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The Tempest
Martin Butler
 ' Why do I love The Tempest? One reason is its amazing inventiveness, the way it seems to push the envelope of imaginative experience. By setting it on Europe's geographical edge, Shakespeare could invent situations and characters -- like Ariel and Caliban -- that were entirely unprecedented, making the play a seminal example of fantasy literature.' –
Timon of Athens
Nick Walton
' Timon of Athens is one of my favourite plays because it reflects in one man the brightest and the darkest extremes of our humanity. Having read it, few are likely ever to forget it. Timon is both Shakespeare's greatest optimist and his most vehement pessimist, and while the story delves deep into the dark sides of life, it also celebrates some of life's greatest comforts: friendship, fidelity and faith.'
Titus Andronicus
Jacques Berthoud
' My love for Titus Andronicus is armoured with respect. What transformed my perception of this play was Deborah Warner's 1987 production at the Swan. It stripped the play of its grand guignol carapace in order to reveal the horror of the consequences of cultural disintegration on the real lives of human beings.'
Troilus and Cressida
Colin Burrow
' I first saw Troilus and Cressida in a production at my school. Jeremy Northam, disgustingly handsome then as now, was playing what must have been his first romantic lead as Troilus. The prettiest girl in school was made to play a tawdry tarty Helen. My wickedest friend was Thersites, whose climactic act was to spit at the audience. He had a fine trajectory and a good aim, but he still couldn't quite reach the headmaster (which was very disappointing for everyone except the headmaster). I felt deeply envious of the performers for being either more beautiful or more venomous than I. As I have grown older with the play I see in it less of the knee-melting passion and vicious abuse of that adolescent production, and respond more to its earnest debates about what love is and what war does to men and women; but I still think that one of the greatest things about the play is its ability to arouse the nastiest of human emotions – envy, sexual jealousy, violence, lust, and simple mean-spiritedness – and at the same time call them into question.'
Twelfth Night
Michael Dobson
' I first got to know this play as an awkward teenage in Bournemouth, when I was made to recite some of Orsino's lines from the scene in which he listens to 'Come away, come away, death.' I was immediately seduced by the atmosphere Shakespeare gives to Illyria which, with its sexiness, music, adventure and languor, struck me as being everything that Bournemouth ought to be, but wasn't. And I was and remain hopelessly fascinated by Olivia, all the more so for being anxiously aware that I am myself really far more like Malvolio than anyone else in the play.'
Two Noble Kinsmen
Peter Swaab
' The Two Noble Kinsmen has many fascinations: it gives the best and fullest evidence of what Shakespeare was like as a co-author and collaborator; it includes some of the least- known great dramatic poetry in Shakespeare (or anywhere in English drama); and, as Shakespeare's last word, it points to how he'd have continued writing if he had done so, and maybe why he didn't.'
The Winter's Tale
Paul Edmondson
' I took my mother to see The Winter's Tale on my birthday one year and told her the plot as far as act 5. As the curtain came down, I saw her reach discreetly for her handkerchief. The magic I had long-believed in had worked even more powerfully than I had secretly hoped. This play, perhaps more than any other, calls us into an irresistible world of gossip, and almost hopeless loss, both of which are made transcendent by a sense of grace not only in its language, but in the joy that Shakespeare bestows on the most ordinary and extraordinary of human emotions. All this and a bear, too!'
Russ McDonald
' I love The Winter's Tale, but not everybody loves it as much as I do. One Shakespearian scholar I know declares that when he goes to hell he's going to be subjected for his sins  to a perpetual production of The
Winter's Tale. To me, that sounds like a description not of hell but of heaven. It is quixotic to attempt to describe in a few sentences the appeal of a great work of art, but if I have to do so, then I will say that . . .
I love The Winter's Tale because it allows me to have, for a couple of hours, what I cannot have in life, and yet the play is self-conscious and ironic about the terms of its gift. Like all the late plays, it restores dead wives to husbands and lost children to parents, granting the kind of gratification that the mortal world refuses to allow. And it does so with great emotional force: in the final moments, when the statue of Hermione begins to move, the theatre frequently resounds with sniffles and sobs that make it difficult to hear the characters' responses. At the same time, however, the play reminds and even teases its audience about the unreality of such wish-fulfillment, prompting us to recall that only a few minutes earlier we have been laughing at the country folk for believing preposterous tales. Who says you can't have it both ways? The
Winter's Tale says you can, and this combination of genuine emotion and ironic self-consciousness-not to mention forgiveness, second chances, and a bear-I find irresistible.'
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