We rank our ten favorite Shakespeare plays

Macbeth may not be one of our favorite Shakespeare plays, but this portrait of Ellen Terry playing Lady Macbeth is probably our favorite picture by John Singer Sargent

Since we started the Emsworth blog, we’ve been amazed to see how many first-rate websites and blogs are devoted more or less exclusively to Shakespeare. The one we like best and visit the most is the indispensable Shakespeare Geek, whose learned readers happily debate such unanswerable questions as whether Hamlet’s mother was in on the murder of his father. The Greek has guest appearances from Shakespeare experts, passes along news from the world of Shakespeare scholarship, and in general cheers the ongoing impact of Shakespeare on culture.

The Geek recently invited readers to rank their favorite ten Shakespeare plays so he can poll the results. This is our list:

10. Measure for Measure. A bracingly earthy play in which a hypocritical judge doles out capital punishment to fornicators, but demands sex from a woman who seeks mercy for her brother. Angelo is one of our favorite villains. And there’s the glorious cameo role of Barnardine, the reprobate who successfully insists that he’s too drunk to be executed.

We were delighted to learn recently that, back in the early 1800s when Thomas Bowdler prepared his editions of Shakespeare with the smutty parts taken out or rewritten to make them suitable for family reading, he threw up his hands when he came to Measure for Measure and left the play alone as a hopeless case.

Al Pacino as Shylock

9. The Merchant of Venice. The first Shakespeare we ever read and still a top favorite, even though we have yet to see a good production. Who can resist either the trial scene or the “In such a night” duet of Lorenzo and Jessica?

How about a moratorium on the whining about the ethnic stereotypes in this play? Sure, Shylock’s character shows evidence of the ingrained prejudices of the day, but the playwright’s affirmation of our common humanity was a breakthrough. And as Portia says, “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”

8. Troilus and Cressida. All good literature and drama is “relevant” (to use a tiresome word) in today’s world. But what Shakespeare play presents a more apt metaphor for our own times than this tale of Greeks, lost in sensuality and relativism, who have lost the sense of what they’re fighting for, or why it makes any difference which side they’re on? The play’s attractions include two of of Shakespeare’s most repulsive characters, Thersites and Pandarus.

Orson Wells as Falstaff

7. Henry IV, Part 1. The play that gives the best sense of England in the Bard’s own day. Prince Hal’s slumming with Falstaff is great fun.  But the picture of Falstaff’s manning his regiment with unarmed peasants to be sacrified as cannon fodder is sobering. Those were cruel times.

If the Shakespeare Geek were inviting his readers to rank their favorite practical joke scenes in Shakespeare, our favorite would be the prank Falstaff’s fellow villains played him on the highway near Gadshill. (Our second favorite is the hilarious scene in All’s Well in which the blindfolded Paroles, believing himself a prisoner of the enemy, all too readily betrays his comrades.)

John Gielgud as Prospero

6. Othello. So many Shakespeare plays revolve around characters like Iago who control and manipulate people around them that we’ve often thought the playwright must have had recurring fantasies of having godlike control over his fellow humans. But none of the Bard’s other puppet masters is so thoroughly sociopathic as Iago. The visceral impact of the final scene is unparalleled.

5. The Tempest.  Gonzalo will forever be a hero to Emsworth and all bibliophiles because he made sure the castaway Prospero was supplied not only with food and clothes, but also with books:

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

Even the wretched Caliban knew the value of Prospero’s books:

Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot

4. Hamlet. For all the usual reasons, we never tire of Hamlet. And the comic relief — the garrulous Polonius, the traveling players, the gravediggers — always comes just when the play needs it the most.

Mervyn Peake's drawing of his own character, Fuchsia

3. Twelfth Night. Here we confess that since boyhood we have been prone to hopeless crushes on fictional female characters: Mona in Elizabeth Enright’s The Four-Story Mistake, Perry Mason’s secretary Della Street, Titus Groan’s sister Fuchsia in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Jane Austen’s Emma — and even though we are no longer young, the quick-witted, slender-figured Viola. Feste’s our favorite Shakespeare fool. There’s just no other Shakespeare comedy that we like nearly so well.

2. Julius Caesar. A gripping story, the best-plotted Shakespeare play. So many delicious scenes: Cassius’s courtship of Brutus, the assassination of the tyrant Caesar, the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, the exquisite quarrel between Brutus and Cassius — and especially the cameo appearance of the unfortunate Cinna the poet. “Tear him for his bad verses!”

