April 23 Word of the Day: Bardolatry
[Found Poem]
Ranking
Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.
Is
it the intricate plot?
So
much of Shakespeare is about the contradictions
between
the private and the public self,
and
how we adopt a part to perform the latter.
But
of course, your personal favourite may be influenced
by
the actual production and the cast. While there are
some
obvious strong and weak plays,
different
plays speak to different situations.
Even
the (reputedly) bad plays often have sheer brilliance
within
them. Because most Shakespeare plays
have
some very meaty roles, a great performance
can
really boost the enjoyment of the play,
in
my opinion, transcending
some
of the weaker plot elements.
Ranking
Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.
Is
it the evocative and sometimes impenetrable dialogue?
It's
a concentrated assault on the language processing centres
of
the brain, for sure,
but
it leaves me giddy with emotion.
Love
the language in all the plays.
Yet
atomising the plays here
apart
from the nominal multi-parters
ignores
the reality that no play stands alone,
the
sum is greater than the parts,
and
there are clearly much larger-scale projects afoot.
The
camera angles are typical of its director.
Ranking
Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.
Such
ranking is necessarily an exercise in both futility
and
eccentric preference. Shakespeare should not be read
as
history, despite the desperate attempts of some
to
insist they are true biography. Of course,
all
the politically incorrect plays are lower down the list:
every
age creates the Shakespeare
that
reflects its self-image best. Shakespeare wrote
for
the theatre at the time,
not
for PhD theses centuries later.
The
outdoor ambience is amazing,
with
songbirds around the park
adding
ad-libs from nearby.
Just
magic.
[Found Poem: Fragments from the Comments column to
‘To see or not to see : every single Shakespeare play – ranked!’, by Michael
Billington. The Guardian, 22 April 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-interactive/2026/apr/22/every-shakespeare-play-ranked-lear-antony-cleopatra-hamlet
]


