Romeo and Juliet is among my very favorite plays. In popular culture it's usually treated as this great romance, but I think that idea misses the point entirely. Romeo and Juliet are teenagers, children really, and their love has all the adolescent intensity, rashness, grandiosity, and impulsivity you would expect from teenagers. (Could I be right in thinking this is the only play in which the Bard makes a point of mentioning his protagonists age? Eh, maybe in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Tempest also?) No, what makes this play great is the texture and life of the entire cast of characters, the tight and lively storytelling, and the deft use of tragic irony.
Speaking of the youth and impulsivity of the title characters, something that stood out to me on this reading was the relationships they have with their parents. Romeo's parents seem supportive in the abstract, but I can't recall that he ever actually shares a scene with either of them. They're just absent. Juliet's parents, on the other hand, are very present in her life, marrying her off to a man she barely knows at a young age and threatening her when she protests.
An interesting related thought to consider is that Romeo and Juliet each have a surrogate parent (Friar Laurence and the Nurse, respectively) who supports them, councils them, conspires to marry them, and helps them like true parents should.
Romeo and Juliet's psyches are not so deeply explored as Hamlet or Macbeth or Richard III, but the tapestry formed by all the relationships makes the play just as rich as those. Its these relationships between the characters, the complexity and effervescence of the interactions that give this play such staying power.
Does it make me a bad Shakespeare fan to say that while I like this, one of the most popular plays, I don't love it? Maybe I just never saw a great production.
Don't get me wrong. There are some great images (Prospero with his book, Caliban discovering booze), and some great language. But the story never really seems to fit together for me.
There's this fantastic thread of this powerful, almost inhuman sorcerer with a grand plan for terrible vengeance, prepared over years, and finally begun with the title storm. And he... calls it off and forgives everyone? It's a letdown.
And then there's Miranda, grown up isolated from all mankind save her father and the brutish Caliban, who has this fantastic feeling of epiphany when she is exposed to wider humanity ('Oh, brave new world!'). I really wish we see her story as she is taken to Milan and joins civilization.
For me, the only really satisfying feature of the conclusion to the tale is Arial's release from servitude.
I suspect that much of the play's enduring focus comes down to viewers looking for the voice of Shakespeare himself, heading for retirement in Stratford even as Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book. And, yeah, that does kind of get me too. All I'm saying is it's a mixed bag when taken as a whole.
For me, Lear is the most tragic of all Shakespearean tragedies, and it hits harder as I grow older. Both Lear and Gloucester are aging, and both are betrayed by their own progeny, the worst of the new generation casting aside their parents like worthless garbage. And it's all the worse because Lear's mind is slipping and Gloucester's loyalty is unbreakable.
I also love this play because it is among the most surreal of the canon. So much of the story is set in these nonspecific and liminal spaces, all moors and heaths and storm. And then there's the image of this half-mad king wandering the darkness in the company only of the acerbic fool, or the image of the blinded exile led to the edge of an illusory cliff by a beggar he doesn't know to be his own son. It's practically postmodern.
One of the Bard's very best.
One of the best comedy plays, with a rather intricate plot and little of the formula that governs most of the others. I read the scenes between Beatrice and Benedick as a forerunner to the screwball comedies of the early twentieth century. And the character of Dogberry is a sort of silly that is timelessly funny,
I've always enjoyed Shakespeare's villains. He paints them with such texture, such depth. You can really revel in Richard III's Machiavelian scheming or feel yourself sinking into Macbeth's guilt-haunted madness. And I enjoy Iago as well, but Othello is the most painful story to witness.
Shakespeare starts the play by showing you an unlikely couple who struggles against difficult odds to be together, only for us to watch Iago destroy them both utterly, without mercy or even much explanation beyond his own slighted ego. And it's all the worse because every other character believes him to be the most trustworthy and honorable of friends.
So perhaps of all the Bard's tragedies, this is the most tragic. It's also among the best paced and best structured. And Act IV Scene III is among the most emotionally gutting things ever written.
I'd consider As You Like It to be one of the best of the comedies. It certainly features some of the Bard's most famous turns of phrase and most eloquent speeches. The plot does meander quite a bit, but, with the help of an actual deus ex machina, everything comes together at the end and none of the threads are left dangling.
Among the most interesting aspects of the play is Shakespeare's particularly meta-level play with gender. Toward the end, you have the boy actor who would have played the female Rosalind, masquerading as male Ganymede (a name with homoerotic mythological origins), who is play acting as a female love interest for her own unwitting lover, whilst also becoming the love interest of a female character (again acted by a boy). One can't help but wonder whether Shakespeare was just having fun or there was more behind it. (Given his sonnets, it's not unreasonable to guess that there might be.)
This one is a very middle-of-the-pack Shakespeare work. There are plenty of dramatic scenes and arresting turns of phrase, but there's really no character central enough to be considered a protagonist, no one to whom the audience ever really feels a sense of attachment. It's as though you can feel the Bard treading ever so gingerly through the messy tale of Queen Elizabeth's parentage, lest he should run afoul of his sovereign's good graces. Indeed, the play's end leans heavily into Elizabethan propaganda.
Not that I blame Shakespeare for that. His shrewdness was certainly a part of his success. But it does mean that this particular play is more interesting as a historical artifact than as a work of drama.
