Nobody knows precisely when William Shakespeare was born. It was in 1564, probably a few days before April 26, which definitely was the date of his baptism, as recorded in the parish church at Stratford-upon-Avon. The Bard’s birthday is traditionally observed on April 23, which is also the date on which he died, in 1616. 
 
To celebrate his life, we’ve asked a few NRO contributors to pick their favorite play by Shakespeare and explain why they love it.


CHARLOTTE ALLEN
If there’s one play by Shakespeare on the high-school reading list, it’s Romeo and Juliet. I have a proposal for English teachers: Ditch it and offer your students Macbeth. R&J is a wonderful play, but it’s a play for girls. “Swear not by the moon” sounded swoonily tragic to me when I was 13 and had a crush on a boy a class ahead of me. Macbeth, by contrast, deals with themes bound to fire up young people of both sexes (Lady Macbeth is as formidable as her husband): thirst for power, a supernatural world of witches and ghosts that calls to mind anime and video games, and the evil that feeds upon desire for advancement and power. Macbeth contemplates murder in order to take the step that will make him king of Scotland “hereafter.” In the end, he is “in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” In religious terms, Macbeth is about the python-like entanglement of sin; in secular terms, it is about the dark and destructive underside of human nature. And here’s the best thing: Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, with a production time of less than two hours. English teachers, dump sappy Romeo and have your students not just read the meatier Macbeth but “strut and fret” it upon your classroom stage. They’ll get it, and they’ll never forget their immersion into the potential for evil that resides inside every one of us. 
 
— Charlotte Allen is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. 


MARK BAUERLEIN
King Lear blew me over when I was 20 years old. Not because it’s a monument of Western literature, or because it imparts the pathos of old age stripped of power. No, it worked for a bare adolescent reason. I identified with an attitude of one character, Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester. He’s a scheming villain. Early in the play, after Lear has banished Kent and renounced his daughter Cordelia, Edmund dupes his father into thinking that the other son, Edgar, is contemplating patricide. Gloucester sputters and rages, then blames the troubles on starry influences: “These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us.” He exits, and Edmund grades him accordingly: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion.” That to me was wisdom. Edmund supplied an unforgiving judgment of elders who took the easy way out, who passed their guilt along to others, who rationalized their vices as the product of circumstance. What youth doesn’t feel the same way about adults now and then?

— Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. 


JAMES BOWMAN
King Lear is the obvious choice. Nothing comes close, not in Shakespeare, not anywhere. But if it is a question of love rather than admiration, the choice is harder. Having once played Leontes on the college stage, I still hold The Winter’s Tale very dear. The Henry IV plays, Henry V, Hamlet, and Coriolanus are all about honor, my hobby-horse, and I love them all. Antony and Cleopatra is also about honor, but love as well, which gives it a more contemporary dimension. Honor there is not what it is to Hotspur or Hal or Coriolanus or even Hamlet, but is seen with a more mature eye — neither with Falstaffian dismissal nor with Henry V’s covetousness. It gets a juster, more even-handed appreciation as a part of one of the world’s great love stories, between two of the greatest characters ever created. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is unrivaled in literature as a portrait of womanhood. She is the truth of what we can only take on faith with Homer’s (or Yeats’s) Helen of Troy: the woman for whom the world is, as Dryden later said, “well lost.” There is nothing like her anywhere else, and her transformative effect on traditional honor looks centuries ahead. 
 
— James Bowman is the author of Honor: A History. 


RICHARD BROOKHISER
This is a Rorschach test. It will say nothing about Shakespeare, who is able to meet almost any mood or need (Harold Bloom said Montaigne created one person, himself; Cervantes created two, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; but Shakespeare created hundreds). 
 
So here is what most moves me in all the inkblots: the last scene of The Winter’s Tale. The play starts like a tragedy, brought on by blazing, witless jealousy: A husband drives his innocent wife to death with his accusations. Their baby is saved from the wreck, and is raised by shepherds (this part of the play is actually pretty dull, or so it seems to me on the page, and in the only — lousy — production I ever saw). Then there is a reconciliation — the missing daughter and her penitent father are rejoined. Hallelujah! Then there is what moves me. An old retainer offers to show the father a statue of his late wife. He is stirred, then deranged: He thinks it is alive. He insists that he will kiss it. His friends try in vain to calm him down. He holds the statue and says, “Oh, she’s warm.” Her death was feigned, she had been hidden from his wrath, but after all these years . . . 
 
