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Two Noble Kinsmen. “This play, written by two authors, seems to have as its ideal the melting of two (kinsmen, authors) into one. This would eliminate friction and rivalry but at the price of a death. It is fitting that the final tableau displays both the triangle of rivalry and, in the end, the death that thus anchors union.”

Henry VIII. “What ties these falls together, beyond their inevitability and remorseless dramatic succession (exacerbated by the play's severe truncation of historical events), is the word ‘divorce,’ which appears, like an uncanny specter, linking the tragical plot of ‘falls of greatness’ to the romantic plot of masque, courtship, marriage, and birth.”

The Tempest. “[the isle] eludes location and becomes a space for poetry, and for dream. It is not found on any map. Prospero’s enchanted island, while drawn from real explorations and published accounts, is ultimately a country of the mind. And this is made clear by the very structure of the play, which starts out in medias res, in clamor, in shipwreck, and in darkness.”

The Winter’s Tale. “This is one reason why silence occupies the two extreme poles of Shakespearean dramaturgy. It characterizes both those who refuse humanity, like
lago, and those who transcend it, like the ‘statue’ of Hermione in this play's final scene, and like all those characters, in this play and other romances, who are struck dumb by ‘wonder’ or ‘amazement.’”

Cymbeline. “If, instead of seeking the play's meaning from the plot, one seeks it instead in a logic of repetition, layering, and dream, there is a surprising unity in the persistence of
• the image of boxes and trunks;
• the question of sacrifice;
• the loss, and later recovery, of children by parents; and
• the adoption, and later loss, of children by parents.”

Coriolanus. “[he] has structural affinities with other doomed Shakespearean ‘innocents,’ like Desdemona and Duncan, whose trust in other people led to their downfall. Coriolanus trusts a code, not an individual, but his trust is similarly misplaced and outdated. He is purer than the world that contains him, a lonely dragon, the repository—for all his faults and flaws—of a lost set of Roman virtues.”

Pericles. “Like Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marina is a creator whose arts rival those of Nature. […] Marina stands at the play’s imaginative center, as the doer of magical deeds, the performer of resurrections, bringing both father and mother back to life—like the spring and the sea, with which she is linked by name and spirit.”

A&C. “And at the same time, Cleopatra is human weakness, pettiness, and frailty, ‘hopping’ in undignified steps through the public street, panting with loss of breath. Her humanity, like her pettiness and her changeability, somehow increases rather than decreases her astonishing erotic power. She is paradox and contradiction, the incarnation of desire—fire, water, and air, dazzling a man of earth.”

Macbeth. “Duncan is linked with light, day, and stars; Macbeth, with darkness, night, and a ‘brief candle.’ The pattern is elegant, pervasive, and cumulatively powerful, these language clusters offering an almost subliminal imagistic counterpoint to the ongoing dramatic action, as if the play’s unconscious were pushing events forward beyond, as well as through, the conscious agony of the protagonists.”

King Lear. “The symmetries provided by these two plots, the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot, are not merely dynastic or structural. Lear, whose error is a mental error, the error of misjudgment in dismembering his kingdom, is punished in the play by a mental affliction, madness. Gloucester, whose sun is a physical sun, lechery, is punished in the play by a physical affliction, blindness.”

Timon. “One contrast between King Lear and Timon of Athens is that the paternal-patron Lear and the arts-patron Timon, although they are addressed in very similar ‘ingrateful’ terms by those who benefit from their generosity, are seen from a modern perspective to be owed something different by daughters and by protégés.“

All’s Well. “The two hoodwinking scenes are thus set up to read or interpret each other. Paroles’ hooding scene is rendered more comic, and also more pertinent, by the fact that this posturing captain whose name means ‘words’ is immediately and completely at a loss for words, since his captors speak a made-up language, which is ‘translated’ by a soldier playing the role of ‘interpreter.’”

Othello. “Othello’s problem in the opening acts of the play is fundamentally a refusal to acknowledge the private nature of his own passion and his own person. Ultimately he will blame Desdemona for inciting that passion in him. His energies are concentrated on the public self, on protecting that elusive entity that Cassio also seeks desperately to protect: ‘Reputation, reputation, reputation.’”

Measure for Measure. “Angelo—the allegorical name is quite uncommon in Shakespeare—defines himself as a man who is above temptation, as something more than a human being. In refusing to imagine himself as human, and thus ‘fallen,’ he falls. In trying to be more than a man, he becomes less.”

Troilus & Cressida. “In the case of Troilus and Cressida, whose existence in literature is tied so directly to this story of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood,’ Shakespeare provides for the audience a scenario at once moving and tragic: the spectacle of two characters struggling blindly against their own mythic identities.”

