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William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in all of English literature and,

in my opinion, the greatest writer of all time. We find his influence

absolutely everywhere, not only in the great works of literature that came

after him, but in our own thoughts and speech, our feelings and our deepest

beliefs. Shakespeare created a pantheon of inexhaustible protagonists who

convince us of their reality.

And indeed, for those who read Shakespeare consistently across the

course of their life and draw nourishment from his works, because

indeed the works of Shakespeare have a healing power to them, for those who

read and reread Shakespeare, many will find that his people are not characters.

their old friends.

And a deep reading of the complete works of Shakespeare is ultimately a quest for

yourself, because that is who you will find, that's who will be staring back at

you as you journey through his plays and poems.

And that's what we found when we embarked on the reading adventure of a

lifetime at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, because indeed we read the

complete works of Shakespeare.

in a proposed chronological order, the order of composition.

And by doing so, we got to marvel at the great writer's aesthetic and cognitive

development. We broke his career down into four phases, beginning with the

apprentice years in which the great artist found his voice, his unique

voice. And then we got to see his glorious rise, which culminated in the

great productions made for the Globe Theatre.

After that, we then moved into what I dubbed the sublime years, which saw the

tragic procession, one of the most awe-inspiring achievements in all of

human history, with masterpiece after masterpiece written back to back in a

fury of dark creativity.

And then we made it to the final years, the twilight years, in which Will,

because when you read and reread the great works, when you read through

everything he's produced, you come to affectionately know him as Will. We then

reached the twilight years in which we saw Will winding down his career with

even more resonant works of genius and ingenuity.

we got to see that Shakespeare became a supreme master of every genre. Comedy,

tragedy, history, romance and poem unlimited.

And indeed one of his greatest gifts to the world was his ability to bend, blend

and subvert generic expectations and run these different genres together.

And the lecture series for that incredible project is still available in

the back catalogue of the Hardcore Literature Book Club at patreon.com.

forward slash hardcore literature. We now have discussions and deep dives into

every single thing the Bard ever produced.

And those who took the journey with us said it was the most life-changing

reading experience they have ever embarked upon. And I would completely

agree. It's the most rewarding thing.

that I have personally done.

And you can kick off your deep reading of Shakespeare at any time, at your own

pace, because new readers are diving into the works of William Shakespeare

all of the time. So join them if you're interested in a journey that will lead

to enormous self-growth.

But today I would like to reflect upon that journey and run through my ranking

of the complete works of Shakespeare.

I've read through the complete works several times now and it is always a

life changing experience it always offers something new and profound and at

the book club we followed an orienting exercise where after each and every play

you give a grading for that work a b c all the way through to f you give a

grading based on your personal enjoyment

or lack of. There's no right or wrong answers here, you're trying to find your

personal canon. So you bring yourself powerfully to the plays, you give every

single one a grading, and you also locate your one passage, that's your

favourite passage, one passage that does all the heavy lifting for how you feel

about that play. And readers also gave a review for each and every play, and I

want to share with you now the works that resonated most with me, and the

works that didn't, because we're doing a reverse ranking.

And we're going from the very worst thing I think the Bard ever wrote...

to the very best thing. So let's dive in now and please let me know your thoughts

on any of these plays and your experience with Shakespeare as we move

through. Let's begin with the worst thing Shakespeare ever wrote.

So the play that takes the prize for the absolute worst thing I think Shakespeare

ever wrote and a play that gets an F and I have no shame, I feel no guilt in

giving this play an F That play is The Merry Wives of Windsor. I really truly

think this is the worst thing Shakespeare ever wrote. I groan whenever

I come to it. Why is it so bad? Well, The Merry Wives was written mid-career,

so it's not an early work. It doesn't have the excuse of being rough or

lacking insight because Shakespeare is still in his juvenile phase. It's mid

-career and comes after the Bard having written a really great procession of

plays. This one is terrible because it was written to commission and legend has

it that it was dashed off in just a fortnight. To be honest I don't even

think Will spent that amount of time on this play. He could write very swiftly,

you had to back in the day in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, you

had to write several plays at the same time, you had to write whilst

performances were ongoing.

Being a playwright or a playmaker was a very busy, frantic and demanding

lifestyle. But he wrote this one to commission.

Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth specifically wanted Shakespeare to write

a play with more Falstaff, the character Falstaff. In fact she wanted a play that

showed Falstaff in love. Now we will come to Falstaff soon enough in our

reverse ranking because he is one of the four...

inexhaustible protagonists. That's what AC Bradley, whose lectures in book form

on Shakespearean tragedy, would say. Falstaff is one of the inexhaustible

protagonists. You can never reach the end of his consciousness.

He is always out ahead of you. Falstaff is an incredible character.

He was very, very popular at the time. But I think the idea that Queen

Elizabeth requested something with Falstaff in love is apocryphal because

the Queen took a very dim view of anything concerning love and lust.

The problem I have with this play is that this is not full stuff. This is not

the inexhaustible.

Falstaff, the lovable rogue we have come to know. We got to know him in Henry IV,

parts one and two. He's not here. This is an imposter wearing Falstaff's

clothes and going by his name, but this is not Falstaff. I don't like this play

because I think it has no heart. It's meant to be a comedy, but it is not

funny and it is very forgettable. And not only that, but I am harsher on it

because it comes...

mid-career so Will should have done better and ultimately it gets the lowest

rating because he mangled one of his greatest characters.

Now let's move into the second worst play and it's pretty much neck and neck

between these two. I give this one an F as well and this is an early play. This

is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, easily one of my least favourites, and I think

objectively one of the weakest in Shakespeare's canon. And I do believe

that there are objective markers of quality when it comes to literature.

Yes, of course, this is a subjective endeavour, your own experiences are

going to colour what you like and what you don't like, but a play can, as Oscar

Wilde would say, either be well written or poorly written, and this one is very

poorly written. It's worth giving Will a break, however, because the two

gentlemen of the Rona has been thought by many to have been his very first

play. Now there are several possibilities for plays that could have

been his first.

Many think that the Henry VI plays were among his first, many think that the

Comedy of Errors might have been his first, I think the Comedy of Errors was

probably his first, but they were overlapping so they were all being

written around the same time. But anyway, this could have been his very

first play and you can tell. Now whilst he displays technical proficiency, when

it comes to comedy.

The characterisation...

It's just so wooden. This does not even feel like Shakespeare. When you say

Shakespeare you think psychologically complex characters. You do not think the

cardboard cutouts that we get in this play.

Again, for a comedy it's not funny, it's not witty and it's not perceptive. We go

to Shakespeare's comedies to learn the great truths about the human condition.

We find none of that here. And not only that but there's no dazzling wordplay.

The story itself is boring and, as I said, there is very little of what would

go on to be Shakespeare here. Now, the one standout or the one saving grace in

this work is the double act of the jester, Launce, and his dog, his canine

companion, Crabbe. Anyway, let's go into the next lacklustre work and another

play that gets an F grading.

from me. And this is actually a later work, and this is Pericles.

I don't agree with Ben Johnson on much when it comes to Shakespeare, but I do

agree with him when he says that Pericles is a mouldy tale and stale.

Pericles was excluded from the first folio. The first folio, by the way, is

one of the most significant and influential doc- and publications in all

of human history. This was excluded from that and I have never been able to

develop any passion for Pericles, which is a bit odd because thematically

Pericles has everything that should do it for me. It's a sea narrative and I

absolutely adore anything that captures the sublimity of the sea. I love the

poetry, the sea poetry of Walt Whitman, I love the sea novels of Joseph Conrad,

I like when it comes to to the Bible, I really like the Book of Jonah, but this

play, which proved to be one of the most popular ones in Shakespeare's day,

absolutely doesn't move me at all. Now that shouldn't come as a surprise

because this is one of Will's collaborative.

pieces, and the first half of Pericles wasn't written by him at all. It was

written, in fact, by an aesthetically horrendous tenth-rate writer called

George Wilkins, who actually penned a novel on Pericles many years before this

play. Now, there are moments of beauty in the second half of the play, thanks

to Shakespeare, but overall I see this as a very rough work. It's also

unrevised, it's unpolished, and... We only have a corrupted copy to go on.

Having said that, I do think that there is great visual potential when it comes

to this play. You can really make it into a spectacle.

And it's also important to consider that this is very much a watershed work that

marks Shakespeare leaving pure tragedy behind and moving into romance,

or what we might call tragicomedy.

And thus, it feels a little bit like a training exercise for this new generic,

mode. It's like he's thinking things through.

But ultimately Pericles is very far down on the list of plays I would ever want

to return to because, simply put, there are just so many more robust, complex

and poetic works in the Bard's canon.

Now let's move into my first D-grade play and indeed I'm going to be grouping

three plays together because we're talking about Henry VI, Parts I, two

and three. I'm going to group them all together because I do think they overall

get the same grading. If I was forced to differentiate a little bit I would say

that parts two and three are better than the first part, but let's consider them

as a trio because that's how they're best appreciated.

When it comes to Henry VI, we're talking high-stakes political drama.

We're talking about international and domestic strife, infighting,

manipulation, power plays, and bloodshed. These are the reasons why the

Henry VI plays proved very popular with the Elizabethan audience.

But parts one, two, and three are very rarely staged.

today, unlike Richard III.

And that's actually the concluding play in what is essentially a tetralogy.

And Richard III loses an enormous amount of power when viewed in isolation.

Now it's good enough to be resonant in isolation, but you really do need to

have the backstory of the Wars of the Roses and how that developed. You need

to have that backstory in order to appreciate Richard III.

So if for no other reason Read Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3 in order to appreciate

Richard III.

So watch Richard III in isolation.

is kind of like watching The Return of the Jedi without first seeing A New Hope

and The Empire Strikes Back.

And if you're interested in English history, these are good plays to watch

just for that, and you can understand the influence upon George R. R.

Martin's Game of Thrones, which is very heavily inflected by a

Shakespearean presentation of English history, English Civil War.

Despite the fact that these plays are quite far down on my personal list,

list. There is a production, there is a film series produced for these plays and

indeed his greatest English histories that is one of the best productions I've

ever seen. It's called The Hollow crown.

If you haven't seen it then I thoroughly envy your first watching.

You are absolutely in for a treat. I would recommend The Hollow Crown as a

great entrance to Shakespeare.

But overall the Henry VI plays are some of the weakest in the Bard's canon which

perhaps seems fitting given the fact that they are about one of our weakest

kings. Again we have to forgive Shakespeare a little bit because these

were written during his apprentice years.

He was still getting to grips with the playmaking business.

But even in these early plays, which are very rough, I think we can tell that

history had Shakespeare's heart.

He was automatically proficient at comedy. That was the mode that he was

just born into.

He was a great comic. He had to work very hard at tragedy. We know him for

his tragedies today, but he really had to hone his tragic skills.

And I think it's history that he was most interested in. Up until the end,

when he started to... develop an interest in romance. And of course

there's an overlap between romance and history. But we've got to be careful

when we say history because anybody who knows their English history will see

those Shakespeare plays and will observe that there is much more propaganda than

history. We're talking Tudor propaganda here.

What E.M.W. Tillyard would call the Tudor myth. That's what we find in

Will's history plays.

They're not faithful to how things really went.

but that's because Will was rather attached to his head, and you must bear

in mind that when he was writing who was on the throne, it was Queen Elizabeth.

So to present anything that might be viewed as critical of her family line

would have been a very dangerous thing to do, indeed.

And that takes us into our next play, another history play that gets a D

ranking from me, a play that's about...

