[HN Gopher] My ranking of every Shakespeare play
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My ranking of every Shakespeare play
Author : chmaynard
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-06-22 20:39 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| jsmith99 wrote:
| Measure for Measure is one of my favourites and I'm glad they
| enjoyed it so much. But it's much darker than they imply. The
| Duke is not necessarily 'soft hearted', more manipulative; and
| the ending where he informs Isabella he will marry her is not
| usually played as a happy ending anymore.
|
| The play has the only Shakespearean comic scenes that are still
| remotely funny. Angelo's struggle with temptation is also
| fascinating.
|
| The BBC radio play of it is also excellent
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0wrpp
| dang wrote:
| A well-known software consultant/writer once told me about his
| years-long hobby, with his wife, which 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 order, film date), not (film date,
| play order). That's a lot of Hamlets.
|
| Not sure what they were doing with the Shakespeare movies that
| got made since they started.
| irrational wrote:
| Did that include things like the modernized Romeo and Juliet
| with Leonardo DiCaprio or Gnomio and Juliet?
| irrational wrote:
| > Like many of you, I had assigned reading for several
| Shakespeare plays in high school. I loathed these assignments. I
| wasn't interested at the time, nor was I mature enough to
| appreciate the writing. Even revisiting as an adult, the
| conventional selection -- Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, etc.
| -- are not highly ranked on my list. For the next couple of
| decades I thought that Shakespeare just wasn't for me.
|
| I feel this. I think trying to teach these things to immature
| teenagers is a real disservice and forms a lifelong disdain for
| many of the great works. I was in my late 30s before I tried
| Shakespeare, Old Man and the Sea, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc.
| again. I loved them, but I easily could have never touched them
| again after the hatred I developed during high school.
| allturtles wrote:
| How do people find The Hollow Crown as an adaptation of the
| Henriad cycles? [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Crown_(TV_series)
| bazoom42 wrote:
| The Richard II is great! Didn't care that much for the rest.
| twiddling wrote:
| Simon Russell Beale's Falstaff was superb IMO. Hiddleston as a
| good Hal. Jeremy Irons was, well, Jeremy Irons
|
| I rather enjoyed the first four. the latter three with Benedict
| Cumberbatch as Richard III were rather weak. Especially when
| you look at Olivier's film.
| paulsutter wrote:
| 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
| Shakespeare," he said. "It would be positively a relief to me to
| dig him up and throw stones at him."
|
| - Tolstoy: "I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read
| Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure,
| but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best:
| "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only
| did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and
| tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling
| works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the
| civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the
| significance which this civilized world attributes to the works
| of Shakespeare was itself senseless."
| JasonFruit wrote:
| George Bernard Shaw, as the kids say, said a lot of things. He
| probably meant some of them, too.
| irrational wrote:
| Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing
| against popular books. Hang out on r/books and you soon read
| similar diatribes against Project Hail Mary, The Way of Kings,
| etc.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Huh, PHM is unpopular? _Artemis_ was fairly boring, but _Hail
| Mary_ was a wonderful pageturner.
| stavros wrote:
| It's not unpopular, there are just people who dislike it.
| stavros wrote:
| It's almost as if different people have different tastes!
| p_j_w wrote:
| >Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing
| against popular books.
|
| Is that a bad thing?
| bijection wrote:
| This Voltaire quote is misleading. He continues: "... one would
| imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. But
| amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which to this day make
| the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be
| found in Hamlet, by a bizarrerie still greater, some sublime
| passages, worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as though
| nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest
| conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever witless
| vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable."
|
| So while he is pointing out the crassness of the work, he does
| think it's great. Voltaire was very interested in the English,
| and pointing out the contrast here was definitely coming more
| from curiosity or even admiration than from dislike.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| >Tolstoy: ... "but having _read_ one after the other, ... "
|
| Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books.
| Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen.
|
| Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the
| Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through
| software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and
| maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the
| Beatles.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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 the east, and Juliet is
| the sun..."
|
| It came as a big surprise after reading and parsing out whole
| plays that other kids in my class were just reading some short
| guide and talking like they understood it.
