How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Whenever the best Shakespeare play is chosen, King Lear usually comes first or second. Shakespeare scholar Jan Kott considers it the most modern of all Shakespeare’s plays, comparing its study of power, sibling jealousy and madness, and its dark absurdity, to the … More Shakespeare Saturday: King Lear
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together All’s well that ends well is another problem play, though it’s more comedic than Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida – a traditional comedy in appearances, but with a resolution that will leave something of an aftertaste. Like in many … More Shakespeare Saturday: All’s well that ends well
And what’s he then that says I play the villain? Ah Othello. In many ways, this is one of the most problematic of Shakespeare’s plays, especially for the modern audiences and directors – a tale about race, otherness, jealousy, spousal violence, with one of the most villainous villains in all of Shakespeare, and a checkered … More Shakespeare Saturday: Othello
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall Measure for Measure is another problem play – a dark comedy that leaves something of a bitter taste in one’s mouth. It’s a morality play, a study on human nature, and perhaps also a satire on the corrupting effect of power and the hypocrisies of the … More Shakespeare Saturday: Measure for Measure
All the argument is a cuckold and a whore Troilus and Cressida falls in many categories among Shakespeare’s plays – it’s a Roman history (yes, I know it’s set in the Greek world), it’s a tragedy, it’s a comedy. It is, in short, a problem play, it’s tragic elements sullied by both the uneasy events … More Shakespeare Saturday: Troilus and Cressida
Journeys end in lovers meeting Twelfth Night is – would you believe it? – Shakespeare’s last true comedy. The later comedic plays tend to be described as “problem plays” – although they traditionall are grouped with the comedies, they tend to have elements that make them hard to classify as purely such. Twelfth Nihgt has … More Shakespeare Saturday: Twelfth Night
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Here we have it. The greatest play ever written. The single most famous line Shakespeare ever wrote. The most iconic and mistaken image in the history of theatre. Nothing is more recognisable as Shakespeare than Hamlet, and nothing is … More Shakespeare Saturday: Hamlet
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. As You Like It is often considered one of Shakespeare’s best comedies – if not the best. It is certainly important enough to have given name to the series of scholarly editions of his plays, The Arden Shakespeare … More Shakespeare Saturday: As you like it
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. This is one of the several Roman plays Shakespeare wrote, and although it is an independent work in all essentials, it does loosely connect to his later play Anthony and Cleopatra. Julius Caesar is the axial character in this play, but he is … More Shakespeare Saturday: Julius Caesar
Can this cockpit hold, the vasty fields of France? Henry V is the last play of the second tetralogy and the last pure history play Shakespeare wrote. Richard III had brought, chronologically, the story of the Plantagenet dynasty to an end, and Henry V was written during the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign. While … More Shakespeare Saturday: Henry V
Shakespeare for absolute beginners 