Queen Elizabeth's father, and that's Henry VIII.

Now this is not an early play.

This is a play that comes right at the end of his career.

It's his second last play, and it was written in collaboration with John

Fletcher. We see that many of the worst works are either right at the beginning

of his career or right at the end.

And it was actually during a performance of this play.

thanks to a cannon fired in one of the scenes that the Globe Theatre caught

fire and burnt to the ground.

Shakespeare's retirement from the theatre came hard upon that. He withdrew

from the theatre, he withdrew as shareholder and playmaker, and indeed

one cannot help but wonder if he would have continued writing if the Globe had

not burned down. Did that prompt him to do something he was already considering?

Was he preparing to bid adieu already?

We don't really know, and it's one of the greatest mysteries at the heart of

Shakespeare studies.

Why did he stop writing?

four years before his death.

The idea of retirement wasn't really a thing back then, so it's very, very

strange. We can discern a little bit of weariness, world weariness, and maybe a

little bit of weariness with the theatre world towards the end in his plays. We

can also discern that he was clearly physically unwell.

But interestingly, when it comes to Henry VIII, it's not actually Elizabeth

that's on the throne, it's King James I, the first of England and the sixth of

Scotland. So this is a Jacobean play.

Even though this is part of a sweeping historical saga, this is a play that

could not have been written under the previous monarch because he was writing

about Queen Elizabeth's father.

and he was also writing about her mother too, Anne Boleyn, and you likely know

what happened to Anne Boleyn. That's Henry's second wife and who he divorced

Catherine for, and he would end up beheading her because she could not give

him a son.

And this is a very curious play because we see, we get Shakespeare's trademark

triumphant... women's voices come through. We get that particularly in the

character of Catherine.

We also get a Lucifer-like Cardinal Wolsey, who feels very much like a

hangover from one of Shakespeare's earlier better plays.

He feels like a hangover from the inexhaustible protagonist Iago from

Othello. It's a curious play because this one ends on a note of jubilation

with the news that Anne has given birth to Henry's daughter.

And it's curious because we know what the play leaves out. We do know that

there's probably not much to be celebrating because Henry was not happy

about it. this.

He would behead Anne Boleyn and he would run through six wives in total and by

the time of his death he drove England into a state of total bankruptcy.

This play Henry VIII is rarely performed today but I think it should be, even

though I give it a D I do think it should be. And the best way to perform

this one is to really lean into its pomp and pageantry and the best way to view

this one is to know something of the real history lurking below the surface.

Now we move into another work that I'm not a huge fan of. This one gets a D

from me too and this is not a play but rather a poem, a narrative poem. We're

talking about Shakespeare's Lucrece.

He wrote this very early on in his career, back to back with another

narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. And he wrote these poems because he was in the

Elizabethan equivalent of lockdown as plague was tearing through the country

and so the playhouses were shut. Over the course of his career he had to deal

with the theaters being shut down constantly either thanks to plague or

thanks to the puritans who really thought what he was doing to be

completely immoral i really find this an uncomfortable poem to read it's kind of

stomach churning and of course that's probably no surprise when you find out

what it's about it is about the devastating sexual assault and suicide

of a Roman noblewoman, Lucrece.

We can see in this poem that Shakespeare is learning his poetic craft and he's

trying to write in a more mature vein during an immature stage of his career.

I find both the subject matter and the lurching style in which it is written to

be stomach churning and so I am in no hurry to reread it again.

And I'm also in no hurry to reread the next work which also gets a D from and

that is the play King John.

This is a very mixed work indeed, and has long been one of my least

favourites. Now, once upon a time, this was my least favourite, when I was doing

my first chronological read-through of The Bard as part of my final year in the

Shakespeare module, studying English at university.

And, historically, King John has not been a popular one with theatregoers

either. It's very rarely performed.

Now, I've gained a greater appreciation for this one in recent times and the

reason why it's not too horrific, it's not too bad, is because we can see

elements of revision and rewriting.

Shakespeare was a relentless rewriter over the course of his career. Now there

are some very painful meditations on child loss in this play that seem to

have been interpolated and inserted at a later date from the original

composition.

a date after the death of his only son, Hamner. A really tragic loss.

Now, Harold Bloom would consider this one to be a special play because he

contends that Shakespeare's invention of the human, he believes that Shakespeare

invented all of us, we are the product of him, he believes that his invention

of humanity as we know it began here in this play, this less than stellar play,

in which we hear the character, the bastard Falkenbridge, actually thinking

aloud

in verse, seemingly for the first time in literary history.

Specifically, thinking and overhearing himself think, catching himself in

thought. This was Bloom's contention that Shakespeare's characters would self

-overhear and change by virtue of hearing themselves.

They are solipsistic, they're narcissistic, unlike with Cervantes's

characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who change by hearing one

another. They talk, they listen, they change. Shakespeare's characters hear

themselves and then change.

Despite that, I ultimately find King John to be a very boring play and also

very much devoid of the historical events, the greatest events of

historical influence when it comes to this monarch, so I'm not a fan of it.

Now we come to another play that gets a D grading from me and that is All's Well

That Ends Well. This play, taken from one of the stories in Boccaccio's

Decameron, is one of the Bard's least performed, least popular and least liked

works. It has a really less than stellar critical reception. And yet, this is a

play that many bardolaters, if you love Shakespeare you are a bardolater, this

is a play that many lovers of Shakespeare find to be a particular

favourite or something of an under-loved, under-appreciated gem that

deserves more attention.

And I wish I could say that I was one of them, but this play for me has the

rather dubious honour of once being my second least favorite now it's gone up a

little bit more recently in my estimation

from flicking through it again and considering some of his other plays, but

this is still very much not one of my favourites. Maybe to me it's not quite

the travesty that is The Merry Wives of Windsor, but I really wouldn't be in a

rush to see this one again either.

But that's not to say that I don't see any redeeming moments in this play. I do

see flashes of brilliance and I do see incredible lines of poetry.

Again though, like with Merry Wives, I think I have a problem with where this

is positioned.

in the Bard's career relative to its quality.

This is quite a late work written in his mature phase and so I cannot help but

think it should have been better. Now, as we found at the Hardcore Literature

Book Club reading the complete works, we found that genius is not linear. It goes

up and down and up and down and it's quite an iterative.

process. So trying to discern when something was composed based on the

quality of it isn't always super reliable because you can have weak works

later on and you can have very strong works early on. But All's Well That Ends

Well comes right after what I call the tragic procession. Four of Will's

greatest dark masterpieces and it still contains a lot of residue from those

plays even though this is a comedy it feels dark, it feels bitter, it feels...

quite unpleasant to read and I think in this play we can really tell that

Shakespeare was struggling with a painful physical ailment towards the end

of his life. Clearly his health is causing him a fair bit of trouble. So

this may be a comedy.

but it's clear that the man behind the work is in a lot of physical and

emotional pain, and so that's just not super pleasant for me to read.

On top of this, it just doesn't feel like Shakespeare to me, and indeed,

statistical analyses of this play have proposed Thomas Middleton to be the most

significant collaborator in this work, although there are many candidates for

who the writers of this one were, and most of it really isn't Shakespeare.

Having said that, the passages that are clearly Shakespearean, I do enjoy. The

passages that are clearly Middletonian, I don't really enjoy. Now we get to

another work that leaves me disturbed and sickened and unsettled, and I give

this play a D, although I have been harsher on it before. We're talking

about Titus Andronicus, the tragedy, his first Roman play that follows the

downfall and the revenge of the military general.

Titus. And I'm not a sensitive viewer or reader, I'm really not, so it always

surprises me to find that any time I return to Titus Andronicus, I always get

a horrible feeling in my stomach. I always find myself sickened. And indeed,

the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, has found Titus Andronicus to be one of

the rare few Shakespeare plays that always make a loss.

If you want to make a killing at the box office, don't produce Titus Andronicus.

Now, Clearly they've not taken their own advice because at time of recording I

believe they are now gearing up for a new production of Titus starring Simon

Russell Beale as Titus. I'm very keen to see that production and see if my view

of this play

changes with that because I'm a huge fan of his. I loved his Falstaff in The

Hollow Crown.

Although many find this play to be a complete abomination, there are many

readers who really have their ears prick up when they come to Titus Andronicus if

they're doing a chronological reading because many of the plays at the very

start of Will's career are a little bit boring, a little bit uninspired.

Titus is the first play that really grabs hold of you and says, hey...

you're going to pay attention to this, whether you like it or not.

It's absolutely filled with over-the-top violence and really grotesque depravity

and torture.

So violent is the content that many have claimed that Shakespeare, writing in

collaboration with George Peel, was actually putting together a parody of

the kind of Senecan revenge tragedies, the banquets of blood that enraptured

the Elizabethan theatre-going audience.

Harold Bloom even would say that he would not attend another performance

unless a director gave it a Mel Brooks.

style, comical, musical rehaul.

He actually wanted something similar when it came to The Merchant of Venice,

too. Although it's worth saying there's a very good film version starring

Anthony Hopkins.

And when it comes to Titus, we can definitely see foreshadows of the

grotesque, tragic violence that would be taken to sublime heights.

in King Lear. We can see the writer of Lear is here, waiting.

And there's also a sense that after Titus, Will had purged something from

his system.

Now, we're still in the D-grade plays for me, and my next play is the Comedy

of Errors, which gives us a very early demonstration of Shakespeare's deft hand

when it comes to comedy. As I said, he had to work upon his tragic skills, but

he was born with a comics touch.

What we find in the Comedy of Errors, which I believe was most likely his very

first play, is a very straightforward exercise, and he's just taking a story

from the ancient Roman comedies. He's taking from Plautus, and this play,

which is the shortest in his canon, follows two sets of twins, and gives us

a really slapstick.

farcical tale, and we see over the course of Shakespeare's career that he

is obsessed with twin protagonists.

He's also obsessed with corrupt, scheming brothers, and he so rarely

depicts happy families. But it makes sense as to why he was interested in

twins, because he himself was the father of twins.

Hamnet and Judith, and the most devastating thing that would happen to

Shakespeare and stay with him all of his life would be the death of his only son,

Whilst The Comedy of Errors is technically good, and I find it's very

readily adaptable to different cultures. I've seen Persian, Japanese and Indian

retellings of this tale.

I find it overall to be quite dull, boring and forgettable. It's enjoyable

enough with the right production but The Comedy of Errors is ultimately one of

the plays that excites me the least in his canon.

And we're breaking into the C-grade plays with our next one. We're getting

into the mid-tier of the list and I give this next... play a C- and this is

Love's Labour's Lost.

One of Harold Bloom's particular favourites and we all have our

particular

personal, subjective favourites which are not necessarily the sublime peaks

of Shakespeare's output.

Bloom would call this one a linguistic fireworks display and would say that it

wouldn't be until James Joyce and his Finnegans Wake in the 20th century that

we would see such a ferocious coining of new lexis and such joyful, zestful

playing with language and punning with words.

This really is Shakespeare on his linguistic heights.

And this is one of four early lyrical plays. We've got Love's Labour's Lost,

we've got Richard II, The Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, all

written back-to-back at the same period of his life, around the time that he was

finding his true voice and really settling into the groove of being a

great writer.

But the lyricism, unfortunately, would come to an end with the death of his

son, because we see after that his plays take a decidedly darker tone after this

and he starts to utilise prose more extensively.

But Love's Labour's lost. This is a feast of language.

is a treasure trove of words and it's also a relentlessly rhyming pageant that

bears clear marks of both the early and more mature Shakespeare.

