Favorite play? Favorite lines?

FULL OF SOUND AND FURY!

Favorite play used to be Macbeth but I like it a bit less every time I read it. I'd have to say either Coriolanus or Antony & Cleopatra, or maybe Othello. King Lear and Hamlet are soo good though...really difficult to choose. Admittedly I haven't read most of the comedies.

A Midsummer Night's Dream has the most beautiful language IMO.

Favorite line right now has more to do with how it's seemed to be in my head for months and the idea, not crazy beautiful language. Coriolanus 3.3:

> There is a world elsewhere.

>If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
>That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
>Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli:
>Alone I did it. Boy!

Coriolanus is perfect

Macbeth is fucking entry-tier.

Not saying it's bad (it's good), but everyone loves it because it's Shakespeare's shortest play and only has one plot so gets taught in every English class around the world.

i hate them all because i'm a contrarian faggot

Am I a pleb for liking Henry V?

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.
I were but little happy
If I could say how much.

that's funny, I just started Coriolanus today, just finished act 1
Somehow, I didn't know the plot beforehand so this is all fresh to me

Nah it's one of Shakespeare's best plays.

A lot of critics think the Henriad (RII, HIV1, HIV2, HV) > his four great tragedies (Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear) I agree with them

I love the character and how unfit he is for even his own home

>macbeth

>I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
>And wish th' estate o' th' world were now undone.—
>Ring the alarum-bell!—Blow, wind! Come, wrack!
>At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

to me this is pretty badass.

>greatest simile

What's so great? It's twice redundant:

>twilight
>after sunset
>in the West

Um yeah, twilight happens after sunset which happens in the West. Great job, Billy.

That line is from Hamlet tho..

youtube.com/watch?v=q89MLuLSJgk

Needs moar Richard II

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

...

AND IF THE DEVIL COME AND ROAR FOR THEM, I WILL NOT SEND THEM

I love the history plays most, beause Im a pleb, but Henry IV has the best characters in Falstaff and Hotspur.

That one is on the top of my list too

also
RICHARD: IS THERE A MUDRDERER HERE? NO. YES, I AM.

>othello
>brevity is soul

>favorite=/=best you stupid faggot
There is no difference, there is no "objectively best" play.

>this is what plebs believe

You can't be fucking serious. The idea that quality of art is in any way objectively measurable is idiotic and laughable.

>50 shades of gray isn't objectively worse than paradise lost

Correct. It's not "worse" because there is no objective "good" and "bad" in the first place.

Was Paradise Lost of self-publishing sensation? I think not

so your first week of freshman philosophy's been super fun, i see.

It's okay, no need to be upset. We all get something wrong at times.

KING CLAUDIUS

Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

HAMLET

At supper.

KING CLAUDIUS

At supper! where?

HAMLET

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes, but to one table:
that's the end.

KING CLAUDIUS

Alas, alas!

HAMLET

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

KING CLAUDIUS

What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET

Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.

>upset
amused is a more accurate assessment. :)

Good shit.

Hamlet is my favorite as well.

Yes? A simile is naturally redundant.

There's a worldwide expert on Shakespeare teaching Shakespeare I at my college this year. I'm not in the class but I think I'm going to try and sneak into the lectures.

And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

It is the final purification of language in the form of monosyllables (particularly the last two lines), corresponding to the final purification of the wretched world of King Lear in the form of Cordelia's resurrection within Lear's mind.

However, my favorite play overall I must admit as Hamlet. It is an infinitely complex system, and I think that ultimately the highest poetry is lyricized metaphysics, as pedantic as that sounds and may be. Although I haven't read Antony and Cleopatra or the Henriad yet, so my mind might change. But I consider Cordelia's subjective resurrection and Lear's ecstasy to be the single most magnificent scene in Shakespeare, although Hamlet is the most magnificent whole.

Well I'm glad. Learning should be fun.

gay as shit. no wonder shakespeare sales are declining.

my favorite from Coriolanus is the part where he comes back from war and finds his wife crying

My gracious silence, hail!
Wouldst thou have laugh'd had I come coffin'd home,
That weep'st to see me triumph? Ay, my dear,
Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear,
And mothers that lack sons.

Measure for Measure

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations that thou bear'st
Are nursed by baseness. Thou'rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both...

This is great.

God, I just read Julius Caesar for the first time last month and thought it was overrated. Then I see this. I'm with the people who say that Shakespeare has to be seen, not just read.

Be not afeared.
The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs
that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ear,
and sometime voices, that if I then had waked after long sleep
will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming
the clouds me thought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me,
that when I waked, I cried to dream again.

youtube.com/watch?v=cBGtycWIEHo

>tfw Willy is so overhyped that by the time you get round to trying his stuff it's just disappointing

Oedipus at Colonus. It's better than Rex.

>50 shades of gray is objectively worse than paradise lost
I happen to agree with your opinion, user. All(?) of us here do. That doesn't make it objective though.

Can shut posting be /lit?

No, your understanding of morality is just about on par with those leaving freshman philosophy. Not the other user btw