|
| THe best movie version of the Tempest is Forbidden Planet, which
| can also just be viewed purely as science fiction.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| "Prosperos books" is a brilliant version of the Tempest.
| Forbidden Planet is great in its own right, but at best
| "inspired by". It uses a similar setup, but the story is
| entirely different.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| If anyone is interested in a retelling of King Lear as a samurai
| film, Akira Kurosawa has an interesting take on it in the movie
| Ran.
| as_bntd wrote:
| > Like many collections, they omit _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ due to
| unclear authorship, and for this reason I'm omitting it from my
| list as well.
|
| > Also, around 20% of plays credited to Shakespeare were
| collaborations of some degree, though the collaboration details
| have been long lost.
|
| Isn't it accepted that _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ was a
| collaboration?
|
| EDIT:
|
| > [On Hamlet] You'd be hard-pressed to find something that beats
| the faithful, star-studded 1996 major film adaption.
|
| Personally, I liked the (less faithful) 1948 film.
|
| EDIT2: I also found it amusing that the play he liked the best is
| the only Shakespeare play I've actually acted in (before his
| favorite adaptation came out).
| jfengel wrote:
| Several are confirmed collaborations, including Pericles and
| Henry VIII (and 1 Henry VI is almost certainly).
|
| The exclusion of 2NK is a bit arbitrary but you draw the line
| somewhere. I also excluded it from my quest to do every play.
|
| In the end I did it as a Zoom production, which kinda half
| counts, as is appropriate. It was actually a good deal better
| than I expected. I found some very good writing, and the plot
| was easier to clean up than, say, Two Gents or All's Well.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Loved this. But would like numbers next to the plays. Since it is
| a ranking.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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 why it's proved so
| enduringly popular.
| vr46 wrote:
| 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
| auditorium casually to stretch and top up on booze + vittles
| whereas now you're fused into the seat on arrival and too stiff
| to get out at the interval without a winch.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I 'studied' _Much Ado About Nothing_ in school (as the author
| wished for) but it was lost on me. Probably the issue is not
| normally the specific choice of play. But there are lots of
| things that are hard about Shakespeare in school, even ignoring
| the unfamiliar language. (A friend from another country said they
| studied some Shakespeare which had been translated into his
| language so didn't sound so unfamiliar, but I can't imagine
| something like that being done for english-speaking schools).
|
| I feel like _The Tempest_ is lower than I expected. I think it is
| often liked for not so easily fitting into one of the traditional
| genres. I feel like I see productions advertised reasonably
| frequently but I also did this at school so maybe I notice them
| more for that reason.
|
| I think the OP has the same favourite play as fictional classics
| professor Jim Lloyd, which is interesting for some, I guess.
| necubi wrote:
| The comedies are so much better performed than on the page. I
| find the humor gets a bit lost in the archaic language, but a
| good cast is able to bring it for modern audiences.
| as_bntd wrote:
| The problem with the stage is that it is much harder to stay
| on top of the plot. Especially when you aren't used to the
| language.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| As well as comedies, histories, and tragedies, some plays
| include The Tempest are often classified in a 4th genre -
| "romances" [0]
|
| 0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_late_romances#.
| ...
| lbeckman314 wrote:
| What are the handy SHA-1 sums for?
|
| "(By the way, a couple of handy SHA-1 sums for those who know how
| to use them:)"
|
| 0ae909e5444c17183570407bd09a622d2827751e
|
| 55c77ed7afb8d377c9626527cc762bda7f3e1d83
| lkbm wrote:
| Torrents for the TV adaption he mentions.
| lbeckman314 wrote:
| Ah, thank you!
| topkai22 wrote:
| Shakespeare remains a great example of the network effect in art.
| His works on their own are good, but not necessarily better than
| all other options in isolation. However, for various reasons
| Shakespeare became incredibly famous/popular and so many
| subsequent works reference Shakespearean works. Now it's
| impossible to avoid Shakespeare if you want to fully understand a
| huge swath of English literature. Meaning people will keep
| putting on Shakespeare, and and others will continue creating
| derivative works, continuing the popularity.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've read all the plays, but haven't seen many of them performed.
