Bardolatry

 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 ]