The verbal ingenuity comes from the energy of youth, and the richness, the

nuance, the layered meanings comes from the Bard's revisions at a later date. An

older Bard comes back to love's labours lost.

It's this play that we have to thank for introducing, popularising and inventing,

in the form that we recognise today, the following words. Words like auspicious,

critic, eventful, zany, and madcap, to name just a few.

This play is about four lords who have sworn off women so as to dedicate

themselves to their studies with their king, with the aim of making their

academy the envy of the world. Now, of course, because this is a comedy, we see

that they end up breaking their oaths and they find themselves under the sway

of some lovely ladies.

But, curiously, this is a comedy that doesn't end in marriage.

Comedy and tragedy are structural terms. They point to the structure of a play. A

tragedy is a tragedy because it ends in death with the stage and page awash with

blood. A comedy is a comedy because it ends...

in marriage.

It's not the humour primarily that dictates whether something is a comedy

or not. Both forms can be funny, both can be tragic. This is a comedy that

does not end in a marriage.

So can we call it a comedy? We do think that there was a counterpart play called

Love's Labour's One, in which we see the young men do get with their loves. But

this play is sadly lost to us, along with a play called Cardinio, which was

based on one of Cervantes' characters from Don Quixote. Now we get to another

C-minus play with Timon of Athens, and this is another really curious specimen

of a play. This one trails after the tragic procession, and what we find with

Timon is a really uneven work that is really sublime in places, and sounds

like an aftersong to King Lear, and clearly bears the psychic residue of his

great tragedies. But this also somehow sounds like it would fit better at the

beginning of his canon. It's half Lear, half Titus Andronicus. Again it's

no surprise to find that this is a collaborative piece.

The parts clearly penned by Will Shakespeare are grand, they're sublime,

they're resonant. The parts penned by Thomas Middleton are less so and a

little bit lacklustre. This is another play that bears the mark of his illness

in old age and this is also a thoroughly misanthropic play. And it's

understandable. By the time Shakespeare writes this play, he has lost his son.

He's lost his father.

He's painfully ill. He's been beset. with many legal issues and family

issues, and he's also weathered the slings and arrows of his outrageous

fortune. He's had to become accustomed to being one of the most famous men in

England, and so that must come with a lot of ups and a lot of downs.

Timon of Athens is like a religious fable, or like a medieval morality play.

despite the Athenian setting.

And Timon, who Shakespeare learnt about from Plutarch and Montaigne, two of his

greatest influences, was a real-life contemporary of Socrates.

We see we get a Diogenes figure, the great misanthropic philosopher.

We get a figure like him come into this play too.

We see that Timon...

is very generous to his kinsmen in the first half of the play, but they take

advantage of his generosity.

They are just fair weather friends.

And when he falls on hard times, where are they? They're nowhere to be found.

They will not entertain, even for a second, the prospect of helping the one

who so generously helped them.

And so we see he has this...

sublime break, this huge mental breakdown where he completely rails

against mankind.

He goes full mankind-hating. And we might observe that in every misanthrope

there was once a hopeful idealist.

Misanthropes are made from disappointment.

You have these high ideals and hopes for humanity and then you have those ideals

dashed. There's an incredible scene midway through the play where Tymon

throws a banquet for his ungrateful friends only to reveal water and rocks

rather than food and then he breaks from society and he goes and lives in a cave

away from the world of men.

This was Karl Marx's favourite Shakespeare play because of its message

that love of money is the root of all evil.

We get a really profound message from the character Appimantus who tells Tymon

lemon. The middle of humanity thou never knowest, but the extremity on both

ends. What's he saying there? He's saying that Timon has flown from one

extreme to another.

Overindulgence, when it comes to generosity, to sudden reclusiveness and

hatred of mankind.

They're both of the same energy. His withdrawal and his initial kindness,

they come from the same place. And this is not a virtue.

Aristotle would advise us that living virtuously is all about finding the mean

between two extremes.

We might recall the story of Daedalus and Icarus in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Icarus was advised to fly a midway course, not too close to the sun, not

too close to the water, but he doesn't listen. That's the folly of pride, and

pride always goeth before destruction.

and a haughty spirit before a fall, as Proverbs tells us. He goes too close to

the sun and his wings are melted and he falls and he dies. We see a similar fall

in this really strange work, Timon of Athens.

And let's move into another C-minus play for me with the two noble kinsmen. Now,

this is actually Shakespeare's last work.

Now, his last solo work was The Tempest.

This is a collaborative work with John Fletcher who was the up-and-coming

playwright in Shakespeare's troupe. And there's something really touching with

Shakespeare choosing to end his career with a strong note of gratitude for his

greatest precursor, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer and Shakespeare are both fathers of English literature.

Because indeed, The Two Noble Kinsmen is a retelling of the Knight's Tale from

the Canterbury Tales, which we have a lecture for at the Hardcore Literature

Book Club. As is so often the case with the collaborative pieces, I think we can

tell which parts were written by Shakespeare and which were written by

Fletcher. Fletcher's parts are comic and light, Shakespeare's are dark and

serious. Despite the C- rating I have a really soft spot for this play and I

believe that it shows that Will was not quite done with writing, that he was

going in an exciting new direction, or he could have done. But he would retire

from the stage right after this play, and he wouldn't write another thing for

four years until his death.

And in this play we get the last lines Shakespeare ever wrote, from the

character Duke Theseus, who says, Oh you heavenly charmers, what things you make

of us, for what we lack we laugh.

For what we have are sorry, still are children in some kind. Let us be

thankful for that which is.

And let's go off and bear us like the time.

Chaucerian scholar Talbot Donaldson would paraphrase the equivalent line in

Chaucer's The Knight's Tale as this. It is a good thing for a man to bear

himself with equanimity, and that means poise in the face of difficulty, for one

is constantly keeping appointments one never made.

Shakespeare, in his final moments, gave us wisdom for how to live. We laugh for

what we lack.

We're sorry for what we have. And so we're like children.

But because the time will come when we will be no more, we should bear

ourselves respectfully and be grateful for what is. I love that. Now we get to

a C grade.

poem with Venus and Adonis, the early narrative poem that he wrote alongside

Lucrece. There's a really common argument in Bardolatry that goes like

this. Was Shakespeare more poet or playwright? Was he a frustrated poet

who needed to turn to the stage to turn a buck? Now, I personally don't like

this line of questioning because it implies that there's something inferior

about playwriting, and that it is more worthy to be a poet than a playwright. I

don't believe this for a second. It was theatre that made me fall in love with

literature as a whole, and I find the theatre to be a really exciting, dynamic

and rousing aesthetic realm. There's something special about the theatre.

But to answer that question anyway, I would personally say that Shakespeare is

a playmaker through and through, because whenever he does turn his hand to

straight poetry, as we see he's liable to do when he's in lockdown due to

plague or the Puritans are shutting down the theatres, we find that Shakespeare

continues to think in dramatic terms. He writes great poetry with great narrative

force, and his poems are full of characterisation.

I would contest that even his poems could be powerfully performed on stage.

In Venus and Adonis, we see Shakespeare's indebtedness to Ovid, one

of the most important books in Will's library, which was very small. He only

had a few books that he returned to again and again. One of the most

important volumes was Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Arthur

Golding. And if you're interested in reading that, then check out our lecture

series for that incredible work.

at patreon.com forward slash hardcore literature.

Shakespeare's influences included Ovid, Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, and

Hollinshed's Histories. And we see that he retells the tale of Adonis, the

mortal loved by the goddess Venus, but he ends up gored by a boar. And then his

blood would fertilise the earth, giving rise to a new flower, a delicate flower.

Now, Ted Hughes had a really fascinating theory in which he saw those two...

early narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, as holding the key or the

formula to unlocking his entire

trajectory. He would see his plays as fitting within one sweeping saga,

and that there are recurring tropes concerning death and rebirth, and there

are also two recurring types of goddess in his heroines that are very important

to consider.

Venus and Adonis is a colourful poem. It feels like you're looking at a Titian

painting. And although Venus and Adonis sold very well and was popular in Will's

time, I still think this one bears the hallmarks of early Shakespeare for me.

So I think a C grade is generous for this one. And we've got another early

work and another C grading for our next play, which has always been a particular

favourite of mine, and that is The Taming of the Shrew. Now, when it comes

to Shakespeare studies, there are two kinds of what we call problem plays.

Typically, when we talk about problem plays, we're talking about the problem

of genre.

What genre is it? When we say problem play, we often refer to a tragicomedy or

a romance, but there are also those plays that are thematically problematic,

and The Taming of the Shrew is one of those problem plays, and has been read

in the modern era as a thoroughly misogynistic work.

But are the women in this play the butt of the jokes?

Or is it the men who are being lambasted, taken at face value? This is

a bawdy play about a man called Petruchio who seeks to tame

his wife.

Catarina. And by tame, we mean he subjects her to relentless emotional

abuse. He meets her physical abuse with emotional abuse, he gaslights her, and

they engage in psychological warfare.

And they do that until, by the end, we find a Catarina who seems to be broken

and ultimately subservient to her patriarchal ruler.

But is she?

That's the reading on face value.

Read on a deeper level...

One understands that Shakespeare's supreme talent and gift to the world,

just like that of Geoffrey Chaucer's, is that of irony.

And if we understand that he gives us these plays that are cast in irony, then

what we see by the end of this play is a Kate who is meaning something quite

different to what she is saying. That's what irony is. Not meaning what you say,

not saying what you mean. By the end of the play we get this really iconic

monologue on how women need to obey their husbands.

But there's a strong tacit implication that all of this is just posturing. All

of this is a smoke screen.

By the end of this rom-com, man and woman have become a team deciding to

oppress others rather than each other and they make a pact and the pact is

this on the part of Katerina I'll appear the good wife in public so it can look

like you're wearing the trousers but don't forget who's running things behind

the scenes given the powerfully feminist nature or we should say proto-feminist

and we could say that Shakespeare forged feminism or helped to forge it as we

know it given the feminist nature of all the rest of his works, it would be

really uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to not be taking the woman's side in

this play.

But ultimately, the question of whether this is a sexist play or not is to me

the least interesting aspect of it. This farce, which again bears the hallmarks

of early composition and is far from an exemplary aesthetic offering, I find to

be ludicrously funny. It doesn't need to be aesthetically astonishing. Can't we

just have a little bit of absurd, ludicrous And if you want to have some

fun, I would check out the film version directed by Franco Zeffirelli, great

director of Shakespeare, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,

whose real-life, tempestuous marriage clearly informed their portrayal of the

characters Petruchio and Caterina, who seem to be early sketches for Beatrice

and Benedict, in much ado about nothing.

Objectively, this is not a great play, but it's one of my particular

favourites. Now we get to a C-plus play with Troilus and Cressida, which was

written during the final years of Queen Elizabeth's reign.

And this was a time in which London's poets and dramatists were at war with

one another. They were engaged in a merry war of words. This was referred to

as the Poets' War.

And you see the poets around this time ferociously satirising and lampooning

one another in their plays. You had playwrights like Ben Jonson on one side,

and you had playwrights like Decker, Marston and Shakespeare on the other.

There had been a ban on satire in prose and poetry right before

this time, so many poets turned their satirising urge to the stage.

Who is Shakespeare lampooning in Troilus and Cressida?

Well, primarily George Chapman, whose translation of Homer's Iliad, which was

the first in English, he is lampooning Chapman's Homer, which had just come out

around that time and had taken the world by storm.

