Just wondering if anyone else here is a Shakespeare fan? As a Phil/Lit student, I kind of have to be, but I love his plays anyway. Anyone else like them?

Yeh I do. He's a legend. I particulary like Macbeth

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Oooh so do i, Macbeth is good

Macbeth is my favorite out of the plays I've read, but the metered dialogue always made it a bit hard to understand at first. I prefer his sonnets, and I've actually written a few for school assignments and myspace blogs.

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Cool I'm doing a poetry module thie year but I'm finding it really hard to write, it's so much harder than stories!

I love Twelfth Night too- I went to see a production of it by the RSC a few months ago that was amazing, they set it in Morocco and stuck really close to the text. They had the box tree scene in a tree, and even added details like pretending to be a cat when Malvolio looked up!

Macbeth is really good too, although I wasn't very happy in my seminar on it a few weeks ago- I was the only one in my group of five who turned up so I had to present and teach two scnees on my own for 45 mintues, which was realy embarrasing and I'm rubbish at presentations anyway.

Macbeth and R+J are my faves. The Tempest is overrated IMO and Hamlet is alright, but having studied it for A Level, any love of that play has left me lol.

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As an ex English Lit student and an ex Drama student I think I have had my fair share of The great Bard.

One of the funniest plays I have ever watched was A Midsummer Night's Dream. The moment that stands out was completely unarranged! In the hilariously awful play put on by the Rude Mechanicals (Bottom and all those characters!) the actor who played Flute who is playing Thisbe is supposed to kill herself with a sword. However because the play is supposed to be so botched and comic the actor drops the sword off the balcony(deliberately but everyone thinks its an accident) so comically he is left to kill himself with his hands :P However one of the other actors playing Theseus, I think, thought that it had gone wrong so improvised in character and runs forward and throws the sword back up onto the balcony. Thisbe catches it perfectly by the handle (another fluke!) and stabs herself much to the hilarity of the audience! Although we all thought at this point that this had been planned!
It was only after because my Uncle was in the play that he told us the story which just made it even funnier :P apparently they then added it into the play and had to practice the sword toss many times!

I suppose you will have to know the play fairly well to understand any of that though!


Hmm other favourites include the two plays I have performed, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet but I am not really a fan of Othello (although I love the name Iago) or Titus Andronicus. The 2004 film of the Merchant of Venice is pretty good in my opinion. I do also enjoy some of his sonnets although he wrote a fair few (upon researching I find 154 to be exact!)



Shall I compare thee to a summers day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate...

Sonnet 18



Even if you dont consider yourself a Shakespeare fan, the breadth of his stories means that you are likely to have come across some of his ideas. How many films nowadays are described as a Romeo and Juliet love story? Not forgetting West Side story of course. Many films are loose adaptations of his plays, 10 things I hate about you, for starters is based on The Taming of the Shrew and The Lion King based on Hamlet. Then there are the phrases, coined or popularised by him that you may use ... "Eaten out of house and home", "In a pickle" (The Tempest) and "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve" (Othello)

So you see ... I feel it is almost impossible to avoid him!

That was an incredibly insightful post, Becca! I'm with Dan... I loved Macbeth, really liked Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, didn't mind King Lear or Julius Ceasar.

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Yaaah sorry :P I had a bit of time on my hands!

Definitely! I really think his plays are applicable to anything- for my coursework this year, I'm rewriting Henry IV Part One in science fiction which is so much fun to do . My favourite's got to be Henry V though.