versions are to ascertain basic plot and character details, but it truly robs them of the poetry and meaning of the text when it’s diluted in that way. It also doesn’t prepare them for college when they encounter it again and professors there are not willing to give them the baby versions but expect they know how to read the original text. I don’t see why both versions could not be available for high schoolers to learn side-by-side but I also understand that even some teachers don’t care for the original, and the limitations of the public education system make doing that harder.
Hamlet is overrated and isn't even that good
King Lear is about a king suffering from dementia, and should be taught as a cautionary tale about arranging long term care plans BEFORE you enter cognitive decline
King Lear is poorly paced.
He says things just to get attention
He’s an Aries, of course
Shakespeare needs to stop being taught in high schools, other than in AP classes or college equivalent electives. Not because it isn't valuable, but because students simply lack the life experience to appreciate what's being said. Doing Shakespeare as part of undergraduate drama coursework COMPLETELY changed how I view The Bard. Everyone was old enough to really take in every single word and appreciate the depth of what Shakespeare poured into every scene and dialogue. High school instructors and their European equivalents have ruined Shakespeare for the vast majority of teenagers.
I applaud you for the boldness of this one. Horrid take though. Classist even. I was not in AP english and consider learning Shakespeare in High School absolutely pivotal for me. Yes, for most students it was droll work, but that does not mean every other student who can and will soak it in proper should be deprived. Completely changed how I think about language. Teachers just need to be paid more.
I took regular english over the honors course my freshman year because of the stellar reputation of the freshman english teacher. I still credit him personally with my love of Shakespeare. Teaching Shakespeare to the non-honors courses is hard but the alternative is a mass culture missing lots of wisdom.
He was much better at writing sonnets than plays.
this is not a hot take, it’s the truth
That there is in fact room to have the hypothesis, through lack of truly provable information, that the man from Stratford, actually writ the plays.
I like Ian's Richard a lot more that Oliver
John Gielgud ruined the way people think Shakespeare is meant to be performed
Sonnet 116 is trite, schlocky bullshit. If anybody else had written it, it would have been discarded and forgotten.
My Lear UOs: Goneril should have inherited the entire kingdom, and would have made a pretty good queen: at the start of the play she’s an efficient, organized head of her house, treats her staff with respect, has a sense of diplomacy and tries her best to make her father reason. He manages to destroy all of these qualities in her by the end of the play, starting with the horrific curse he hurls on her in 1:3. Also, Lear doesn’t learn a single thing by the end, still acting like a victim and blaming his daughters for his demise. The only character in the play with a redeeming arc is Edgar.
Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech has more dramatic effect if it’s moved to Act 2, Sc 2. It fits better. It helps with the development of Hamlet’s character. It increases the pacing and tension, as moving it places it the misted of increasing tension and contributes to the urgency. There’s more momentum. Additionally, knowing Hamlet’s deep existential concerns earlier colors the interpretation of his interactions with other characters and his seemingly erratic behavior, and emphasizes his pervasive sense of uncertainty and doubt.
Titus Andronicus is satire.
i don’t feel any sympathy for othello, it’s such a leap of logic from “my wife is cheating” to “i need to murder her”, and when you read the play with that context it’s clear he never loves her as much as she loves him
The “problem plays” in Shakespeare scholarship are well-named because they are a problem for the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a great writer.
I suppose mine would be that his clowns/“funny” parts were basically the “Benny Hill” humor of his day.
Shakespeare made the best insults in the world.
If you're going to teach a Shakespeare play in high school, it should be Henry IV Part 1. The frustrated dynamic between father and son of Henry IV and Hal is especially relatable for kids that age, and you still get a lot of the iconic Shakespeare themes and techniques to discuss.
shakespeare is actually still alive today and i met him at a bar in toledo ohio
As You Like It sucks. I know a lot of people love some of the monologues and the character work in it. But it's boring, the humor doesn't work anymore, and the plot just kind of meanders until the driving conflict is just solved off screen.
Timon of Athens is a top 3 play of his and it rarely gets produced and never gets talked about.