But other poets have been identified in this play too. If you turn to the

sonnets, you'll find the character of the rival poet, who's actually a

composite figure made of Chapman. and Marlow and Johnson, maybe we find all of

these in the play in some fashion. Now, Troilus and Cressida is another problem

play when it comes to genre. It's not problematic thematically, it is

generically confusing.

There's no clear generic designation, and this one's often deemed to be

unperformable. Is it a comedy? Is it a satire? Is it a tragedy?

Can we call Shakespeare's reimagining of Homer's myth and legend history? It's in

this play that we see the Shakespearean strangeness at its most acute.

Great writers either make you feel estranged at home or they make you feel

like home is strange.

Shakespeare makes you feel comfortable in a very strange, weird and

disorienting world. That's one of his talents.

And the reason for the strangeness comes in the fact that we have Greek and

Trojan characters speaking in ornate oration in a way that's more

reminiscent of the cold baroque aesthetic of Julius Caesar.

And yet the characters, whilst being ancient, are bizarrely and fully

Elizabethan too. So they might have Greek and Trojan names, but they feel

like Shakespeare's contemporaries. Shakespeare reduces the Homeric heroes

down to a ragtag band of Elizabethan rascals. Achilles is portrayed as weak

and disreputable, because he's actually a poetic repackaging of the Earl of

Essex, who had recently been executed by Elizabeth for treason. This is one of

the rare instances in which critics can actually find many contemporary

political figures thinly disguised in the work. Shakespeare didn't like to do

that. He would often err on the side of caution when it came to that sort of

thing. I personally find it best to read Troilus and Cressida as a closet drama.

like Lord Byron's Manfred and Goethe's Faust, particularly Faust Part II. And

if you're interested in Faust, we have a lecture for that at the book club too.

What's a closet drama?

That means you put on a performance in the theatre of your mind. You choose the

cast, you clothe the characters, and you get to charge the poetry with meaning.

And many of the greatest speeches in Troilus and Cressida work...

perfectly as isolated poems.

And I think you can tell that Troilus and Cressida was written hot on the

heels of Hamlet. And though this is a masterful work, it was a collaborative

piece again with Middleton, it's also rancid, bitter, hateful,

misanthropic, and it shows the bard to again be in a very dark part of his

life. But I love how he ultimately takes the ancient idea of a hero

being as good as the latest deeds they've done. What have you done for me

lately? That's the ancient Greek attitude.

He takes that idea and he infuses it with a dark vitalism and we get a

cutting mockery of his contemporaries. This makes Troilus and Cressida a really

special work, even if it's not one that I'm personally keen to revisit that

often. Now the next play on my ranking, again we're talking mid position here.

is Richard III, and I give this one a C+. Now is the winter of our discontent,

made glorious summer by this son of York.

This has to be, along with to be or not to be.

and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, one of the most iconic lines of

Shakespeare. And these lines are spoken directly to us at the very beginning of

the play. This is the only Shakespeare play that opens with a soliloquy

delivered straight to the audience by the central protagonist.

And the protagonist, of course, is the sublimely pantomime-esque antagonist

Richard III, who is both a delightfully evil Marlowian hangover, he feels very

much like the kind of villains that Christopher Marlowe was putting

together, and he also feels like a remnant or a hangover of the days of the

morality plays.

That's what passed for drama in Shakespeare's childhood, where actors

like Richard Burbage, who was the tragic lead in Shakespeare's troupe, would

stride about the stage as personifications of abstract concepts

like vice and greed.

I see Richard III as being an early sketch for the complex.

motiveless and yet motive-hunting malignancy of Iago in the tragedy of

Othello. That's one of the most fun things about a deep and sustained

reading of the complete works of Shakespeare. You get to see where

Shakespeare develops his characters across time. You get to see the

evolution. It's really, really rewarding.

Richard III, just like Iago after him, is a malignant...

tumour of a character.

What I love about Richard III is just how complicit the audience is in his

Machiavellian scheming, in his outrageous machinations. We follow his

scheming with relish. And as Harold Goddard would say, Richard III from

beginning to end is marked by juvenility and genius.

I love that. You've got juvenile energy.

and you've got the genius that would be characteristic of his more mature years,

side by side. Goddard would say, nothing Shakespeare ever wrote was apparently

done with more gusto.

The destructive energy of Richard himself is a measure of the constructive

energy that went into his making.

The zest of the poet in fashioning his villain hero accounts for our zest in

following his machinations.

So this is a young Shakespeare who is discovering the power of irony for the

very first time and learning to layer in multiple levels of meaning.

And what we have with Richard III is a flawed, marred and imperfect work that

is ultimately just a bit of pure fun.

This feels like Will has a new toy, and his toy is his box of dramatic tricks, a

new toy that he's playing with and experimenting with. And after you deep

read Richard III, Check out some of the documentaries and books put together by

the Richard Society because you will see they have tried to counter the enduring

image of Richard that Shakespeare popularised because, again, this play is

Tudor propaganda more than history. It had to be. But we see that our

conception of historical personages is relentlessly shaped by Shakespeare.

The real-life Richard, it is compellingly contended, was quite

different. from the Machiavellian villain that we find on stage.

I absolutely love all of the history surrounding this play, so a rereading or

a reviewing of Richard III is an opportunity to go deep into English

history, which is always fun. And our next play is another C-plus play, and

that is Cymbeline.

And this is a really fascinating romance play, which the editors of the first

folio threw in with the tragedies.

This is one of the plays that I struggle to recall fully when a lot of time has

passed after a reading.

Returning to it is always rewarding, however, as it has a really complex plot

and it has vivid characterisation.

And Cymbeline is particularly rewarding as an experience when you've already

read a lot of Shakespeare plays because this is both a palace of tropes, ancient

tropes, dramatic tropes, and Renaissance motifs, but it also feels like a hall of

mirrors, where you see Will's face everywhere.

You hear echoes of everything he's already written. So it's kind of like

going on an Easter egg hunt with this play, and you discover all these

allusions and harkbacks to the most powerful plays in his career.

This play is kind of like a mature corruption of Romeo and Juliet.

If Juliet were to awake from her sleep of fake death and then weep, over the

decapitated body of Paris. Now there are echoes of King Lear here, there are

undertones and overtones of Othello, we also get his narrative poem Lucrece come

in, and some of the philosophical sketches in this play remind us of

Hamlet and Macbeth, which we haven't gotten to yet. The tragic substance is

jostling side by side with comic

festive elements that make us recall Twelfth Night, much ado about nothing,

as you like it, all's well that ends well in a Midsummer Night's Dream.

Today, Cymbeline has something of a cult status when it comes to bardolatry.

but it was really popular in times gone by. It was actually one of the top 10

most performed Shakespeare plays, and playgoers were as familiar with the

character of Imogen and Posthumus and Cymbeline as they were Romeo and Juliet,

Lear, Cordelia, Hamlet, and Ophelia.

Now we're out of the C grade plays and we're getting into the Bs with our first

B minus, and that is Richard.

the second.

Absolutely fantastic play. As I said earlier, this is one of Will's four

early lyrical plays. He wrote four lyrical dramas that come back to back in

quick succession that really showed him tapping into a flourishing of

creativity. What's really interesting when you read The Complete Works is you

get to see which periods were the most poetically fertile for him. And it's

quite interesting to think about why that might have been, what was going on

in his life at the time. This history play is quite different from all the

rest of his history plays because it is one long song, in my opinion. It is one

grand procession of rhyming couplets and it's stuffed with striking symbols.

This is also the play that ended up threatening the Bard's life the most. It

put him in a lot of danger. As I said, Will was rather attached to his head

and, unlike many of his peers, he managed to avoid having a stint in the

Tower of London.

Ben Johnson famously was locked up and branded and tortured.

Will didn't have to go through that and that's because he largely stayed away

from anything that could be inferred as contemporary political commentary, and

yet Queen Elizabeth would famously declare, I am Richard II, know ye

not that? The deposition scene in Richard II was cut by the

censors, but...

After committing treason, we see the Earl of Essex would commission a

production of this play by Shakespeare's troupe with that deposition scene

included. And then he marched upon Westminster and defied the monarch. And

he ultimately ended up losing his head. I think this is the play where we really

see Shakespeare start to take off. We see that his glorious rise begins

properly.

here and this is also one of the best parts of the henriad saga again one of

the most rewarding things you can do is to watch all of the history plays either

in order of composition in which case they'll be out of historical order or

watch them in chronology of historical event and you can do that by watching

the hollow crown in this play we see richard ii deposed by henry bolingbroke

who would become king henry iv and we ultimately end up feeling an enormous

amount of pity for this monarch yes we critique him at the start. Yes, we might

see him as being a rather ludicrous figure but I think he gets our sympathy

over the course of the play and our sympathy is increased by this play's

relentless lyricism. I give our next play a B grading and that's The Merchant

of Venice and this is another one of his most controversial plays along with The

Taming of the Shrew. Controversial because of the topic and some have seen

this play as simply anti-semitic Christian propaganda.

If you read Shakespeare's works deeply you'll come to the conclusion that

ultimately he was most likely a nihilist and very much rejected, personally

rejected, dogma. This is not something that you'd want to be public about back

in the day but I think we intuit.

his feelings come through.

Some see the play in that regards, whilst others have marvelled at the fact

that Shakespeare makes his Jewish antagonist, Shylock, the vengeful money

lender, so psychologically complex.

Indeed, Kenneth Gross wrote an entire book arguing that Shylock is

Shakespeare, and he makes a very compelling argument.

Without Shylock, this play, which is largely indebted to folkloric tropes,

would be somewhat forgettable. But Shylock stands out. He stands out from

the play and he delivers one of the most profound and chilling speeches in all of

Shakespeare. We see the Christian Antonio.

borrows from shylock in order to help his friend and he puts up a pound of

flesh that's where we get that phrase a pound of flesh as collateral and when he

can't play shylock confined to the Jewish ghettos of Venice whose financial

recourse is usury and yet he is demonized for it. There is a heavy

comment on Christian hypocrisy come through in this play because the

Christians don't practice usury but they're more than happy to make use of

the so-called sinful practice. They're more than happy to partake in it and

they're more than happy to cast Shylock as some villain.

And we see in the Elizabethan era, this was an age in which Jewish people on

stage, Jewish characters, were nothing more than gross, distorted parodies.

And there was a great fear and fervour around the thought of Jewish people

because people had no personal experience with Jewish people. Basically

no one in England would have actually known a Jewish person. There were barely

any in the country at the time. What Shakespeare does in this age is he takes

this stereotypical and antisemitic stock character and instead of giving us a

stereotype like Christopher Marlowe's Barabbas, he gives us this human, this

complex thinking protagonist.

When Shylock is asked what's the good of taking the pound of flesh from Antonio,

what's that good for?

Shylock says, strikingly, it's good to bait fish withal.

If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.

He hath disgraced me and hindered me. Half a million laughed at my losses,

mocked. at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled

my friends, heated mine enemies." And then he says, and what's his reason?

I am a Jew.

Hath not a Jew eyes?

hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,

passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the

same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same

winter and summer as a Christian is.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. I think that's one

of the greatest speeches in all of Shakespeare, really disturbing, dark,

complex, vitalistic speech.

And for that...

It brings the play up to a strong B grading. Now, let's move on to our next

play, which also gets a B from me, and that is the history play Henry V.

This is one of the great plays that will pend to inaugurate the opening of the

Globe Theatre.