Brian Bedford as Lear at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, 2007

1. King Lear. This is Emsworth’s favorite Shakespeare.  We identify in an alarming way with Lear, with his monumental mistakes of judgment, with his difficulty in swallowing his pride, with his instinct for the grand and the dramatic.  And Emsworth has three daughters too! 

The comic moments in King Lear almost overshadow the tragic. Just when his heartache is the most acute, Lear has the presence of mind to address “Poor Tom” with a self-deprecating witticism: “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters?”

Christopher Plummer writes In Spite of Myself

Literature it’s not, but what a read! Christopher Plummer has written a memoir of his life on the stage, on the movie set, and in the bedroom. We were riveted by every page of stage gossip and titillating reminiscences.

In Spite of Myself reads in Mr. Plummer’s own voice; there’s no trace of a ghost-writer. He begins with his childhood in Montreal, where his mother read him the Just So Stories and The Wind and the Willows (just what Emsworth read to his own children!) and the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (introduced to Emsworth by his favorite college professor). She also took him to the theater (his first play: J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, another of our favorites).

Plummer studied piano but was upstaged by a more talented high school classmate, Oscar Peterson. Still underage, he began to hang out at Montreal nightclubs, where he met an alcoholic Diana Barrymore, who asked her to escort him to a posh after-dinner party. As Plummer remembers it,

I boldly sat down at the piano, hoping to accompany Diana in a French song or two. She winked at me and took up the cue. As was her custom, she had decked herself out in a daringly revealing low-cut dress. In the middle of a song in order to emphasize a phrase, she made a sweeping theatrical gesture, miles over the top, when suddenly, not just one but two glorious breasts popped out in full view and stayed out for the rest of the number.

That’s on page 49; this 650-page book is full of juicy bits like this.

And his amours! For the most part, Plummer names names. By his account, he has enjoyed the favors of scores of beautiful women (besides his three wives) over his long life.

His show-business stories (not all of which involve him personally) are marvelous. One that tickled our fancy has to do with the composer-pianist Percy Grainger, whom Plummer saw in Montreal as a teenager:

The Australian, Percy Grainger, came to town very often — declined hotels and insisted on sleeping on his piano in a studio at Steinway Hall. He was most eccentric and would play only two encores: “The Man I Love,” as if Grieg had written it, and his own “Country Gardens.”

For the most part, Plummer’s gossip is good-humored; several accounts of nasty behavior by show business colleagues omit names. One is left in awe of the sheer numbers of distinguished actors, directors, playwrights, and producers, from Noel Coward and David Selznick to Katharine Hepburn and Julie Andrews, that Plummer has known during his career.

And there’s plenty in this book about the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario), which is clearly close to Plummer’s heart, as well as about Plummer’s work in England and on Broadway. Did you know that Duke Ellington dedicated his 1957 album Such Sweet Thunder to the Stratford Festival? Plummer met Ellington when the composer, doing research for his album, was in Stratford monitoring a rehearsal of Hamlet.  The dedication’s right there on the front cover.

One does not have to believe all of Plummer’s stories to enjoy them. (Did Grainger really sleep on his piano?) At one point Plummer tells of a Montreal music critic who fell asleep, missed a performance by Horowitz, wrote a glowing review of a performance he did not hear, and only discovered afterward that the maestro had become ill and did not play. Over the years we have heard other versions of such a story, with different performances and critics; no doubt Plummer thinks he is telling the original.

Another tale that tested our credulity involved an affair between the young Plummer and a married actress. According to Plummer, he and the lady were making love on a chair in a dressing room when the lady’s husband walked in and engaged them in casual conversation. Supposedly, the husband never suspected what was happening, because the lovers’ lower limbs were fully covered by the woman’s long, full gown. It’s clear that’s how Plummer remembers the incident. But it’s hard to believe it happened quite that way.

We expect that it is because Emsworth has raved for years about Plummer’s performance as Lear at the Stratford Festival in 2002 that one of our daughters knew to snap up a copy of In Spite of Myself for our Christmas stocking. In fact, Plummer’s King Lear remains the high point of our theater-going career. Plummer’s ribald, swaggering king seemed to us exactly what the Bard had in mind. And with Plummer, the language barrier simply disappeared; he rendered Shakespeare’s immortal lines so naturally that he might have been speaking twenty-first century American.

King Lear (and Cordelia) on canvas

In an earlier, generously illustrated post, we noted how artists have liked to paint scenes from Hamlet. Happily, artists have also given plenty of attention to Emsworth’s favorite Shakespeare play, King Lear.

