I know, but I just went off the top of my head. Whats his best, in your opinion?

The Tempest, then
Timon of Athens, then
Henry V

Just my opinion. You?

someone should start a thread/poll about people's favourite shakespeare.
for the record, my favourites are Coriolanus, The Tempest and As You Like It.

I like his comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably my favourite of his works, but I haven't read enough of his work to give a judgement on what his best is (a dusty volume of his complete works sits on my bookshelf).

Go on racehorse. Start that thread.

Fair enough. My advice would be to buy the plays seperately, in one of the editions where the annotations are on the same page as the text. Arden are very good.

Two votes for The Tempest so far, I see.

I had to do a lot of studying on Shylock's part in The Merchant of Venice, which I think there's maybe a lot more to than is first thought upon reading.. but all of that schoolwork probably took away all of my interest.

School doesn't always help to inspire, it's true.

I think it probably helps to see the play either on stage or video. The full thing is great, but also the BBC did a series of 30-minute animated adaptations which were really excellent.

I'm gonna make that poll, racehorse is gone.

Watching it on stage definitely helped me get more interested. Last year we read Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and by luck both of those were being performed at our towns Shakespeare festival at the same time we were reading them. So a bunch of people from my class and my teacher went as a sort of informal field trip to watch those. It was a lot of fun.

i was lucky in that both my parents brought me up to harbour a love of literature.
in fact after the obvious "mama" and "dada" my first word was my own distorted take on the name "shakespeare" ("wiggle n beer")...

my mom is addicted to reading books. she used to read to me almost every night when i was younger, which is part of the reason i could read whole books by age 4. our house has three full-size bookshelves crammed with books, other miscellaneous ones laying around. its a damn shame when kids go into middle or high school barely knowing to read because their parents never bothered to care.

sweet

i prefer to read the fall and captain beefheart lyrics.