And what an opening season it would have been, with plays like As You Like It,

Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, and then Hamlet. Again, we need

to get to that one. We haven't seen that one yet. He delivered a great variety of

plays. when the globe was built up. History, comedy, tragedy, Poem

Unlimited. Henry V is an overtly and self-consciously patriotic and

nationalistic play, often careening into jingoistic propaganda, but there is

something incredibly rousing about Henry V, who we have watched grow up. He was

Prince Hal in the Henry IV plays. Again, we haven't gotten to those yet. We

watched him grow up and he turned from a delinquent youth into a strong commoner

king. Harry, who had the common man's touch.

We see him walking amongst the men's tents at night.

Their morale is low, but he has the power to boost them. They are weary and

they are outnumbered before the Battle of Agincourt.

And yet, thanks to his rousing pre-battle, speeches. We see that battle

leads to incredible victory for the English troops.

What we get in Henry V is great meta-theatrical flair. I absolutely love

the chorus figure. Every now and then over the course of his career

Shakespeare will bring in a chorus to speak directly to us, just like in the

ancient days.

I love the chorus, I love the poetry, I love the energy, and I also love the

fact that this play gives us some of the finest and most quoted speeches in all

of Shakespeare.

Look up the Saint Crispin's Day speech and see Kenneth Branagh deliver it in

his film version.

You see, as we get to the better plays, we get to the plays that are eminently

quotable. Now, our next play is a B play as well, and it's Much Ado About

Nothing.

Although I am putting this firmly in the middle in regards to quality and

ranking, this is another play that has long been one of my particular and

personal favourites. This is actually one of the plays that I read properly

and first understood and enjoyed.

The first tragedy that did it for me was King Lear and the first comedy that

really did it for me was Much Ado About Nothing.

The very first plays that I ever read, by the way, were Romeo and Juliet and

The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. I've said before that my grandmother

got me into Shakespeare and she recommended these plays or seeded their

titles and I went to the library and picked up the great book of spells that

is the complete works but Much Ado About Nothing really gave me my click point

when it came to Shakespeare and things just fell into place after I read it. I

know this play incredibly intimately, it's one of the plays I know best and

what I love about this play is the fact that the ostensible B plot, the

secondary story, becomes the main event. The main story follows Claudio's wooing

of fair Hero. And we see how things turn sour when the misanthropic

malcontent and Iago precursor bastard Don John interferes with their

matchmaking. But who do we watch for? Because we don't watch for Claudio and

Hero. We watch for the merry war of words. betwixt Beatrice and Benedict who

professed to despise one another but are easily duped into believing that the

other loves them when they overhear their friends scheming, they believe

that the other actually loves them all of a sudden, and that's all it takes for

them to fall in love with the one they profess to hate. Isn't that interesting?

The title, of course, contains a bawdy Elizabethan pun, much ado about no

thing. No thing was Elizabethan slang for female genitalia, so much ado about,

well, you know what. But the title also perfectly conceptualizes Shakespeare's

more nihilistic sentiments because we do indeed

often, or always, make much ado about essentially nothing.

Nothing is one of the Bard's favourite words.

I absolutely love the fact that we can see from this play, and for many of his

plays, we can see that Shakespeare very much likes to make his women

protagonists smarter than the men. They typically run circles around the men. I

don't think Will got on...

too well with fellow men, and probably preferred the company of women. We see

in Much Ado About Nothing that Benedict is a fool to think that he can outwit

Beatrice, who is the only character who's really thinking in the play.

And I love the fact that for such a light, comedy, things, as is

Shakespeare's proclivity, things take a decidedly dark and disturbing and

genre-subverting turn towards the end.

And if you want to see two actors who play the lovers with perfect chemistry

then check out the film version with the then-married Kenneth Branagh and Emma

Thompson. Very, very good film version.

OK, now things are getting interesting.

because we're getting our first A minus play with Measure for Measure. This one

was long termed to be a problem play and marks a dark turning point in

Shakespeare's career because all of the plays up until this point

were Elizabethan. You can delineate Shakespeare's career if you want to be

really reductive into two sweeps.

Elizabethan and Jacobean. And they are different. The plays do have a different

substance and quality and set of thematic concerns depending upon who is

on the throne.

Measure for Measure was written quite swiftly upon the death of Elizabeth and

with the new reign of King James.

And so we see that Shakespeare's troop would become the royal troop to the and

they would perform plays prolifically for him. He commissioned so many plays.

He really wanted the country to have lots of theatrical marvels. He wanted

the country to be recognised for its artistic offerings.

What's the difference between the two eras? Well, Elizabethan plays are

typically lighter, they're comic, they're sparkling, and don't take

themselves too seriously, whereas Jacobean plays are much darker.

They typically concern really deep... moral issues and not only that but

they're cognitively challenging and they are also typically tragic in tone and

substance. In the Jacobean plays we get a sense of bleak existential

and nihilistic despair come through.

Around the time of Measure for Measure this was a really dark moment in

England's history because this was when the country saw one of its most

devastating spikes in plague deaths yet recorded and so Will would write

many of his Jacobean plays in essentially lockdown.

Death and decay was absolutely everywhere in the culture and we can see

that Shakespeare is not shying away from it in this play.

Measure for measure gives us a study in governance, or how not to govern, how

not to rule. We see that the Duke of Vienna, Vincenzo, who critics have seen

as a Christ figure, entrusts his puritanical deputy, Angelo, to rule the

city in his absence, and he decides to take a vacation from his

responsibilities. He decides to delegate.

Except he doesn't do that. He secretly remains in the city.

disguised as a friar in order to observe Angelo's governance.

And Vincenzo has been a lax ruler for many years, and so he wants to see what

happens if his dominion turns into a tyranny. But he wants another person to

do it instead. He doesn't want to be the one bringing in these harsh

authoritarian rules.

And he just wants to see what the effects would be.

This is actually another one of those plays, just like Cymbeline, that I

struggle to recall the details of when I haven't read it for a while, but I am

always stunned when I return to it. I always find it to be really fresh when I

return to it. And I'm always stunned at just how much of a master work it really

is. We now have the tricky job of delineating between masterpieces, and

Shakespeare produced so many of them. We have an absolutely incredible character

and a another supreme example of Shakespeare's love of rendering women's

voices with Isabella. We also have a great message that is rare for

Shakespeare taken from scripture.

Shakespeare was born and raised in a Catholic family and a Catholic part of

the country. Indeed, his area of Stratford gave rise to several of the

men who would take part in the gunpowder plot.

And yet, as I said, he was most likely atheist and at his most despairing...

utterly nihilist. But we get a message that's taken from the Sermon on the

Mount, Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, in which he said, by that which you measure

others, ye will be measured.

Yeah, so judge according to how you would like to be judged. Now, the

standout of this play for me is the perpetually drunk prisoner, Barnadine.

who has managed to survive in prison for so long by merely turning his

executioners away at the door and telling them that he's too sleepy or too

hungover to be killed today. He's been drinking all night. Go away. Not today.

I'm not ready to be put to death.

Now, he ultimately apprehends death.

as no more than a drunken sleep. I love that. And of course we also get a

superbly Hamletian meditation on death from the character Claudio who says, I

but to die and go we know not where to lie in cold

obstruction and to rot the weariest and most loathed world life.

that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what

we fear of death.

Now we get to another A-minus play with Coriolanus and the greatest tragedy when

it comes to this masterpiece is the fact that it is so underappreciated. We

should be speaking about Coriolanus, which is about a proud military leader

and killing machine who is banished from the Republic he hath so nobly served and

thus seeks revenge. We should be talking about Coriolanus in the same breath.

as we talk about Hamlet and the tragic procession. That's Othello, King Lear,

Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. This muscular tour de force is absolutely of

those plays' eminence. And alongside Hamlet is one of the Bard's most

readable plays.

This is like a densely packed...

poetic and immersive novel. You can read this one like a novel.

Now luckily this play has gained in popularity in recent years thanks in

part to Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut production, well worth checking out.

T.S. Eliot would say that he actually preferred Coriolanus over Hamlet and,

with the exception of King Lear, called it his most mature tragedy.

Eliot would marvel at the classical restraint in the play's opening and he

would marvel at how Shakespeare managed to work up the tragic hero's fatal flaw,

that's pride or hubris, and he would also see Coriolanus as the most human of

all the Bard's people. And if you agree with him then that's quite an

achievement.

This is also one of the most politicised of all of Shakespeare's plays due to its

commentary on power and the people versus the governing body, which is

perennially profound.

This is an incredible play. If you haven't read it and you've read a good

handful of Shakespeare's greatest, then I would implore you to check this one

out. Now we get to an A play with Twelfth Night.

This play is a winter festive celebration that summons the spirit of

midsummer madness.

As the title suggests, this is best performed on the last night of the 12

days of Christmas. That's Epiphany Eve.

Though the alternative...

title, What You Will, might embolden us to use this play as entertainment for

any holiday season.

In Twelfth Night, we get a romantic comedy that I think really supports some

claims that Shakespeare's comedies are often crueler than his tragedies.

Typically his tragedies are funnier than his comedies and his comedies have a

ferociously cruel streak running through them. Though whether his audience would

have seen some of his plays as cruel I would probably contest that. Remember

that this is a time in which Theatregoers would be choosing between

seeing a play by Will Shakespeare and also maybe seeing some bear baiting or a

public execution.

These are all forms of entertainment in the Elizabethan era.

We have a whimsical, poetic, pastoral story in Twelfth Night that's filled

with great songs, a story that whisks us away to another land, the imagined

locale of Illyria. But there is a callous edge to the jokes and the

laughter and the pranking and the merrymaking.

And I can also feel a river of pain running below the surface of this...

play and I can intuit Shakespeare's grief for his deceased son in the

character Olivia's grieving for her brother Antonio.

I think Twelfth Night, despite how light it is, is an inexhaustible work.

That means you can read it and reread it and you'll never get to the end of it,

it will never diminish, it will only continue.

to augment your consciousness.

And though I have seen very good productions of it, I've seen put-up

productions, outside on a plot of grass, which feels very Elizabethan to me, I

like to treat Twelfth Night like a closet drama.

And I like to imagine the world for myself.

I also like to take this one out into nature with me. I like to walk and read

at the same time. I also think that Twelfth Night has the very best jester

in all of Shakespeare alongside the Fool in King Lear of course and I think you

can tell a lot about a person depending on who their favourite Shakespearean

fool is. In Twelfth Night the Fool is Festy and Festy's closing song,

hey ho the wind and the rain, is one of my personal favourite passages in all of

literature, not just Shakespeare.

all of literature.

And you can find song versions online. I implore you to treat yourself and check

them out. And this is also a great play that demonstrates the utility of comedy

as a form. C. L. Barber would see the comic formula and the social utility of

comedy as this. It takes you through release to clarification.

What does that mean?

Release means that the play is a festive experience its celebration itself.

So watching the play, you partake in the festive celebration.

And clarification means that you leave the theatre feeling a renewed sense of

appreciation for the natural world and your loved ones, but the world around

you and the season you're celebrating.

That is the utility of comedy.

Because if Twelfth Night does anything extraordinarily well, it definitely

makes you feel as though you're partaking in a festive celebration and

you definitely do leave the theatre feeling a renewed appreciation for the

world around you. Now, the next play to get a strong A grading from me is Julius

Caesar, Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece.

And for me, the build-up to Julius Caesar's brutal assassination in the

third act, precisely at the midway point of the play, is unlike anything the

theatregoers would have seen up until that point in his career. You find

yourself... holding your breath, especially if you watch a really stellar

performance like we get in the 1970 John Gielgud production.

