What is Shakspeares greatest work? I want to read his best work, and go from there if i like it

What is Shakspeares greatest work? I want to read his best work, and go from there if i like it

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Hamlet

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Tempest

Can someone who didn't exist even have a best work?

Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Henry IV

these are the cream of the crop. Objectively the best plays.

Othello is my favorite.

mind telling me your objective criteria?

>The Tempest doesn't even make his top 7
Tossed your credibility in the trash tbqh

>6 tragedies and a history
lmao brainlet pls

>falling for the post-colonialism jew

>no comedies
Disgusting desu.

I am going to start reading Othello tonight. What should I keep in mind while reading it? What makes it so good? Without spoilers.

The villain is really into NTR

agree but I'd replace Coriolanus with Richard III

high schooler detected, underage pls go

Lear is overrated. Merchant of Venice is much better. In general I'd recommend all of the problem plays

ur self worth is overrated

Othello did fuck Iagos wife

MOORED

Iago is my favorite villain of any literature

Midsummer Night's Dream

m8 if a tragedy is titled after a character that character will die, I literally can't think of an exception to this rule. Every Shakespeare title is one big fat spoiler.

That's one of the things that make it a tragedy my man

This or King Lear.

Shakespeare's works were written by a black lesbian

My personal favorites are Othello, The Tempest, and Hamlet.

Actually, I just remembered two exceptions to the rule - Prometheus Bound and Euripides' Medea.

Is reading Shakespeare the best way to experience it or is the play form superior?

same desu

If it's a good performance it is almost as good as reading.
Chances are it won't be a good performance though.

Both supplement each other.

I'll bite. Tell me, who do you think wrote the plays?

Richard III is not even his best Richard, baka.

it's the original cuck kino

King Lear is my favorite but The Tempest is probably the best.

Are there any good performances that you know of online? Sadly I don't live near a place with any sort of theatrical merit

>The Tempest is probably the best.
It is impossible that someone actually holds this opinion. The Tempest has barely anything in terms of good monologues, the story stumbles all over the place, and most of the characters are barely memorable. Shakespeare probably contributed the least on this one, and it shows

>reading for dialogue
>reading for plot

kill you're self

youtu.be/4XLSjpN7zeI

Shakespeare is literally nothing but people talking, you unrepentant memer.

The Merchant of Venice gives an excellent perspective on the historic persecution of the Jewish people and the harsh suffering imposed on them.

Shakespeare is literally 100% dialogue

tempest still his best shit, u just too plebby tier to get it

>On The Tempest: ‘It’s like Shakespeare squared, which is why pseud Shakespeare fans like it because it shows they can understand it. Which they can’t.’

what is this from some youtube channel run by an undergrad? stay pseud pleb

damn, this goes

Deservedly.

>I'd recommend all of the problem plays
If you're including the Winter's Tale in that group, I have to strongly disagree. That was the first of Shakespeare's I was assigned in school for whatever reason, and it was the first and last I actually read (until I started reading for myself as an adult). I cannot overstate how much I hated that play.

1. Othello
2. Macbeth
3. King Lear
4. Julius Caesar
5. Coriolanus

Julius Caesar is probably his best beginner play though. If you can't follow the plot, then just give up on Shakespeare.
Hamlet is pretty overrated.
Most of his comedies are trash.

How do you guys read Shakespeare, are there any additions you like?
Notes to explain the old English?
Or do you just read it?

took a course on shakeson and our professor made us buy the complete pelican shakespeare. iirc each play has a sizable introduction and there's lots of footnotes and shit.

The tragedies and histories are pretty easy to understand. Never understood how this "Shakespeare is difficult" meme started. You'd have to be a complete brainlet to not be able to follow the plot of Julius Caesar or Macbeth for example.

It's only the comedies that are difficult because they rely on obscure wordplay and outdated puns. Thus meaning that they're almost unnecessary to read in the 21st century.

The one play where the guys talk about the chick's fat rolls and equate them to countries and landmasses is genuinely funny as fuck though. I forget what one that's from.

Most people struggle to adjust to the older style of English. If you're on Veeky Forums this probably won't be the case, but who knows.

Actually, a lot of the problem I noticed with people who struggle to understand Shakespeare are because they attempt to read it like poetry.

So instead of just reading it using the punctuation, they would just stop at the end of a line even though that might be in the middle of a sentence. And that would really fuck up their understanding of it.

I like to add marlowe to my shakespeare reading

Hamlet or The Merchant of Venice.

The Tempest is also god-tier but I wouldn't jump right in with that.

pay attention to Othello's language and how it begins to mirror Iago's as time goes on

Explain to me why academia started stucking The Tempest's dick in the last couple decades. It seems thoroughly mediocre to me.

cuz it's got a huge fuckin' tempest bro!

""""""Academia"""""" can choke on my cock.

Titus Andronicus is unironically one of Shakespeare's 10 best plays, yet the only criticism critics have against it is "Wahhhhh it's too violent ;_;"

It's the only one post-Macbeth that's any good.

Inb4 Coriolanus

But it's not good

What didn't you like about it? And just so you know, not liking that it's very simple to understand by Shakespearean standards so psueds can grasp it as pretend they're into Shakespeare isn't a legitimate criticism.

