Spotted first on Facebook via Will Sutton’s “I Love Shakespeare” page, let’s talk about this list of Shakespeare’s 25 Greatest Characters.

What does that even mean?  Most famous? Most beloved?  Like many lists, I think it ends up meaning “author’s favorite” but I’m going to be generous and treat it as, “Characters only Shakespeare could have created.” Mercutio’s a great example.  The Romeo and Juliet story existed before Shakespeare, but one of the reasons why we remember his version is because of character creations like Mercutio (who technically existed in the Brooke original, if I recall, but you know what I mean. Shakespeare gave him life.)

It’s a good list, and it’s probably not what you expect.  Lear is on it … but Hamlet is not.  Falstaff is … but no Portia.  Meanwhile, the list includes Autolycus, Nurse, and Lance.  Each entry comes with its reason for inclusion.

I wonder if we could make a claim to greatest play, then, by looking at which plays provide the most characters for this list? As You Like It, Henry IV and King Lear provide two characters, but Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet each bring three.  (Othello has one, Julius Caesar one.)

Not appearing on the list at all?

Hamlet.

Bold move!

I’m a big Shakespeare music fan.  From David Gilmour’s rendition of Sonnet 18 (which I later learned was actually Bryan Ferry’s version of Sonnet 18) to the complete works of Rufus Wainwright (with a little Loudon Wainwright thrown in for good measure), I’m always interested in hearing people put the text to music.  Driving my daughter to school the other day to wrap up her English class and finally finish Romeo and Juliet I told her about how “Romeo’s last words” shot me up to the front of the Google search results because it’s a popular New York Times crossword puzzle clue (the answer is, “I die”).  So then I had to play The Flesh Failures, the big finale from the musical HAIR, where the chorus comes in singing, “Eyes, look your last, arms, take your last embrace…” and I even flipped out in the car, while driving.  “GOOSEBUMPS, EVERY TIME!” I told her. (I even linked to an amateur production because it doesn’t matter who sings it ;))

Sorry, got a little sidetracked there.  Anyway.  The other day I got email from Tom Harrison, who had his own version of Sonnet 18 he wanted me to hear. This let me to the discovery of the week – by looking at the Shakespeare tag on this Bandcamp.com site I discovered a whole new audience of musicians doing Shakespeare music!

I won’t pretend to suggest the “best” ones I’ve found because it’s going to take me forever to browse. There’s every genre you could imagine.  Sometimes it looks like the band is just named / inspired by Shakespeare and the work itself is not so much about the text, but in most cases I’ve seen it’s actually putting the text to music.  In some cases it appears to be music that was produced for actual Shakespeare performances.

Report back in the comments when you find the good stuff you think everybody should hear!

I’m going to go predictable here and point to some Tempest music that I liked :).

I suppose this post isn’t specifically about Shakespeare. But I am assuming that many (most?) of us enjoy the subject so much that we don’t limit ourselves to waiting for a performance, and are pretty familiar with the text. Maybe not every play, but for your favorites, I’m assuming that you’ve read them. Probably closely, and probably more than once.

Why?

I run a virtual bookclub at work (which is really just a Slack channel where I brain dump the audio books I go through on my commute at a rate of about 2-3 per week).  We were bouncing around recommendations and a coworker asked what kind of things I like to read. I said, “I like stuff that explores humanity’s place in the universe, and our purpose in life, if there is one.  How an individual’s actions and motivations affect everyone and everything around him.  If technology is involved, AI and stuff like that, all the better.  But that’s extra.”

In a previous discussion on the same topic, though, here’s what I’d told somebody:  “I like books where you feel changed at the end. Most books I read, I’ll forget.  Sure they were entertaining for a little while, but if they don’t leave me with something that I’m going to carry with me, I don’t feel like I got anything of value out of it.”  I’m trying to figure out if that is the same answer or the opposite answer.

Either way, I got to wondering if the same logic applies to my love of Shakespeare, and I believe that it does.  Tell me that Hamlet and King Lear don’t perfectly fit both my answers above?  I tend to trivialize the comedies (just like I would for movies or television shows), but even a Midsummer or Much Ado has a certain depth that touches on what I’m seeking.  I don’t get that from Love’s Labour’s Lost, or All’s Well That Ends Well.  Maybe that’s personal opinion, or maybe there actually is something in one play that’s not in another that strikes a universal chord.  Who knows.

What’s your story?  Why you do this? What do you get out of it?