What is Shakespeare's Greatest Play?

Experts weigh in.

Top 10 Novels Inspired by Shakespeare

 The list, care of the Guardian.

Peter Brook's "King Lear"

10 Things You Didn't Know about Shakespeare

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

10 Shakespeare References in Disney Movies

The list, care of Geeks X Girls.

Cymbeline

Did Shakespeare Have a Hand in the Writing of OTHER Elizabethan plays?

Yes.

Orson Welles and Peter O'Toole Discuss Hamlet

Shakespeare to Be Retold By Famous Authors

Margaret Atwood retelling The Tempest? Howard Jacobson The Merchant of Venice?

From a piece in the Guardian...

Award-winning novelist and critic Jacobson has chosen The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays, which can be read as antisemitic. "For an English novelist, Shakespeare is where it all begins. For an English novelist who also happens to be Jewish, The Merchant of Venice is where it all snarls up," Jacobson said.

"Only a fool would think he has anything to add to Shakespeare. But Shakespeare probably never met a Jew; the Holocaust had not yet happened, and antisemitism didn't have a name. Can one tell the same story today, when every reference carries a different charge? There's the challenge. I quake before it."

Canadian novelist and critic Atwood, whose latest book, MaddAddam, explores gene-splicing between humans and animals, opted for The Tempest. "It has always been a favourite of mine, and working on it will be an invigorating challenge. Is Caliban the first talking monster? Not quite, but close …" she said.

5 Best Shakespeare Biographies

The list, care of Biographile.

Which Shakespeare Character Are You?

Take the quiz and find out.

King Lear, Starring Orson Welles

The Creator of Downton Abbey Takes on Shakespeare

11 Strange Shakespeare Adaptations

The list, care of Mental Floss.

Shakespeare and the Sway of the Sea

Can one seriously imagine that the Bard, who wrote so stunningly of the sea, never truly saw it? Royal Shakespeare Company associate director David Farr on the power that the ocean held over the poet.

From a post on the Daily Beast...

What these plays all need, in production, is that sensitivity to the sea. They need a strange, elusive poetry that renders fortune, fate, chance (all words constantly used in these plays) as agents of a greater power. That makes the sea both God and Devil, and that makes man tiny and vulnerable. In the Twelfth Night I directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the world of Illyria was a hotel, its furniture seemingly drifting on an endless wave, the flotsam of human disappointment. What one learns in working on Twelfth Night is that the truly shipwrecked souls of this play are not Viola and Sebastian but the wretched inhabitants of Illyria, clinging to the driftwood of their dashed hopes as their world goes under.

But we are not just overwhelmed by the ocean, we also contain it. Orsino in Twelfth Night describes his passion as “all as hungry as the sea” (2.4.101). The human soul is an ocean tossed by storms of passion, deep and bottomless in its need for succor and nourishment. Storm is a metaphor for our own desires.

And then again we are just a drop of water. Lonely, lost, bereft.

Shakespeare - a Quiz

Good luck!

Sonnet 18

David Tennant reading Sonnet 18 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day' from Touch Press on Vimeo.

Shakespeare - Tax Dodging Food Hoarder

Could Shakespeare’s Coriolanus have been his way of trying to expunge a guilty conscience?

From a piece in the Sunday Times...

The play depicts a famine created and exploited by rich merchants and politicians to maximise the price of food and includes the lines: “They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain”. 

It has now emerged that as Shakespeare wrote the play at the height of the 1607 food riots, he was himself hoarding grain. As one of the biggest landowners in Warwickshire, he was ideally placed to push prices up and then sell at the top of the market. 

“There was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them,” said Jayne Archer, a researcher in Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University.

Joss Wheedon's "Much Ado about Nothing"

Soliloquies in Macbeth