Of course, when one thinks of Julius Caesar, they cannot help but think of

Mark Antony, and the greatest Mark Antony, I believe, is Marlon Brando.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after

them. The good is oft interred with their bones.

So let it be with Caesar.

I find this to be a very taut play.

It's a very cold play and it definitely contains foreshadows of

Macbeth to come. This feels like a...

colder, more ornate Macbeth. By the time we get to Macbeth, Shakespeare's

embracing lyricism again. And we get in Julius Caesar a play that sublimely

thinks through the act or acts of betrayal.

And you need to read Julius Caesar, in my opinion, to really appreciate

Shakespeare's next Roman tragedy and masterpiece, Antony.

and Cleopatra. Then our next A grade play and we're getting really close to A

plus territory here.

In fact there's an element of needing to arbitrarily call some plays A grades and

just leave a little bit of room for the A plus plays to come but we come to a

really stellar comedy. An absolute masterpiece with As You Like It. This is

Shakespeare's lightest play but as is always the case with his light works

there is an edge of cruelty running below the surface and we get in this

play another inexhaustible character.

A.C. Bradley would delineate four inexhaustible characters with Falstaff,

Iago, Cleopatra and Hamlet. But I would add Rosalind to the pantheon. I would

add Rosalind because she is eminently conscious. She thinks aloud.

She thinks and speaks in metaphor, which Aristotle would teach us is the highest

form of cognition.

You can tell that Shakespeare wrote this play to inaugurate the opening of the

Globe Theatre, especially when you come to the iconic speech from Jacques, which

goes like this.

all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players we have our

exits and our entrances and one man in his time plays many parts this is

another play that I like to take out into nature with me this one is

particularly special for me because it makes me recall my grandmother and I

find it quite sad that I wouldn't have been able to talk to her in depth about

Shakespeare when I really got an appreciation for him because she sadly

passed away when I was still quite young but I do recall when she talked about

Shakespeare she talked about Rosalind and so spending time in this world

spending time with the inexhaustible Rosalind is in a sense spending time

with my grandmother and that is why literature can be so healing, and that

is why you find not only yourself between the covers of great books and on

the stage, but spending time in great literature is an opportunity to

appreciate and apprehend otherness.

You are spending time in company in solitude.

It's also in this play that we are given the opportunity to spend some time in

Shakespeare's greatest locale of the mind, the Forest of Arden.

Yes, of course, there was a real forest of Arden in Warwickshire, where he was

from, where he was born and raised, where he would live, Stratford-upon

-Avon. And there's a real forest of Arden in France, which is in there too.

But there is something really beautiful and almost utopian and paradisiacal

about this Arden. We may consider that Shakespeare's mother's name was Arden.

Her maiden name was Arden. And so this is like Shakespeare returning to a

locale of his childhood. And this is like an honour. of his mother in a

really beautiful way and what we get in this play is a call for us to take

seriously the world's ecological concerns.

We can read Shakespeare through so many lenses. To pick one is reductive but one

of the many lenses afforded to us and indeed one of the many lenses that

Shakespeare anticipates.

is that of the ecological.

And although the forest of Arden is a paradisical location, great danger still

exists in this romantic locale. Great danger but is also a sense

of freedom.

In this play Rosalind is banished from her uncle's court but as she tells us

her banishment is really a liberty.

Her going hence is a moving into freedom because in Shakespeare's plays we see

just how claustrophobic and how stifling and repressive the world of the court,

the city life, the world of civilisation can be.

Now for our next play we get another A grading from me with Romeo and Juliet

and without a doubt this is one of my favourite plays of all time and is also

another one of the plays that I know most intimately.

Now technically it's definitely not one of his best. But I've got to give you a

strong A grading for so many reasons.

One, this is another play where we can really see him taking off. He's now

moving into a really masterful phase of his career around the time of writing

Romeo and Juliet. Two, you have to consider...

influence. When one thinks of archetypical lovers, you think

immediately of Romeo and Juliet, don't you? And we cannot discard that, we

cannot take that for granted.

And what I love about this play is, yes, it's a tragedy because of the ending,

and you know the ending from the very beginning, and it's so iconic that

there's no way to go into this play and not know what is going to happen, and so

that's a real challenge to anybody who wants to produce it. How can you keep it

fresh? Yes, it's a tragedy, but it feels so funny throughout.

It's one of those tragedies that really proves the dictum that Shakespeare's

tragedies are really his comedies. And not only that, but the thing that I

absolutely adore about this play is it is here that we see for the first time

in literary history a sincere and truthful expression of a young woman in

love for the first time. And she says, and this is one of my favourite lines of

poetry of all time, My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep.

The more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.

Isn't that extraordinary?

Juliet is one of Shakespeare's greatest characters.

And if you want to know if you're in love, consider if you would be able to

say that and mean it. The more I give to thee, the more I have. Is your giving to

another a form of taking? Or do you just want something from another?

Does giving to another nourish you? If so, then you are.

love. And Romeo and Juliet, amongst many other things, teaches us how to know

when we're in love. Now we're getting to A-plus territory with the sonnets. Shall

I compare thee to a summer's day?

If aliens came down to Earth and wanted to see a curation of the greatest human

achievements, I believe you would show them the symphonies of Beethoven, you'd

show them the artwork of da Vinci, and you'd show them the sonnets of William

Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets consistently over the course of

his life, so there's a great variation in quality.

They are not all masterpieces.

And of the 154 collected in the volume of his sonnets, Keep in mind that he

wrote more sonnets than are collected in that volume. We find sonnets in his

plays like the beautiful collaborative sonnet that Romeo and Juliet speak aloud

when they meet.

Of the 154 sonnets in that volume, I think around 30 of them could be

considered masterpieces.

And there are many that are not very good at all, but the ones that are

masterpieces bring up the whole volume. And I believe it to be a miracle that

Shakespeare could pack so... much into just 14 lines and he

revolutionized the sonnet form and we get a drama in these tight taut little

stanzas but a drama that plays out across the entire sweep of the sonnets

too. The answer to the question of whether Shakespeare is more poet or

playwright is never more clear than when you turn to the sonnets and you see the

narrative force and you see the characterisation he put into them. We

have of course the iconic procreation sonnets from sonnets 1 through 17 in

which he is imploring his patron to pass on his genes and he was writing those

sonnets to commission.

And then you've got an arc with characters like the fair youth and the

rival poet, which is a composite of several rival poets in which Shakespeare

gives voice to his jealousy, his jealousy in love, but also artistic

jealousy. He gives voice to longing and frustration and also inspiration and the

desire to be immortalized. And then the questioning over whether that's worth

anything ultimately.

anyway, and the climax of the sonnets comes with what is known as the Dark

Lady sequence.

And there we find a great irony in the fact that Shakespeare is labelled a love

poet, because indeed the love he gives us is not idealised. It's very complex

and it's painful and it's imperfect and it's very far from idealised, but it

rings true.

One of my favourite exercises to do every year is to read through the entire

sonnets in order and be on the lookout for your personal top ten. and your top

ten may change over the years, but it's interesting to see the commonality

between your favourite poems, and indeed the sonnets of Shakespeare are like

Rorschach tests, inkblot tests that say a lot about you.

at a moment in your life.

If you're interested in my personal top 10 then check out our lecture for the

sonnets at patreon.com forward slash hardcore literature.

Now whilst we're talking about the sonnets let's throw his other poems in

here too.

Let's include A Lover's Complaint which comes at the end of the sonnets volume

as a coda. It was a convention after a string of sonnets after a sequence to

then have the woman's voice or a voice of a woman at the end. We get that in A

Lover's Complaint. which isn't that good, but let's throw it in with the

sonnets. And whilst we're here, let's throw the Phoenix and the Turtle in too,

which is all right. It's all right as a poem. It's an allegorical work about the

funeral of two lovebirds, Phoenix and Turtle Dove, whose union

symbolizes true divine love. And so their death is mourned because that's

the morning of the death.

of true art.

Now we get to an A-plus play, and what I believe was probably Will's first

masterpiece with A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is easily one of the

prettiest, most patterned, ornate and lyrical plays in the Bard's canon.

But is it really a play?

Does it work as a performance, or does the dream work better when it's read as

a poem, or read as a closet drama, or indeed set to music?

and produced as a colourful symphonic pageant. The tradition of both the

visual and the musical arts are much richer thanks to the existence of A

Midsummer Night's Dream, and perhaps the most iconic musical work in the Western

tradition is indeed an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

What do we play at weddings? We play Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

That continues to sound out in celebration of romantic union to this

day and would not have come about if not for Mendelssohn's deep love of

Shakespeare's work.

Despite the iconic status of this play, it's very much like Romeo and Juliet,

it's been almost over-performed, and so it's a real challenge to deliver

something that's not become cliché by now. Despite the iconic status,

historically critics have been unconvinced by this one. Samuel Pepys

would call it the most insipid, ridiculous play he's ever seen, although

he had to admit that it had very pretty music and dancing.

Whilst William Hazlitt thought that all that is finest in this play is lost in

its representation.

The spectacle is grand, but the spirit is evaporated and the genius flees when

you try to perform it. The poetry of it and the staging of it do not agree with

one another. That's what he would contend. There's also been a history of

picking and choosing when it comes to what you focus on in this play in the

18th century.

Producers would focus on the Ovidian story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and Bottom

the Weaver, and the working men's drama.

And we see in the 18th century a profusion of mock operas poured forth

out of this work. And again in the 20th century we see a focus on the character

Bottom, one of the most wonderful characters. We see that Jan Kott...

would emphasise the bestial sexuality of the play, and he would highlight the

story as a nightmare cuckold fantasy.

I think it absolutely is right to see this as Bottom's play. The dream is his.

But I delight in all of the characters, from the quarrelling demigods Oberon and

Titania, who has one of the prettiest speeches in all of Shakespeare, clearly

inspired by the natural world, clearly inspired by Stratford-upon-Avon, and I

love the misadvent... adventures of Puck. And I also love following the

lovesick youths who are mad in love and frantic in this subterranean

world. They retreat from the city, they lose their heads but ultimately end up

revitalised. This is a play filled with pure Shakespearean meta-theatre that

gives us a warning to be careful trusting what we see.

because so often our perception is off, we are what we see. And this is a play

that reminds us that lunatic, lover and poet are all one, and it reminds us that

the course of true love never did run smooth.

What we have with Shakespeare's first masterpiece is a highly original, if

plotless, and magical musical romp.

that I personally never tire of. Our next A-plus play is The Winter's Tale.

This play is late, mature, romantic Shakespeare at his most sublime and

psychologically complex. This is also deep cuts Shakespeare that historically

has not been one of the most popular ones but I think deserves a lot more

love because I take it to be a top ten play.

and one of his very best masterpieces. This is a play of two halves with one of

the strongest openings in his entire career.

We open on a tragedy and the tragic substance mounts until we feel like we

cannot take it anymore and then it breaks.

into romance.

It breaks into the pure poetic and comic and pastoral form for the rest of the

play, with a strong streak of the fantastical, of course.

And the driving force of the conflict for this play is the jealousy of King

Leontes, his paranoid jealousy.

We see that his wife Hermione at the outset is nine months pregnant, and his

bosom buddy from neighbouring Bohemia, Polixenes, has been his guest for that

same amount of time. And seeing how well his wife and friend get on, Leontes, who

is kind of like his own Iago, compounded with the choleric humour of King Lear,

again, we haven't met those two yet, they're coming up, Leontes loses it, and

he charges his wife with adultery in poetry that is taken to breaking point

and taken to the condition of prose. In fact, you read...