Only a rash or careless writer would try a stunt like that, and only God’s favorite would pull it off. 
 
— Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and the author of the forthcoming Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement. 


STEPHEN COX
My favorite work of Shakespeare is King Lear, the world’s greatest and simplest play. The characters are as starkly depicted as people in a fairy tale. The plot could be summarized in a handful of sentences. It starts with a father who demands that his daughter profess her love for him — but all she will say is “Nothing.” “Nothing will come of nothing,” he replies. Yet out of this exchange of nothings grows a drama that addresses all the important questions of existence. 
 
Contrasted with King Lear’s elegant simplicity of form is its brutality of action. And it isn’t just brutal — it’s shockingly, ridiculously, nauseatingly cruel. At every moment, the viewer is forced to ask: What is the significance of human life? Is there a God, and could he possibly care for us? To ensure that there would be no easy answers, Shakespeare took a story with a happy ending and made it almost unbearably tragic. 
 
I am a Christian. I believe that Christians should be faced with the questions that King Lear asks. The answers can be discovered only at a level as deep as the one where King Lear lives. 
 
—Stephen Cox, a professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego, is the author of The New Testament and Literature and editor of Liberty. 
 

EDWARD JOHN CRAIG
There are few things in the hearts of men that are undreamt of in the Bard’s philosophy. Macbeth provides a particularly instructive example of human evil.

The Thane of Cawdor chooses a path of regicide and intrigue to secure and retain the Scottish crown. He had shown no preternatural inclination to evil — not like the monstrous Richard III. There was no bitter resentment over a slight, of the sort that made Iago revenge himself on Othello and Cassio. Nor was Macbeth motivated by the desperate misfortunes that Banquo’s murderers claim drive them to their crime.

Macbeth was noble, wealthy, honored by his king, seemingly fortunate in marriage. Moved only by his “Vaulting ambition which / o’erleaps itself” he commits a murder — and subsequently becomes a mass-murdering tyrant. Ambition is a kind of explanation, of course — one we can all understand — but hardly a pointedly tragic circumstance that should call forth such a parade of devious and murderous deeds. There is no “root cause” behind Macbeth’s sinister turn. In this, Shakespeare provides an enduring lesson: some who choose evil cannot be dissuaded from that course by appeasement or apology.

— Edward John Craig is the managing editor of National Review Online.


NICK GILLESPIE
Titus Andronicus is not only Shakespeare’s first tragedy but by common acclamation his least accomplished drama. Indeed, Bardolators in past centuries routinely claimed that there was no way Shakespeare could have ever authored a dog so nasty as this; more recently, Harold Bloom argued it can be salvaged only as a parody of mediocre Elizabethan revenge tragedies.

Yet the play, based on a story of rape and revenge in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and shamelessly pinching from Jasper Heywood’s English-language version of Seneca’s Thyestes, still speaks to modern audiences for reasons that go far beyond its over-the-top violence (think Quentin Tarantino with an unlimited budget for ketchup) and bizarre fixation on torture and dismemberment (think, um, Quentin Tarantino with an unlimited budget for ketchup). Set in ancient Rome and chock-full of human pies, Titus Andronicus tells a story in which all political and martial power is wielded bluntly and horrifically and in which everyone is doomed by the limits of gender, race, and rage. It brilliantly depicts and reveals the aristocratic, pre-modern world in which the individual is given no room to flourish and no meaningful representation in the public or private sphere. First staged at the very dawn of the modern era, in which the individual would finally (if imperfectly) be allowed to create his or her own future, Titus Andronicus remains a bizarre, stomach-turning, and wonderful reminder of a universal, stultifying social order that the world was fast putting behind itself in favor of something approaching liberty for all. 
 
— Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.tv , holds a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. 

LEO GRIN
King Lear is the play that I find myself coming back to again and again, both in Shakespeare’s version and in director Akira Kurosawa’s blood-soaked Sengoku adaptation, Ran (1985). 
 
Greed, betrayal, exile, madness, poison, hangings, swordfights, disguises, usurpations — Lear has it all. But crucially, in the midst of all of this debased treachery, Shakespeare gives us Cordelia, a doomed angel of a daughter who never forswears filial piety even as her regal father offers her every reason to hate and abandon him. Their final reconciliation is so moving in its raw emotional simplicity, and the ensuing tragic finale so devastatingly bleak, that for several centuries after the Bard’s death the play was widely staged with a rewritten happy ending. 
 