It has nothing that stands out. No great monologues, no compelling themes, the most notable character in the story is Caliban, for fuck's sake, and he's only really become famous because of the story's popularity in former British colonies as a hamhanded metaphor. I see no reason to praise it in general, let alone to place it near the top of Shakespeare's work.

Because it's w e i r d d u d e

That's from the comedy of errors and is one of the funniest things in Shakespeare imo

Why is no one mentioning Romeo and Juliet? Isn't it supposed to be the most popular?
Also, please sort Shakespeare's work by difficulty.

>please sort 50 plays by difficulty
no thanks
Romeo and Juliet is the one that gets read in High Schools, presumably because teenagers can relate to being entirely dominated by your emotions, but it's not really his best. I think only the Japs like it the most.

Hamlet
Henry IV
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Midsummer's Night Dream
The Tempest

>people who struggle to understand Shakespeare are because they attempt to read it like poetry.
>instead of just reading it using the punctuation, they would just stop at the end of a line even though that might be in the middle of a sentence

that's how you should read poetry too tho

also to answer, its only hard for high schoolers and you can't really blame them if all they've read up to that point is shitty YA. They have super small vocabularies to begin with, then add a coupla hundred years on top of that and they struggle.

Othello was black

"Moor" in English now means a very large plain in Yorkshire with little bushes on it

Reading is great if you don't have access to seeing it performed (most of his plays don't seem to be performed now and if they do they might not be very good productions).

An alternative to seeing it live is watching some of the film adaptations that do his work justice. Branaugh's Hamlet comes to mind.

> The Tempest
> best

Please explain to me why you feel this way. I read it and although I enjoyed Caliban getting drunk, I didn't really get much out of it. I enjoyed it but not near as much as I enjoyed Coriolanus or King Lear.

> Shakespeare
> old English

Lmao

> Never understood how this "Shakespeare is difficult" meme started.

People are usually forced to read it in school and most students struggle to get their heads around the language, rhythm, poetry and imagery of the language. Most kids probably just stumbled through mispronouncing the words most of the time. This experience sticks with them until they're old enough to read it by themselves but because they remember the initial experience as such a slog, they dismiss Shakespeare as "too difficult" and probably never read his work again.

This was at least applicable for me, but I sucked it up, bought a complete collection and just dove in. Shakespeare is now my nigga.

This. Titus Andronicus is fantastic but other than the violence I hear no other criticism of it.

Romeo & Juliet is great but it's often taught in schools and really appeals to the dumb youth who think their school girlfriend is "the one"

It's great, it really is, but it's also absolutely insufferable

I really just wanted to smack both Romeo and Juliet at many points, they're both too young to get that far into it (But I suppose that's why it's a tragedy - they lose before they can even learn that young love is bullshit)

The idea is "hurr durr Shakespeare was Fletcher-tier at that stage. Works were too grisly - w-which means i-it's immature!"
It's a history play and history is violent and a lot worse shit has happened. I thought the play was riveting - one of my favorites.

Once Mercutio dies, the play goes downhill fast.
It's a pretty overrated play IMO and Coriolanus should take its place in the canon of classics.

Mine too, user. Good to see I'm not alone.

Thirding this.
Also I'm the guy who started this chain of discussion so I'm glad to see my opinion on Titus isn't that controversial.

Now....how do we meme it into becoming an accepted part of the Shakespeare repertoire?

> Please explain to me why you feel this way. I read it and although I enjoyed Caliban getting drunk, I didn't really get much out of it.

yeah fuck oath this
for lack of better articulation The Tempest just doesn't feel as "deep" as his other plays, it just all feels pretty inconsequential, and maybe I'm missing something but I've studied in both high school and university and I learnt some cool stuff about and picked up references I'd have missed on my own but I still didn't find any of it particularly enlightening, at least not compared to Hamlet, or Othello, or MacBeth, or Merchant of Venice...

It's just not as realistic as the others. It a been a while but after that girl was raped and had her hands and tongue cut off the dude comes, finds her, and recites a poetic monologue instead of helping her.

His characters were not as mature as they became later in his career.

I expected Kenneth Branagh. Instead I got an autistic lego reenactment.

I have a feeling this post was made by someone associated with the ADL.

Because it's literally about colonialism, and studying the relationship between Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel is what makes the play interesting. And it gets postcolonial scholars wet to see a Shakespeare play critical of imperialism.

Can you say a couple more sentences though? Scholars think its Hamlet or Lear thats the key text so itd be good to hear an argument to the contrary

Honestly if its a reputable production that doesn't do a bunch of bullshit like set it modern day Syria or whatever then yeah theater is a great way to experience it

I've read all of these and more, seems a good list to me. Ignore The Tempest brainlets, it's an incredibly overrated and trite work with no interesting characters, beautifully written like most of his other later plays but with almost no deeper meaning.

Bardolotry - Will thinks what I think! Told you!

In that list Othello to Coriolanus were written consecutively in a short amount of time in his greatest burst of artistic talent.
Hamlet is a no brainer and there is a reason it's his most famous play.
Henry IV has his best character in Falstaff.

OK. I agree it's a good list.

It's a critical failing, definitely.

My favorites are Hamlet, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure.

Bleh, so it's exactly what I thought.