Shakespeare: Rank His Great Tragedies

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Forgive a slightly off-topic post - but Verdi improves, I think, on the original with Otello.

I don't think so - that simplistic reduction of Iago to a cardboard cut-out requires a lot of forgiving: and Shakespeare builds up the disintegration of Othello's psychological breakdown to much more devastating effect. (And the Willow Song AND Ave Maria!?? Isn't everybody in the Opera House just itching for the strangulation by the time that's over? It's practically dawn by the time she gets to bed!)

But the first roar of approval approval any performance of Falstaff comes from Will's ghost.

[verismissimo]

Who was it and when did four plays become elected THE four?

The folio has 12 tragedies, the remaining eight being Troilus, Coriolanus, Titus, Romeo, Timon, Julius Caesar, Ant and Cleo and Cymbeline.

Since we are going en famille to R&J at the RSC on Monday, that's always a favourite for me, and I expect to shed a tear, as usual.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Who was it and when did four plays become elected THE four?

A C Bradley, 1904.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespearean-Tragedy-Lectures-Othello-Macbeth/dp/0692247599

[Don Basilio]

That occupies a strange position relative to the four plays I mentioned. It's highly rated but isn't much discussed and rarely staged. Like Troilus....connoisseurs love it but the public stays away.

That really surprises me. A & C is the one I'd go for any time.

[Conchis]

That really surprises me. A & C is the one I'd go for any time.

But you're a connoisseur! :)

[Conchis]

Who was it and when did four plays become elected THE four?

The folio has 12 tragedies, the remaining eight being Troilus, Coriolanus, Titus, Romeo, Timon, Julius Caesar, Ant and Cleo and Cymbeline.

Since we are going en famille to R&J at the RSC on Monday, that's always a favourite for me, and I expect to shed a tear, as usual.

Troilus (great but the man on the Radford Semele omnibus doesn't get it)
Coriolanus (great but hobbled by a central character whom it is hard for most peope to identify with - and sensitive mothers can't endure the 'She holds him by the hand, silent' scene)
Titus (rubbish as a text, however you look at it)
Romeo (over-written, even if beautifully so at times)
Timon (a qualified failure)
Julius Caesar (hobbled by its disastrous final two acts)
A&C (see Troilus)
Cymbeline (totally barking plot, which would work better as an opera: successful productions of this play are rarer than flying pigs).

[Conchis]

I don't think so - that simplistic reduction of Iago to a cardboard cut-out requires a lot of forgiving: and Shakespeare builds up the disintegration of Othello's psychological breakdown to much more devastating effect. (And the Willow Song AND Ave Maria!?? Isn't everybody in the Opera House just itching for the strangulation by the time that's over? It's practically dawn by the time she gets to bed!)

But the first roar of approval approval any performance of Falstaff comes from Will's ghost.

Otellos is the one of only two successful operatic treatments of Shakespeare that I know of (Verdi wrote the other one, too). I don't think of it as an improvement on Shakespeare as everything is cut and simplified: I think Boito showed his talent as a librettist by what he left out.

[Conchis]

I do agree on Winter's Tale. As you say, we get the complete tragic cycle - innocence corruption redemption, thanks to the happy survival of the innocent Perdita .... + comedy and all human life generally. Various lines that I learnt for A Level 50 years ago have stayed with me. eg Polixenes on his boyhood friend Leontes:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' the sun,
And bleat the one at the other: what we changed
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did.

I first saw the play in a Frank Dunlop Pop Theatre staging in the 60s with Jane Asher as Perdita (Tom Baker as the Bear?). Also a very memorable production at RSC as with Antony Sher as Leontes and most recently a couple of years ago with Kenneth Branagh as Leontes and Judi Dench as Paulina.

The later plays tend to go beyond go beyond catagorisation - Antony and Cleo, Tempest.

If armtwisted to rank the big four tragedies: I'd go Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth.

Laurence Harvey played Leontes in that production. It was filmed but the film is hard to get hold of and is not on youtube or DVD. Tom Baker did indeed play the bear!

I thought Sher was a liability to that RSC production: he's far too twitchy and unrelaxed to cut it as a Shakespearean actor.

[Nick Armstrong]

I do agree on Winter's Tale.

I also agree with you and Bella Kemp, brilliant play. Another of my 'three visit' productions (along with the Holm Lear and the Madoc/Haig Measure for Measure) was this gem of a production by Adrian Noble in 1992, with John Nettles surprisingly excellent as Leontes and Richard McCabe utterly hilarious as Autolycus



(Let's see what the radio production which starts in about half-an-hour on R3 is like... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078wtnn)

[jean]

I thought Sher was a liability to that RSC production: he's far too twitchy and unrelaxed to cut it as a Shakespearean actor.

I really can't agree.

I did not see Sher in the Winter's Tale but I loved his Richard III, and I thought his Shylock excellent.

I'd even say I have never seen a better Falstaff, in which role I don't believe he twitched at all.

[Conchis]

I really can't agree.

I did not see Sher in the Winter's Tale but I loved his Richard III, and I thought his Shylock excellent.

I'd even say I have never seen a better Falstaff, in which role I don't believe he twitched at all.

I will NEVER forgive him for his wretched Fool in Michael Gambon's King Lear back in the 80s. Talk about upstaging and chewing the scenery. I would literally walk MILES to avoid an Antony Sher performacne in Shakespeare.

[gurnemanz]

I have certainly seen Sher performances which I didn't enjoy at all, indeed found irritating (eg Travelling Light at the National Theatre) but I have good memories of the RSC Macbeth with Harriet Walter as Lady M. We saw it on tour at the Young Vic, i.e. at close quarters. We also liked his recent RSC Lear at the Barbican.

[Conchis]

I have certainly seen Sher performances which I didn't enjoy at all, indeed found irritating (eg Travelling Light at the National Theatre) but I have good memories of the RSC Macbeth with Harriet Walter as Lady M. We saw it on tour at the Young Vic, i.e. at close quarters. We also liked his recent RSC Lear at the Barbican.

The only thing he has ever impressed me in on stage was Ronald Harwood's play Mahler's Conversion, which was briefly seen at the Aldwych in 2001.

His Malvolio was bloody awful, too. Mind you, I don't like the play.

[verismissimo]

... Romeo (over-written, even if beautifully so at times) ...

Overwritten ... wouldn't that be Hamlet, Conchis?

[Conchis]

Overwritten ... wouldn't that be Hamlet, Conchis?

No: by the time he wrote Hamlet, he'd curbed his tendencies toward the purple. Romeo & Juliet is an immature work.