When the time is right, even the sanest of all ends up committing a madness. That is why I am going to dedicate this post to outline the three best William Shakespeare plays.
Nothing better than starting on the defensive to face one of the two greatest writers in the history of mankind. In this case I will resort to that of literature, like any other art or creative facet, has a point of subjectivity in the final taste of the user. And here I am going to make that subjectivity of mine clear to my friend Shakespeare.
What is known of the English author composes that typical nebula between reality and fiction. And here if I am going to be absolutely iconoclast ...
Writing about a Shakespeare, a Cervantes, a Da Vinci or a Michelangelo and transferring the image of some bored guys who barely left their studio and who might go through cyclical phases of hemorrhoids does not look good. In the same way that it would not look good to point to his characters tending to animosity (despite this being a pattern of certain reiteration in various geniuses). So they, the characters always have a patina of epic or enigma that you know ...
It has all the earmarks of Shakespeare was a great worker. Father at 18 and prolific author, only the confinement could lead to such an extensive and great work. The decade of 1580, which points to his mysterious passage through the world without any document that attests to his tasks, seems to me like a decade of writing and more writing, presenting plays and occupying his little free time between carantoñas to his children and few caresses to his wife (the thing was never quite right, according to a note from the author himself).
And after these brushstrokes, it is time to raise my particular ranking of Most Recommended Works of William Shakespeare:
The sum of a summer night
The universal of Shakespeare is detected in the small, in the invariable sensation of humanity (with its burden and its immutable background yesterday and today), regardless of the scenarios posed by the evolution of our civilization.
The best thing about Shakespeare is that his drama is read or enjoyed interchangeably. His proposals combine the lyrical and the prosaic, the living image and the idea in action.
Dialogues that always translate into characters, whether you are in the second row of a theater or in the armchair at home. Literature as magic, relationships between people as the foundation for the outbreak of humanity, language, love and hate, of all that we are.
Summary: A Midsummer Night's Dream was written as amusement at Elizabeth I.'s Court nobles' nuptials. Shakespeare used a number of sources, masterfully manipulated from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Chaucer's Tales. The playwright fuses these influences in a text where love is presented in marriage as a source of conflicts to achieve political power.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is a play of humor and self-confidence in which viewers can recognize the archetypes of that London Court. Without a doubt, one of the most universal Shakespearean comedies that has been performed and adapted all over the world.
The Tempest
On stage this work is an explosion of the human before the elemental, before the representation of the divine that we can see in the real environment. But it is also an internal implosion, in search of the inner storm, of the manifestation of the contradiction of living and the disappointment of destiny.
Summary: considered the most sincere and original invention of Shakespeare. It is also the "summa" of his culture accumulated over the years, and especially of his theatrical experience. It is above all an experiment in the realm of the show: it deliberately exploits, like no other previous work, the resources and tricks of the scene and makes the musical element and all the sound effects a structure that runs through the work.
The figure of Prospero is essentially seen in "The Tempest" in its natural context, which is nothing but theatrical. His magic, his art, are a reflection on the art of the playwright. Meta-theater and psychodrama playing on a series of suggestions that induce the characters to reveal themselves and at the same time to recognize themselves as part of a broader intelligence that includes them, as part of the design with which the magician-playwright explains himself.
Hamlet
Probably his most social or political work. Beyond the circumstantial scenario of the time, between monarchies and nobility, the characters in this work reach the magnitude of social debate, of stratification, of homelands and borders, of alienation. At the end the person emerges, the individual, with the same anxiety from the base or from the top ...
Summary: The tragedy of Hamlet traces the admirable portrait of a legendary prince of Jutland, dreamer, contemplative, mired in doubts and irresolutions, who, forced to clarify the reasons that led to the death of his father, succumbs to the fatality of circumstances.
His madness is not only, in the traditional way, a fiction and an alibi, but it becomes a way of being and a vision of the world. His ambiguity, his ambivalence, and his disorientation bring him remarkably close to the sensitivity of our time.
Populated, as Vicente Molina Foix points out in his prologue, by an abundant and complex gallery of "secondary" characters, the work has enjoyed a constant validity over time, which has led to the incorporation of numerous expressions of the work ("to be or not to be", "words, words, words", "the rest is silence") that have become emblematic.
Miguel you are heavy
You are a bore, is a way of saying it, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Proust, among other literary classics, are considered to be the best, because they have value due to their impact on culture, their way of telling stories and their anachronistic nature, which It makes a large public value it so much to appreciate it with greater artistic depth, they are preceptors for the making of what literature currently means, so there are stories for all tastes, but there are stories that build tastes.
He claims that Shakesoeare is one of the two greatest writers of mankind. Where do you get such a statement? With what criteria is this conviction reached?
Below he talks about subjectivity when choosing 3 works. Well, since in art, subjectivity is the only thing that counts when evaluating works and authors, the only subjective criterion is personal taste or pleasure.
It is impossible to bring criteria to support that Shakespeare is one of the greats. There are no bigger, nor less big. There are no criteria to qualify a work as a master or non-master.
Shakespeare, Miguel Angel, Cervantes are just a few among thousands and thousands of artists. To say that they are one of the supreme or greatest is to objectify art. That's absurd.
For the rest, many, many, we think from our TASTE that Shakespeare and Cervantes were mediocre or even bad writers. This is as valid as the TASTE of others. But we do not fall into statements such as believing that because we LIKE Cortázar a lot, he is the greatest Spanish-speaking writer.