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As You Like It
Katherine Duncan-Jones
 ' I love As You Like It because it celebrates freedom. Growing up in a big city (Birmingham), I was always excited by the idea of escaping to the greenwood. As an adult, I have come to relish the play’s affirmation of freedom of speech and individual self-expression. The Forest of Arden is a place where everyone can be themselves, bitter or romantic, comic or reflective.’
The Comedy of Errors
Randall Martin
 ' I love the play because it so skilfully combines domestic comedy, shot through with the real needs, rituals, and complications of everyday life, with mythical resonances of classical Mediterranean culture. It appeals profoundly to both the human heart and the historical imagination. My most vivid stage memory of the play was a 1994 production by theatre students at the University of Victoria. The company's youthful physical energy animated the play's rough-and-tumble comedy brilliantly, without any need for the kind of over-the-top gimmickery professional companies sometimes mistakenly feel must be added to the play. And the actor playing Adriana brought out better than I have ever seen the remarkable strengths and vulnerability of her character. Adriana's moving appeals for social justice and her expressive longings for human companionship and emotional fulfilment echoed in the strongest key similar but more lightly coloured desires in the play's other characters. This production impressed me with just how surprisingly intelligent and marvellously funny The
Comedy of Errors can be.’
Coriolanus
Paul Prescott
' Coriolanus is full of conflicts: between cities, classes, warriors, mothers and sons. I love its restless energy, its political and psychological insights, its noisiness, its tense moments of silence, and its brilliantly unlovable hero.’
 Hamlet
Paul Prescott
' I can think of no earthly reason not to love Hamlet. It's the funniest, bloodiest, sexiest, saddest, wittiest play ever written. Hamlet is, to adapt the Danish advertising catchphrase, “Probably the best drama in the world”.’
Henry IV, Part One
Charles Edelman
 ' My first-ever essay as an undergraduate was on Henry IV, Part One. Forty years and countless readings later, I still find something new every time I read or see the play.’
Henry IV, Part Two
Adrian Poole
' The relationship between Falstaff and Hal is one of the most intriguing
studies of love and loyalty in Shakespeare. But years ago my eyes were
opened to another aspect of these plays' greatness by a brilliant review
of Kenneth Tynan's. The Henry
IV plays, he said, were "the twin summits of Shakespeare’s achievement . . . great public plays in which a whole nation is under scrutiny and on trial". To someone brought up on the unquestionable greatness of the tragedies, this was a wonderfully liberating, challenging claim.’
Henry VI, Part One
Jane Kingsley-Smith
 ' Henry VI, Part One makes spectacular use of the Shakespearean stage. It represents its themes emblematically, offering a succession of speaking pictures which vividly represent its themes of heroism and patriotism, treason and betrayal. The play also engages head-on with contemporary attitudes towards female power. It uses witchcraft to demonise Joan of Arc whilst tacitly acknowledging her status as a scapegoat for men's failures and insecurities throughout the play.
This is a profoundly sceptical play, casting the same ambivalent gaze upon the heroism of Talbot, the demonism of Joan, and England's military struggle to bend France to its will.’
Henry VI, Part Two
Michael Taylor
' I've always thought that Henry VI, Part Two is one of the most underestimated of Shakespeare's early plays. What Shakespeare does for the male actor in the character of Richard III, he does for actresses in Part Two in the characters of Margaret and the Duchess of Gloucester (not to mention Margery Jourdain and Simpcox's wife). And the liveliness of Shakespeare's writing in his depiction of Jack Cade and his supporters anticipates the wonderful achievement of the tavern scenes in another Part Two of a history sequence, Henry
IV, Part Two.’
Macbeth
Carol Rutter
' Macbeth was the first Shakespeare play I saw on stage. I was eight years old. The scabby, gimp-legged Porter came on to answer the knocking at the gate. He stopped centre stage, unwound the filthy scarf that hung looped around his neck, loudly blew his nose on it, then carefully replaced it before observing, “Here's a knocking indeed”. I was hooked.’
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