Twelfth Night. “But in Twelfth Night he makes an important change from the earlier Comedy of Errors design, by making his ‘identical’ twins of different sexes. By doing this he is able to combine an old theme with a newer one, the theme of rebirth with the theme of sexual love and growth, and the freeing and educative function of erotic ambiguity and sexual desire.”

Hamlet. “[T]his invitation, to ‘speak of these sad things,’ is a way of making tragic events bearable, by retelling them, by placing them at once in the realm of the social and of the aesthetic. It is important to note that Horatio himself cannot really do this. He has not heard the soliloquies, without which the play has a very different quality, far more sensational and inexplicable.”

As You Like It. “But if Rosalind is Ganymede as much as Ganymede is Rosalind, then questions of gender and sexuality will also come under the rubric of ‘as you like it,’ and the play emerges as not only a fantasy of genre, a pastoral fantasy, but also a fantasy of gender, a fantasy, that is to say, about the very nature of human desire.”

Julius Caesar. “In fact, as Cassius and Brutus are soon to learn, they have killed the wrong Caesar. They have killed the private man, the one of flesh and blood. But the public man, the myth, lives on, after his death, after theirs, and long after Shakespeare’s. ‘Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.’”

Henry V. “The play the audience has been watching is, as the prologues have insisted, only an illusion. The conventional request for applause (‘let this acceptance take’) returns the power to the audience, where it has always been. What we are asked to approve is a spectacle of victory, and a concept of kingship, that is finally only an idea, precariously achieved and too easily lost.”

MAAN. “While there is no direct relation between the surly taciturnity of Don John and the blushing silence of the young lovers, their thematic connection is clear. The problem is not one of a wicked external diabolus ex machina but if the exploitation of existing internal weaknesses. DJ is a personification of the problems that are bound to arise between two silent lovers in a world that depends on language.”

Merry Wives. “… Doctor Caius, whose final consternation and humiliation when confronted with the fact that he has been duped into ‘marrying’ a boy, matched Malvolio’s poignant exit line. As always in Shakespearean comedy, the calm center of social reunion at the close is guaranteed, and guarded, by the escape of some anarchic energies beyond the bounds of the play.”

2 Henry IV. “King Henry IV sees himself as accursed because he is a usurper, and the pattern of the House of Lancaster seems almost as if it might parallel that of the House of Atreus in Greek tragedy, cycle after cycle of vengeance, sin, and retribution. The fear of talionic justice, an eye for an eye, haunts the King and the scene.”

1 Henry IV. “His is the most fragile of creeds, the creed of the epic warrior, and his time is passing in England. The Hotspurs of the world, like the Tybalts, cannot survive, although a world deprived of their spirit and their quixotic idealism is a world less valuable to live in. Hal, like the audience, will learn this, and we will see him try to incorporate something of Hotspur in himself.”

MoV. “The ambivalence that an audience feels about this play is something built into the play and emerging from it. If we alternately sympathize with Shylock and criticize him; … bask in the glory of Portia’s wit and critique her as a woman who will always get her way, regardless of the wishes and the feelings of others—if we feel this ambivalence—it is not because the play fails but because it succeeds.”

King John. “In dramatic terms the rivalry sets up a series of mother-son pairings unusual in Shakespeare’s history plays, which are so often preoccupied with the relationships between fathers and sons. Eleanor & John, Lady Falconbridge & the Bastard, and Constance & Arthur are all juxtaposed in scenes that show […] the complex politics of mother love, in a way that will not appear again until Coriolanus.”

Richard II. “But Bolingbroke does not think in these theological terms. The kingship for him is a political, not a religious, office until he attains it, when his tune and tone will change. And the image of the king as the sun will itself chart the pattern of Richard’s tragedy and fall, as it is transferred in the course of this play from Richard to Bolingbroke.”

MND. “Dangers are all around them, and the Athenians’ escape from danger, back to the world of comedy and marriage, is fortune but not inevitable. The Pyramus and Thisbe play neutralizes and makes manageable all the dangers they could have encountered. And it is a measure of their own limitation that none of the noble spectators can see the connection between the play they are watching and the one they are in.”

R&J. “It is not overstating the case to say that gold versus silver constitutes another of the play’s defining feuds, and that the critique of gold leads to the stunning climax/anticlimax of the final seven, in which Capulet and Montague, having apparently learned nothing from their losses, vie to build golden statues, each for the other’s dead child.”

LLL: “It is the King’s plan that is untimely, because it fails to understand the lively spirits of youth, and the propensities for sex, courtship, and play. In a culture far more seasonally dependent than our own, the pattern of nature is taken as more than a powerful metaphor. […] The attempt to stop time or to alter seasons will always be, for Shakespeare, a sign of resistance to what is human.”