The Winter's Tale, and you easily forget that Shakespeare's writing in iambic

pentameter. It is extraordinary.

We would say of Gustave Flaubert in the 19th century that he would take prose to

the condition of poetry, while Shakespeare, before him, took poetry to

the condition of prose. Now that was revolutionary.

He pushes the poetry to its absolute limits, and what we get here is a really

seriously proto-Stanislavskian sense of naturalism that still remains fresh and

shocking many hundreds of years on.

The first half of the play contains the power of the tragic procession, whereas

the second half also contains the markers of a mature Shakespeare, but the

second half gives us a nice recall of the earlier comedies, like Much Ado

About Nothing and Twelfth Night. Truly, The Winter's Tale is one of the finest

works of literature ever penned, ever put on the page or performed on stage,

and I would really implore you to experience it.

if you haven't already now next up we've been making hints about this play

throughout this ranking it's time to talk about it My next A-plus Shakespeare

play is The Tragedy of Othello. This was the play that kicked off the sublime

series of consecutive works that I call The Tragic Procession. In an astonishing

burst of genius that Will sustained for 14 months, the playwright wrote four of

the greatest tragedies of all time back to back, and thus changed the course of

literature forever.

Othello is THE play about jealousy.

the green-eyed monster, and contains a Shakespearean warning, just as we found

in A Midsummer Night's Dream, to be careful when it comes to trusting what

you see. In fact, the dream and Othello are very strange bedfellows. They're

very similar.

It wouldn't take much to change either play and turn the tragedy into a comedy

and the comedy into a tragedy.

We see Othello is the Barbary Moor war general and outsider in

Venetian society.

Shakespeare loved to set his plays abroad and in the past so as he could

not be accused of making contemporary commentary. So he liked to go to Venice,

probably never went to Venice, but in his imagination he went to Italy all of

the time. Othello is the outsider of Venetian society who's newly married to

Desdemona, and both of their lives are destroyed by Othello's right-hand man,

Iago, when Othello decides to promote another man, Cassio, to the position of

lieutenant ahead of him.

Iago, as we've said already, is one of the Bard's inexhaustible protagonists

and a supreme nihilist who would influence Milton's Satan,

Dostoevsky's Svidrigailov, and Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden.

Iago is the darkest and most Machiavellian web-spinner in all of

literary history.

I am not what I am in a terrifying inversion and subversion of Yahweh's

assertion out of the burning bush to Moses.

Iago dupes his commander into thinking his innocent wife unfaithful which then

leads to his murdering her and at the end taking his own life in disgrace.

Every time I return to this play I feel an incomprehensible sense of anguish and

my focus turns to a different protagonists every single time, each

time the play becomes another character's play.

And G. Wilson Knight would talk of the Othello music and appreciate the

cognitive, auricular power of this play. There is a cold, haunting, martial

poetry in this world. Music is absolutely right, and this is one of the

plays that is best adapted into opera. If you really want to get the tragic

condition and substance across, Make an opera of Othello. Even though I love

what Paul Robeson and Laurence Fishburne have done for this play, it is Verdi's

operatic adaptation that comes closest to capturing just how overwhelming and

devastating this masterpiece is.

Now our next A-plus play.

is without a doubt one of the most sublime peaks in all of literature and

is part of that tragic procession. We're talking about Antony and Cleopatra.

This is an endless play, and just like Antony's dotage for Cleopatra,

thoroughly overflows the measure.

The stage cannot contain this play.

Shakespeare would defiantly smash the classical conventions of the unities of

time, place and theme.

because it was considered at this time that plays should have a central action,

they should take place over the course of just 24 hours, and be confined to a

single place.

Shakespeare dismissed that. And we see that this play splits its locales

between Rome and Alexandria, but they might as well be the entire world.

And this play takes place over the course of many years, across an

extraordinary historical epoch, where we see the Roman Republic...

had fallen with the death of Julius Caesar, and what followed was a series

of bloody civil wars that would mount and mount until we reach the decisive

naval battle of Actium, in which the two lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, would meet

their tragic downfall, thus ushering in the Roman Empire and the first Roman

emperor, Augustus. A.C. Bradley would call Cleopatra, with her infinite

variety, one of the inexhaustible protagonists, and it is for her that we

continue to read and watch.

In this play, we see that domestic strife is blown up to mythic

proportions, and the political has entered the bedroom. The bedroom has

become a political arena.

Antony is no longer the stoic and powerful orator we made the acquaintance

of in Julius Caesar. He is now a faded warrior, a Mars in decline, wasting the

night in revel and drink.

and his all-consuming love affair with Cleopatra, the Queen of the Nile. And

Cleopatra is one of the most enigmatic, charming and alluring of all of

Shakespeare's protagonists. And this is a play that...

for all its woe once again proves the dictum that Shakespeare's tragedies are

funnier than his comedies." This is one of the works alongside Hamlet that gets

me laughing the most, and we have Cleopatra to thank for that. Shakespeare

worked very closely with one of his favourite sources, Plutarch's Lives, for

this one, and he transformed that telling of Roman history into a

sprawling painting and a poem unlimited.

to engage with Antony and Cleopatra is to partake in the grand comedy that is

the human condition.

Now let's talk about our next A-plus play.

When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the hurly-burly's done?

When the battle's lost and won? We are, of course, talking about the Scottish

play. or the tragedy of Macbeth, which takes us down to the darkest pits of

hell. Here we have another play from the tragic procession, in which the bard was

clearly trying to purge or exorcise something dark inside of him. He wrote

these tragedies away.

from the stage.

The playhouses were shut due to plague, and he wasn't collaborating at all. He

retreated into solitude and he wrote these plays all by himself, with no

consideration as to how they could even be performed.

And I think that's why they are the best things he ever wrote. And these plays

demonstrate that genius is of a single solitary mind.

This is another one of the first plays, written under James and not Elizabeth,

and thus as we said before, marks a strong delineation between his early and

his later works. And Macbeth was very clearly written to suit the tastes of

the monarch, who was absolutely obsessed with dark magic and witchcraft, and he

would write tracts on demonology, tracts that would inspire the Salem witch

trials. If I could reduce Macbeth down to a colour palette, it would be black

and white.

with streaks and splashes and flashes of red. We have blood alternating with

thunder and lightning.

Thunder fills the air, scorpions fill our minds, and we see daggers before our

eyes, and blood soaks all.

For all its darkness, this is one of Shakespeare's lyrical plays, and thus,

funnily, makes us recall an earlier stage of his life. It's also one of his

shortest. It's short, it's compressed, and it's forged taut like a diamond, and

it's filled with rhythm and rhyme with the most profound lines delivered in

couplets. The juxtaposition of the melodic style with the macabre theme

makes for a work that really sinks its claws into your soul and does not let

go. I love the prophetic, proleptic power of this play, a play that's filled

with binaries and seeks to show how past, present and future are all of the

same fatalistically flowing river.

And ironically we have in this play one of Shakespeare's best couples in his

murdering crown-grabbing husband-and-wife team, Macbeth and Lady

Macbeth. And we also have the best presentation of paranoia and a spiral of

madness out of guilt, the sort of madness that inevitably ensues when you

go against your conscience.

And we also have, simply put, some of the most iconic and endlessly quoted

lines in all of literature.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded

time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools their way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour

upon the stage and then is heard no more.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Nothing. So we're in what I consider to be Shakespeare's top five greatest works

now, and our next A-plus play is The Tempest. This is the last solo work.

of William Shakespeare before he inexplicably retired from the stage four

years before his death.

Though inspired by the contemporary writings of Montaigne and a very real

colonial expedition to the so-called New World, his actual patrons were on board

the ship that was blown off course into the Bermudas. Despite that, the Tempest

is a really rare original conception.

of wills, just like A Midsummer Night's Dream and thus is essentially plotless.

When Shakespeare's being original the plot is pretty much non-existent, it's

roaming and rambling and not really there and you read as Dr Samuel Johnson

would say of Richardson's Shakespearean Clarissa, you read for the sentiment and

not the story. We see the wizard mage figure, Prospero is a surrogate for

the playwright himself. He's a stand-in, just like Iago, for Will Shakespeare.

And we see that his usurper brother and the king and a bunch of drunkard

colonists wash up on shore of his island where he has ruled for many years with

his daughter Miranda and he has gained subjugation over the land and the land

is anthropomorphised into the figures of Ariel and Caliban.

They wash up on shore and what we find in this play is a fun, musical, romantic

comic romp that is intensely meta-theatrical and serves as the Bard's

formal farewell to the theatre.

Right at the end of the play he asks the audience to clap their hands together

and release him from their bondage. Shakespeare puts into Prospero's mouth

these incredible words when he disappears the pageant in front of his

daughter Miranda and lover Ferdinand, and he says, our revels now are ended.

These are actors, as I foretold you. We're all spirits and are melted into

air, into thin air.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the

gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself.

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial

pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a

sleep. Now as we get into the very top spots I am going to be combining two

plays together because it's my list.

and I can do what I want. I'm going to be combining Henry IV, parts one and

two. I have to combine them together in one saga, and in fact it's worth

considering that these two plays are a part of an even wider saga.

That's the Henriad, a sweep of eight incredible plays. But truly, I don't

consider parts one and two to be separate plays. I think it's a shame if

they are produced separately.

I think if you're going to produce Henry IV, you should either produce them

together, or you should... produce them one after the other on separate nights

in sequence with each other, because they really do need to be read together.

If I had to rate one of them higher than the other, then I would give the

preference to part one, just because it's lighter, it's more jovial, it's

more of the comic substance, whereas the second part has more of a tragic

substance, what with the waning.

of Falstaff, one of the most vitalistic characters in all of literature, and

there are two sides to the bard's psyche.

You've got Falstaff on one side who says, give me life, and on the other

you've got the ambassador of death, Hamlet.

Those are the two halves of Will's interior.

Falstaff is the poetic descendant of Chaucer's wife of Bath, of which we have

a lecture at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, and this sack-guzzling

Socrates of Eastcheap is not witty only in himself, but is the cause

of wit in other men.

He tells us, "'Tis no sin to labour in our vocation." And of course his

vocation is stealing purses beneath the light of the moon.

Like Hamlet, we can refer to the wisdom of Falstaff, not Shakespeare.

Almost like the character got away from the creator, almost like they're

separate.

entities. And I do believe that these characters took on a life of their own.

They really did get away from Shakespeare.

And we can learn a lot about how to live from Falstaff. We see at the end of

Henry IV Part 1, at the Battle of Shrewsbury, Falstaff, who has stuffed

his holster, not with a sabre, but with a bottle of sherry sack, turns and flees

from the Battle of Shrewsbury. Why?

because honour does not comfort one when you are dead. What's the use of dying if

you're not around to feel the honour? So he turns and flees and says, Give me

life, I'm not ready to depart just yet.

Across the course of this saga, we see the evolution of Prince Hal, who goes

from delinquent ruffian with father issues, his father, of course, being

Bolinbrook, and he goes from a young Machiavellian rapscallion to the rousing

commoner king after the death of his father in part two and his ascension to

the throne.

But it's a really painful second part of the saga because it involves a public

denouncing of his dear friend, his best friend, Falstaff, because he has to set

an example. He cannot have the kingdom run by ruffians. He needs to be a strong

king. So what we see is not only one of the most inexhaustible characters in all

of literature, but we also see the development of a young man into a ruler.

