what are your favorite shakespeare plays and why?

Question

mine will always be Othello.
FYI, i have read them all and understand them completely, so i am just asking out of curiosity not because i need recommendations or anything.

Answer 1

much ado about nothing ..probably the most interesting lol oh and twelth night which i am studying now these ones are'nt boring lol

Answer 2

I have never liked the comedies (I'm not usually a fan of comedy anyway), there are several of the histories I enjoy (Richard III, Henry V, Titus Andronicus) but my favorites are the four tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello), Of those I utterly adore Macbeth. It can be played many different ways, ie as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Macbeth's true destiny, as Lady Macbeth forcing her husband into a crimical act, as Macbeth choosing for himself, etc. I think in this play the ebdless struggle of chaos vs. order is very well played out, more so than in the other tragedies.

Answer 3

Well, I've only read three so far but out of those three I'd have to say Macbeth. The other two were Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. I didn't like Romeo and Juliet at all and I really like Hamlet but Macbeth was more intrigueing. There was a little more to it.

Answer 4

Shakespeare "Twelfth Night" All because of one statement that is made in that play.....

Act 2, Scene 5

Some men are born great,
Some achieve greatness,
And Some have greatness Thrust Upon Them.

and isnt this statement true for the men our guard and protect our country , soliders and police, firefighters, doctors, teachers ...any body that helps our society.... that is why I like this play

Answer 5

A midsummers nights dream. Because more drama, it's not a tragedy story, it's funny , it's still about love and very orginal.

Answer 6

Midsummer's Night Dream. because it is the funniest.

Answer 7

I have to go with King Lear - although I might amend the response to call it Shakespeare's "greatest work", rather than his "best play."
Why - because In King Lear Shakespeare transcends the natural boundaries of drama to express life beyond the limits of his artistic medium. For this reason Bradley* calls it his greatest work but not his best play. Its failure as a play is a success at a higher and wider level. In Macbeth Shakespeare represents destruction at the physical level--war, murder, etc. In Lear it is faith, love, hope and expectation that are destroyed--things of the mind. It is psychological destruction in the wider plane of life, destruction of values not just bodies.
You can't see Lear performed without being left emotionally devastated - it's awesomely powerful.

*Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.
LECTURE VII
KING LEAR

King Lear has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him best would pronounce for keeping King Lear.

Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The 'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate altered King Lear for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In 1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.

What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and playgoer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I venture to doubt it. When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. King Lear seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.

This twofold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the affinities and the probable chronological position of King Lear. It is allied with two tragedies, Othello and Timon of Athens; and these two tragedies are utterly unlike.1 Othello was probably composed about 1604, and King Lear about 1605; and though there is a somewhat marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those in which evil appears in its coldest
and most inhuman forms, and those which exclude the supernatural from the action. But there is also in King Lear a good deal which sounds like an echo of Othello -- a fact which should not surprise us, since there are other instances where the matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare's mind and reappears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play. So, in King Lear, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of Goneril. Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of course essentially distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy, 'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster, again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried out) of making his father witness, without overhearing, his conversation with Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where Othello watches Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion of the temptation, where Gloster says to Edmund:

and of my land,
Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means
To make thee capable,

reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, 'Now art thou my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of certain unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the likelihood that the composition of the one followed at no great distance on that of the other.

Answer 8

macbeth