The finest Lear picture that we know is also the easiest to see in person, at least for New Yorkers. It’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it illustrates the end of the dramatic first scene in King Lear. The aging English warrior and king, Lear, has called his three daughters to him in order to divide up his kingdom among them; he plans to enjoy himself in retirement at their respective castles.

With ill-considered vanity, Lear first asks his daughters to tell him how much they love him. Goneril and Regan flatter the old man shamelessly and are awarded their shares of his kingdom. But Cordelia, his youngest daughter and always his favorite, refuses to play the game and arouses the wrath of the choleric old king, who gives her nothing and banishes her in a fit of pique.

Cordelia calls out her hypocritical sisters in a parting speech whose lines are engraved on the frame of Cordelia’s Farewell, the 1894 picture by the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey from the Met shown above:

Ye jewels of our father, with wash’d eyes
Cordelia leaves you: I know you what you are;
And, like a sister, am most loath to call
Your faults as they are nam’d. Use well our father:
To your professed bosoms I commit him:
But yet, alas, stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place.
So farewell to you both.

The three sisters are on the left side of Abbey’s large painting (nearly ten feet wide!). Regan wears a dark gown, Cordelia wears a bitter smile and holds up the folds of her red dress, and Goneril, in white, points toward the back of the stoop-shouldered Lear, who is followed by a dog. (The dog is not in Shakespeare.)

Scenes from Shakespeare seem to have been something of a speciality for Abbey. He used a similar palette in The Play Scene in Hamlet, at the art museum at Yale University (shown here; Hamlet is lying with his head on Ophelia’s lap). It looks as if his models for the two pictures may have been wearing some of the same borrowed costumes and props.

In the play, things go badly for Lear after he has given away his kingdom. Regan and Goneril can’t be bothered with their father and refuse to let him stay with them; they even turn him away in the face of a storm.

As the tempest reaches its height, Lear wanders on the heath, accompanied only by his Fool and his faithful friend, Kent, railing against the elements, his ungrateful daughters, and the unjustness of the fates. Of all the scenes from Lear, the tempest scene seems to have been the most tempting to painters. This large picture, King Lear and the Fool in the Storm, by the Scottish painter William Dyce, who showed the wind but overlooked the rain, was painted about 1851 and is at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. The Fool is begging his master to go and ask his daughters for mercy: “here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool” (Act III, scene 2).

Kent persuades Lear, nearly mad with grief, to take shelter in a hut, a scene that is the subject of the American artist Benjamin West’s crowded 1788 painting, King Lear (just above), which is at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the hut, Lear, the Fool, and Kent are joined by Edgar (disguised as a madmen), and then by Lear’s friend Gloucester, who risks the wrath of Lear’s older daughters by offering the king food and shelter. According to Maria Grazia Messina in Shakespeare in Art, the English portrait painter George Romney was “obsessed” with the story of Lear. The Romney painting to the left, King Lear in the Tempest Tearing off his Robes (left), gives us the moment in Act III, scene 4 when Gloucester appears through the storm, looking for Lear. In the center of the picture, Lear is tearing off his clothes in solidarity with the near-naked Edgar; the Fool points to Gloucester, who carries a torch: “Look, here comes a walking fire.”

Toward the end of the play, Cordelia returns from exile with a French army and is briefly reunited with her father, whose senses are recovered and who now realizes how unjust he has been to his youngest daughter. But after a battle, both Lear and Cordelia become prisoners of the bastard Edmund, as depicted in William Blake’s 1779 watercolor, Lear and Cordelia in Prison (above), which is in the Tate Britain in London. At Edmund’s order, Cordelia is hanged. Lear discovers her body and carries her onstage, then himself dies of grief, the scene portrayed in the Irish painter James Barry’s 1774 picture, King Lear Mourns the Death of Cordelia.

What Harry Potter could have learned from Hamlet

Despite his best intentions, Emsworth has occasional brushes with popular culture. A few years ago, for example, he fell prey to the addictive tales of J. K. Rowling.

Rowling is an exceptional story-teller. But the way she concluded her Potter story in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, released about a year ago, was hugely unsatisfactory.  Now, after spending some time with Shakespearean tragedy (for example, see Emsworth’s review of Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in this post), Emsworth is in a position to explain why.

J. K. Rowling simply failed to respect the rules of tragedy. For six heart-racing volumes, the Harry Potter saga was shaping up as one of the grand tragedies in our literature. But in the end, Rowling lacked the intestinal fortitude needed to end her tale properly.

