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My ranking of every Shakespeare play

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Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#81

Post by bombcar »

wudangmonk wrote: post #59
paulsutter wrote: post #22

Not trying to start any debate here with Shakespeare fans, just intend this as a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare - Voltaire declared Hamlet a ‘vulgar and barbarous play’ and that ‘one would take this work to be the fruit of the inspiration of a drunken savage’ - George Bernard Shaw: ’. “There is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shak…

Shakespeare and Tolkien are similar to me. If you ever say you did not like them, you have an army of defenders calling you names about your lack of education and literary maturity, you always get attacked for who you must be as a person. Read both, not impressed.

You can use one to deflect the other; Tolkien was so disappointed by the twist in Macbeth that he wrote the Ents.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#82

Post by tagawa »

el_nahual wrote: post #14

Anyone who likes Shakespeare--or anyone who wants to like it--should watch this marvelous BBC Series called "Playing Shakespeare": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2VnxiW3oqk&list=PLboSQWmG70... It's produced by the Royal Shakespeare company and is comprised simply of some of the greatest shakeasperean actors (Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, David Suchet, Patrick Stewart) talking about different elements of how to act shak…

What a wonderful discovery - thank you!

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#83

Post by bombcar »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #53

I can't agree with the description of Macbeth "dropping the ball with the porter scene". It's a darkly hilarious release of the tension in the previous scene. Macbeth is losing his mind in guilt, and then suddenly you're in a comedic relief scene, with a hungover drunkard cracking jokes about whiskey dick. His initial monologue has perhaps not aged as gracefully, but the humor in this hungover buffoon incorporating t…

He was saying the scene is incredibly important and the version of Macbeth he liked best dropped the ball on the porter scene.

Which, as you say, is a critical ball-drop because that scene is very important for the audience.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#84

Post by ghaff »

bazoom42 wrote: post #45
dekhn wrote: post #39

I remember the teacher talking up Romeo and Juliet and being fairly unimpressed. But when I read King Lear, I was electrified- that scene with the king ranging around in the field while the fool says smart things is really good IMHO. I saw the Scottish Play put on by my high school theater and it was also great. Over time I've come to appreciate his fragments: "But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? Tis t…

“Prosperos books” is a brilliant version of the Tempest. Forbidden Planet is a great movie in its own right, but at best “inspired by”. It uses a similar setup, but the story is entirely different.

The Tempest is one I keep coming back to.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#85

Post by bombcar »

irrational wrote: post #24
dang wrote: post #10

A well-known software consultant/writer once told me that his years-long hobby, with his wife, was to watch every film of every Shakespeare play. They were working their way through all the Hamlets, all the Macbeths, all the etc., in chronological sequence—indexed by (play, film date), not (film date, play). That's a lot of Hamlets. Not sure what they were doing with the Shakespeare movies that got made since they st…

Did that include things like the modernized Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio or Gnomio and Juliet?

And brings up the question - do you classify the Lion King as a Hamlet? ;)

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#86

Post by bombcar »

vr46 wrote: post #30
lr4444lr wrote: post #12

My shrink pointed out in a conversation once as a tangent that Hamlet was not-so-subtly a psychoanalytic masterpiece: Hamlet watches his uncle carry out the Oedipal fantasy of killing his father and marrying his mother, and is haunted by a "ghost" to take action. It is not Shakespeare's only play to feature historical fiction or political machination by a long shot, so one should probe for other reasons to explain wh…

Hamlet has all the best lines, but by god do you have to slog through so much of the play to get to them, including Ophelia's endless wailing. I've seen it half-a-dozen times and it is never ever not a slog in some way, not with Andrew Scott, nor with Benedict Cumberbatch or Paapa Essiedu. It's just a bloody long play, or feels like it, and I imagine in Shakespeare's day, audiences wandered in and out of the auditori…

I’ve had a director argue pretty convincingly that Hamlet is a “built your own adventure” play where you’re supposed to select some scenes and remove others, and that it may have arisen from multiple revisions.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#88

Post by SkipperCat »

Great article. One thing that breaks my heart is that Shakespeare is taught in school by reading the plays. That's a sub-par way to consume the content. Students should watch the plays. Its the acting that brings out the brilliance of the content (and the content is truly brilliant).

Kenneth Branaugh performance of Henry V is my all time favorite. Watching Marlon Brando as Marc Anthony was also amazing. I still go back and watch his eulogy for Caesar on Youtube every so often.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#89

Post by Solvency »

dbtc wrote: post #65
adamgordonbell wrote: post #54

As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "The very substance of the amb…

He wrote for our time too

It's almost like basic human behavior transcends time.

Re: My ranking of every Shakespeare play

#90

Post by apendleton »

ojbyrne wrote: post #3

That was fun to read, even though I would disagree with much of the article. I generally like the comedies least, the OP likes them most, but it's nice to see people talk about Shakespeare in an article linked here. A couple of comments I would make: * "People will think I’m crazy, but yes, I’m placing Henry IV above Henry V." I doubt many people would think you're crazy, the Henry IVs are generally considered better…

Yeah, I also liked the idea but apparently have pretty different tastes. I was pretty surprised to see Pericles and Othello almost next to each other in the rankings. Pericles is... not at all good. There's this whole build-up of dramatic tension and then in a sudden, bizarre deus ex machina moment, the plot takes a hard turn when pirates appear out of nowhere and kidnap one of the main characters for no clear reason. One production I saw at least try to lampshade the absurdity by giving the pirates eyepatches and parrots, which almost made it tolerable.

Also, maybe unpopular, but I don't love the Branagh Hamlet. It feels pretty overwrought to me, and I like Helena Bonham Carter's Ophelia better than Kate Winslet's.

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