And this saga...

takes me through the whole gamut of human emotions, the good, the bad, and

the ugly, and I rank both parts of Henry IV as one of the supreme achievements in

all of human endeavour, and taken together, I find Henry IV to be every

bit of the eminence of the tragic procession, and it contains the very

best prose and poetry.

in the English language.

And when you think of the greatest works of Shakespeare, you inevitably think of

the tragedies.

But considering the desert island question, which books, which works would

you take to a desert island?

Of course, it's not the tragedies that are going to offer comfort to you first

and foremost. You want them there because they are incredible

achievements. But you need the life-affirming philosophy that comes

through in Henry IV. And if you haven't read these two plays, I really sincerely

implore you to do so. Check out our lectures for them at the Hardcore

Literature Book Club and watch The Hollow Crown.

So we're talking top three plays now.

Let's get to number two. What I take to be the second greatest work that

Shakespeare ever penned. This is, of course, an A plus play.

Maybe we can call it an A plus plus play.

And you may have guessed it. It is King Lear, The Tragedy of King Lear.

continues to be the most emotionally overpowering work of literature I have

ever experienced. Now, Hamlet is cognitively overpowering and it speaks

right to and beyond our intellects, whilst Lear works its way into the very

core of our being and tears us apart from the inside out.

Lear is one of the supreme jewels in the Bard's crown. It is one of the most

sublime and awe-inspiring mountain peaks. Now, if you'd asked me just a few

years ago...

which play would take the top spot for me, I would have undoubtedly said King

Lear, this play. Indeed, I would very much like to have two number ones, but

if I have to choose and if I have to order them, then King Lear comes at a

very respectable and close second place after the one I'll talk about in just a

moment. Such was the power of this tragedy to overwhelm a tragedy about an

aging king foolishly dividing his kingdom that this play has actually been

off. the stage longer than it has been on, and many consider King Lear to be

essentially unperformable. It's considered too bleak, depressing and

nihilistic. Nothing will come of nothing.

That sums it up for me.

And after years of being off the stage and unperformed, it would return to the

theatres with a rewritten version.

Poet laureate Nahum Tate would rewrite the tragedy and give it a happy ending.

It's only by the mid to late 18th century that we see theatre companies

dare to perform the original. And even with the original performance, we see

that audiences ultimately ended up preferring the one with the happy

ending.

The Romantic Poets. And it's worth considering that our lens of

appreciating Shakespeare is thoroughly romantic.

We can't help it, whether we like it or not. The Romantic Poets would state that

King Lear should be treated as a closet drama, read in solitude and performed in

the theatre of the mind, rather than performed on stage.

Tolstoy would rail against this play, calling it unnatural, which is the

perfect description for this play. He's not wrong.

Interestingly, Tolstoy had a fierce resistance to all of Shakespeare, except

for Falstaff, who he really liked. But he particularly despised King Lear. And

you see Bradley.

called King Lear the best of all of Shakespeare's works, but not his best

play. Which sounds like a contradiction, but he's essentially saying that what we

have here is an astonishing aesthetic achievement that can never be worked up

to its full potential. Such is the all-consuming abyss that opens up in

this tragedy.

I personally reread King Lear every year, alongside Hamlet, and I love

reading it, but... I would also say that the very best performance I have ever

seen has been a production of King Lear. I'm talking about the Rupert Gould

-directed production starring the late great Pete Postlethwaite, performed at

the Young Vic. He will always be my Lear. And when we went and saw that

play, we were not only in the splash zone, because if you know anything about

Lear, you'll know that there's the iconic storm on the Heath scene. We were

not only in the... Flash Zone.

But we were in the Flash Zone too, when Lear ran naked through the auditorium.

It was quite an experience.

There are so many great performances out there of Lear. Sir Ian McKellen and Paul

Schofield, directed by Peter Brook, have completely nailed the role too.

And I also think that one of the finest filmic achievements in all of history

was inspired by this play. We're talking about Akira Kurosawa's Ran, which does

not translate the poetry, but Kurosawa nails the Shakespearean substance

visually. King Lear has absolutely everything.

Grotesque cruelty, what with the blinding of Gloucester, phenomenal meta

-theatre, you might recall if you've seen it, the Cliffs of Dover scene, we

get relentless meta-theatrical commentary come through, and we also get

powerful political commentary.

A dog's obeyed in office, that is never not true.

And we also get powerful existential commentary too.

When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

And like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport.

On top of all this, we get really perceptive and profound meditations on

aging and family dynamics and good versus evil.

And we also have unparalleled subtext.

We have the wisest fool.

We have the funniest king.

Blow winds and crack your cheeks.

And we also do have the most heartbreaking ending, rendered in the

most sincere and affecting poetry and prose in all of literature.

Simply put, with King Lear, we have, alongside the books of the Bible,

alongside Lady Murasaki's Genji Monogatari, we have one of the greatest

works of all time.

Twinned with this next one, which I give the edge to. If we have to give one play

the crown, then here's my A+++, and we're talking about the tragedy of

Hamlet. To be or not to be, that is the question.

At top spot we have the highest peak, or one of the very highest peaks in all of

world literature.

This thrilling tale of revenge and existential angst is an astonishing work

of unbelievable genius.

Now T.S. Eliot famously called Hamlet an aesthetic failure, and to that Harold

Bloom would ask, if Hamlet's an aesthetic failure, what could we

consider an aesthetic success?

What is clear, however, is that this play and its inexhaustible protagonist,

the ambassador of death, as G. Wilson Knight would call him, what is clear is

that this tragedy definitely got away from Shakespeare.

It's without a doubt his longest.

and we wish it were longer. And it probably could have been longer. And

forget about dividing Shakespeare's plays into Elizabethan and Jacobean. You

can divide his plays into pre- and post-Hamlet. Up until Hamlet...

Shakespeare was still working through his anxiety of influence, as Harold

Bloom would say, when it came to his precursors and his influences. But after

Hamlet, an extraordinary thing happened. He became his own influence.

The plays after Hamlet all wrestle with the fact that he had written the

greatest thing that could be written. How do you top Hamlet? He struggled with

that all the way through the rest of his career. And this, alongside Henry IV,

parts one and two, and alongside the sonnets, is undoubtedly Shakespeare's

most personal and intimate work, bearing everywhere the sorrow, the grief, of the

recent loss of his son Hamlet, which is just another way of saying Hamlet.

And this play speaks perennially to father-son relations, it speaks

endlessly to grief, and it speaks always to the concern that no matter what

greatness we achieve, no matter what we achieve in this life, we will inevitably

one day be forgotten when our flesh turns to dust.

Jorge Luis Borges would say that Shakespeare is everywhere and nowhere.

with emphasis on the nowhere.

But I find the stamp of Will's soul absolutely everywhere in the tragedy of

Hamlet. And every single line in this play is a masterclass.

It's a masterclass in irony. The art of not saying what you mean and not meaning

what you say or meaning something entirely different. And I think

Hamlet... alongside Christ and Socrates is one of the three, the trio of most

influential personages in the Western tradition.

When we think of Hamlet, who can deny the Prince of Denmark's reality?

We do not think of a character, we think of a human, we think of a real man.

We cannot deny his reality when this character clearly lived more fully and

more truly and more vividly than real people who we actually meet in our day

-to-day life.

And we could go on listening to Hamlet forever.

I have a battered paperback perpetually beside my bed and it's stained with my

ink and it's dogeared from loving rereadings. You can always return to

this work, treat it like a novel, like both parts of Henry IV taken together,

read it like a novel, read it like a philosophical tract, like a Poem

Unlimited and a closet drama.

It is astonishing how much genius is in this tragedy.

The Soliloquies of Hamlet.

are always fresh, and each new Hamlet performed is an exciting chance at

renewed self-discovery. There are just as many Hamlets, if not more, than there

are actors and actresses to play him. Because no matter who you are, where you

are, or when you are from, everybody always finds themselves in the Prince of

Denmark. And he is a character who knows all about playing a role. It practically

feels as though he knows he's in an absurd dream, a drama, and that he could

step off from the stage at any moment and join our ranks, join us in the

audience. And if you wanted to craft a symbolic image, that would be a stand

-in, not only for the theatre, but would represent the arts themselves, what

would you choose?

Many would choose Hamlet in the graveyard, holding the skull of poor

Yorick aloft, and then contemplating our common mortality.

Phew, there we go. So that's the complete works of Shakespeare, ranked in

a reverse order from worst to best.

And if you haven't read any Shakespeare or you've only read a little bit of

Shakespeare or the last time you read Shakespeare was back at school and you

want to embark on an incredible journey of self-discovery, if you really want to

experience some incredible growth, then I really implore you.

to pick up the complete works of Shakespeare and work through everything

the Bard ever produced and follow along with the lecture series at patreon.com

forward slash hardcore literature. And let me know your ranking. Let me know

what you make of these incredible plays.

What you find when you forge through the complete works of Shakespeare is what

Owen Barfield would tell us. He would say that it is shocking to discover that

what we take to be our original feelings were once Shakespeare's thoughts.

This is why Harold Bloom would say, not so outrageously that Shakespeare

invented the human.

Shakespeare, along with the Bible, is the foundation for all of Western

culture. And once you've read through the works of Shakespeare, you'll find

when you read Shakespeare, it is the most leveraged move you can make for

appreciating absolutely anything else you want to enjoy.

And reading through elevates your cognitive power, it increases your

aesthetic appreciation.

And it increases your empathy too. Your emotional intelligence goes up when you

deep read Shakespeare.

But at the end of the day, the reason why we read and reread Shakespeare is

because it is fun.

It's healing, yes. And during times of war, there are many soldiers, shell

-shocked soldiers, who would turn to Shakespeare as they turned to Jane

Austen and Charles Dickens for nourishment. It's healing when you are

feeling ill, physically worn out. It's healing when you're feeling spiritually

worn out. You're feeling some emotion. toil or burden Shakespeare is always a

retreat he is a friend that you can return to time and again across your

lifetime but not only is he healing but he is enormous fun and I really do

encourage you, if you haven't read through the complete works already, to

make it a long-term project. Go at your own pace, treat yourself to some

fantastic volumes, have them stacked up, order them, follow a chronological order

like we've outlined at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, and joyfully work

your way through the plays. Give them a grading, give them a ranking that's

unique to you.

Isolate one passage from each and every play that you think says everything that

you want to say about that play, and review them.

and re-read them and watch new productions, watch new interpretations,

read criticism around Shakespeare and you will find a greater sense of meaning

and purpose and artistic appreciation in your life. Without a doubt it's one of

the greatest things that I have done and continue to do and so I would really

encourage you to drink deep and suck the marrow out of life because life is in

Shakespeare. And thank you so much for watching today and sharing your deep

love of literature with me and keeping these great works alive.

If you have read through the complete works of Shakespeare or you've read a

good proportion of them, if you've joined in the adventure at the Hardcore

Literature Book Club then please let me know your ranking, your personal

ranking. Which plays are your favourites? Which are your least

favourites and why?

Are there any commonalities?

Why do different plays resonate with you at different times in your life? And

again, if you are a relative newcomer to Shakespeare then I would really

encourage you to dip in, take the plunge, dive in, tear through his works.

I've heard from so many readers now from so many different backgrounds who have

said making Shakespeare's acquaintance and developing that friendship with him

is the greatest thing they have ever done.

Thank you again and happy reading everybody.

Bye bye for now.