The rules of tragedy have been well understood since Aristotle laid them down 2,000 years ago, and I summarize them here, not intending to patronize any readers, but merely to refresh them on what they learned while studying Julius Caesar in ninth grade. A tragedy must, first, be a serious story about a conflict between a hero and a great malign force. In a tragedy, moreover, the hero must undergo a change of fortune, preferably because of his own mistake or flaw, leading to a disastrous, heart-rending denouement.

Consider Lear, that warrior king and grand personality, whose fatal mistake is to misjudge the characters of his daughters and to surrender his kingdom prematurely. With his world aligned against him, he loses everything. King Lear ends, oh so satisfyingly, with a stage strewn with corpses. Kent and Edgar, who survive, rule in Lear’s place.

Consider Othello, that great general and commanding figure, whose fatal weakness is to trust the sociopathic Iago and to allow him to plant fatal seeds of jealousy in his bosom. Weakened, Othello loses everything, and the play ends (once again, most gratifyingly) with blood and bodies everywhere. Gratiano, a minor character, succeeds to Othello’s place.

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"

Now consider Harry Potter, a hero among heroes, a wizard prodigy, a born leader and Quidditch captain, whose destiny is to battle the world’s greatest wizard. Like Lear, Othello, and Hamlet, Harry has a fatal weakness: a powerful connection with Voldemort tempts him to the dark side. Harry flirts too closely with evil and, in a moment of ambition and weakness, betrays his friends. Too late, he repents, and the story ends with bodies (including his own) and wands broken and strewn over the great hall at Hogwarts. The wizard world starts anew; a minor character, Neville Longbottom, succeeds to the place in the world of wizards that Harry might have held.

Only, of course, that’s not how J. K. Rowling wrote it. Because she lost her nerve plotting and writing the final volume, Harry never makes a fatal mistake, never loses his way, and rises safely and blandly from the wreckage of the final battle.

And so do Hermione and Ron. And so does practically everyone else. In fact, after all the hullabaloo and speculation by Potter fans over what would transpire, who among the Order of the Phoenix actually dies? An elf. The werewolf. The duplicitous Severus Snape. One of the Weasley twins (the twins do not have distinct personalities). Tonks (you probably don’t remember who she was, either).

J.K. Rowling lost her nerve in "Deathly Hollows"

In fact, at no point in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — for that matter, at no point in the series — are readers called upon to deal emotionally with the deaths of any character they have truly come to care about, except Dumbledore, and his age and infirmity take the sting out of his loss. J. K. Rowling flinched at her final task, which was to break our hearts.

She even shrunk from disposing of her villains. What possible reason could Rowling have had for letting Percy Weasley live? When a character in a tragedy has lost his way and gone over to the enemy, he must perish, even if he has belatedly seen the light. J.R.R. Tolkien understood this; that’s why the great warrior Boromir was slain at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.

And why, oh why, does Draco Malfoy survive? In a properly staged final battle, Harry’s arch-enemy would repent and, in a moment of high drama, would strike a critical blow on Harry’s side. Then, having atoned for his earlier wickness, and in a state of grace, Draco would die fighting. At the very least, Draco should die at the hand of the Dark Lord, so as to punish his parents for their wickedness. But nothing of the sort happens. Readers are not even told what happens to Draco after Harry last encounters him.

Let there be no mistake: J. K. Rowling wanted to write a tragedy. Why else would she have attached an epigraph to the Deathly Hallows in the form of a quotation from the playwright Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy (died 455 B.C.)?  But when it came down to cases, she lacked the stomach for the tragic conclusion that her story deserved.

From the dark tone of the fifth and sixth books, we were fully justified in expecting that (a) the forces of good would, in the final conflict, sustain serious losses and (b) that even if the Dark Lord were defeated, the wizard world would never be the same. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, to which the Harry Potter saga owes much, the defeat of Sauron marked the end of an age and the departure of the elves from Middle-earth.

Instead, Rowling left readers in a wizard world where all was copacetic, where the survivors were happily mated up, and where their little wizard offspring were happily heading off to Hogwarts. Sentimental rubbish, and a good tragedy wasted.

For Emsworth’s review of All’s Well That Ends Well in the 2008 season of the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario),  see this post for the Emsworth review of Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in this post). Other Emsworth posts include reviews of shows in the 2008 season of the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), including Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married (see this post), Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (see this post), Leonard Berstein’s Wonderful Town (see this post), and J. B. Priestley’s The Inspector Calls (see this post).