“Now you need to post your ranking of all Shakespeare’s plays.”
That was a tweet from Matt Yglesias, so here goes:
The best, in order
The Henriad (as a unit!)
King Lear
Hamlet (even if it is a bunch of cliches, strung together)
Measure for Measure
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet
As You Like It
Twelfth Night
Winter’s Tale (underrated)
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Anthony and Cleopatra
The Tempest
Othello (slightly overrated, Verdi’s opera actually is better)
Richard II + III
Pretty flawed, but I still want to call underrated
Cymbeline
Coriolanus
Troilus and Cressida
OK, and would be pretty awesome from anyone else
Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
All’s Well That Ends Well
Overrated, though you still can think they are pretty good
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Taming of the Shrew
Just not that good
Henry VIII
Two Gentleman of Verona
Merry Wives of Windsor
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
King John
Let’s not even get into the possible co-authorships.
The bottom line
Shakespeare is very likely the deepest thinker the human race has produced, so these are worth careful study! I am a fan of the Folger Library editions.