| My ranking would be different than his, but that's just how these
| types of things go. I appreciate the effort.
| all2 wrote:
| There are a fair few that were made into movies in the 60s and
| 70s that are definitely worth a watch. I saw _Taming of the
| Shrew_ for the first time in a long time and caught some
| hysterical jokes that I completely missed as a kid.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Favorite quote by Azimov:
|
| He was on some talk show, and the host asked why he wrote
| _Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare_ : aren't there already thousands
| of books about Shakespeare?
|
| He said, "Yeah, but not by me."
| munchler wrote:
| > Romeo and Juliet ... A beautiful play, but I just don't connect
| with its romantic core.
|
| Anyone who has children understands that this play is 100% a
| tragedy and is in no way romantic. Two teenage idiots think
| they're in love and end up killing themselves stupidly to prove
| it. The adults are also doofuses. The play itself is brilliant,
| but horrifying.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| They _are_ in love. This is what makes it such a tragedy.
|
| Romeo and Juliet are not idiots, they are clearly the most
| sensible persons in the play. And it is anachronisic to call
| them teenagers, since the idea of "teenage" as a stage between
| childhood and adulthood is a 20th century innovation. In the
| universe of the play, they are adults and of marrying age.
|
| Apparently some teachers try to teach the play as a warning
| against young love, probably because they are afraid of
| students emulating the sex and suicide. But if you actually
| read the play, it is entirely on the side of the young lovers
| and condemns the parents and society.
| el_nahual wrote:
| 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 shakespare.
|
| I recommend starting with Episode 8, "Exploring a character" if
| only to see David Suchet utterly _outclass_ (the much more
| famous) Patrick Stewart in their portrayal of Shylock.
| AquinasCoder wrote:
| To add to this, I have a much deeper appreciation for all the
| works of Shakespeare I have seen performed rather than merely
| read. Even hearing certain soliloquies out loud makes them much
| more powerful and engaging.
|
| I think Shakespeare is better if you suspend belief a bit in
| some plot machinations and enjoy the work as performed and
| written. It's not that you shouldn't analyze the work and think
| deeply on its themes, but I find that many approach Shakespeare
| as a philosopher first rather than as a playwright and poet.
| deepspace wrote:
| This clip by Ian McKellan talking about acting Macbeth was an
| eye-opener for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGbZCgHQ9m8
|
| It shows what a genius and consummate professional McKellan is,
| and demonstrates the effort he puts into preparing for acting.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| 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 and for the reason
| mentioned: Falstaff.
|
| * On performances of Richard III: "I liked two different
| performances for different reasons. The 1995 major film puts the
| play in the World Word II era. It's solid and does well standing
| alone. The BBC production has linked casting with the three parts
| of Henry VI, which allows one to enjoy it in full in its broader
| context. It's also well-performed, but obviously has less
| spectacle and a lower budget." -- you really need to watch the
| 1955 version for Laurence Olivier's performance.
|
| Also on editions: The Riverside Shakespeare is great.
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1036552
| jfengel wrote:
| So much depends on the performance. Some of the comedies make
| great productions, suitably edited and with the right amount of
| physical comedy.
|
| Right on the page they are nearly all a slog. The tragedies
| make better reading.
| twiddling wrote:
| Falstaff. Ah Falstaff.
|
| I would recommend Orson Welles "Chimes at Midnight" as a
| wonderful setting of Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2.
| as_bntd wrote:
| Laurence Olivier is a great actor. I've enjoyed several of his
| films, including his Hamlet adaptation (which he also
| directed). I have yet to watch Richard III though.
| tomcam wrote:
| I thought he overacted that role. I feel it requires a much
| lighter touch than most actors give it.
| jfengel wrote:
| Timon of Athens is much better if you view it as a black comedy.
|
| One of the best compliments I ever received was an audience
| member who said, "Why don't they do this play more often?" Well,
| it really sucks if you take it seriously.
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