A full 400 years after its first performance, King Lear still prompts audiences to conclude, as Isaac Asimov did in his Guide to Shakespeare, that “nowhere in Shakespeare, and, I believe, nowhere in literature, is the human heart so skillfully and ruthlessly torn in sympathy with what it sees and hears.” I can’t go quite that far with Homer and Luo Guanzhong looming on my bookshelf, but his point is well taken. 
 
“No cause . . . no cause . . .” Gets me every time. 
 
— Leo Grin’s literary journal, The Cimmerian,was twice nominated for a World Fantasy Award. 


ANDREW KLAVAN
In my youth, I suppose, Hamlet spoke to me most insistently. Now, increasingly, King Lear and The Tempest seem the binary chorus of my middle age. For some reason, lately I find myself moved to tears by the happy resolutions of such comedies as Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night and prone to a sort of miserable amusement at the human folly inherent in relentless tragedies like Othello and Macbeth. Maybe it’s because, for me, Shakespeare’s works are like a snapshot of the modern west’s Big Bang — the moment when earth’s greatest culture was born — and now that that culture seems to be dying, its fading joys break my heart while there’s nothing for its multiplying disasters but dark laughter.

Which brings me to Henry V, a veritable Bible of political conservatism (maybe with Wordsworth’s Prelude playing the role of the New Testament). Henry V understands both the evil exigencies of power and its occasional necessity, the mirages of tradition and ceremony and their mysterious magic, and the continual tragic struggle between human life and human governance. Plus it tells how a happy few can triumph against overwhelming odds — so perhaps there’s life in the old culture yet. 
 
— Andrew Klavan is the author of The Last Thing I Remember and Empire of Lies. 


LESLIE KLINGER
My favorite play is King Lear. My legal practice includes estate planning, and it’s all too often that I see dysfunctional relationships between parents and children. Shakespeare’s perception — that the “fault” often lies on both sides — is just as valid today as 400 years ago. Too often “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” describes the parent’s feelings just as much as the child’s. If only we were all lucky enough to have a fool as a companion, to puncture our ego and keep us on the right path!

— Leslie Klinger is by day a partner at Kopple & Klinger in Los Angeles and by dead of night the editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and The New Annotated Dracula.

HEATHER MAC DONALD

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a cornucopia of such luscious language, pouring forth the bounties of the English countryside: “Feed him with apricocks and dewberries / With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.” This abundance belongs to the rich pastoral tradition, stretching from Virgil through Milton and Keats, in which the objects of nature are made more delightful by being named and organized in verse. A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers many theatrical pleasures as well — the mounting of Pyramus and Thisby, Bottom’s cheerful desire for “your good dry oats” while in the lap of the delicate Titania, the lovers’ crossed infatuations — but the silvery-green language of the fairy world is its finest attribute, in my view. I find that nature no longer thrills me as it once did (Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode is eerily prescient: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more”), but nature transformed through art retains its power. 
 
The conventions of the courtly masque and of Classical rhetoric — “the eastern gate, all fiery-red / Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams / Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams” — also contribute to the play’s gossamer gorgeousness. 
 
A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired what I think is the most sensitive musical rendering of a linguistic world ever created: Felix Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to the play, which shimmers almost as much as Shakespeare’s language.  
 
(I have to sneak in a strong runner-up: Twelfth Night, for the sheer wonderfulness of Malvolio.) 
 
— Heather Mac Donald is the John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 

JOHN J. MILLER
Hard to pick a favorite, but one I’ve always liked a lot is Othello, with its excellent villain and great title character. I can’t put it better than Allan Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa did in Shakespeare’s Politics: “Othello sought to accomplish an extreme human feat; he attempted to be a hero without a home, without a city to sing his praises and write his epitaph. He did this under the guise of universality; only if a man is liberated from the influence of and need for the laws and ways of a particular nation can he go anywhere and be a hero. But this universality, Shakespeare seems to tell us, is a lie.” 
 
—John J. Miller is NR’s national political reporter. 
 

JOE QUEENAN
My favorite play by Shakespeare is Julius Caesar. No one to this day knows whether Shakespeare viewed Brutus as a hero or a villain. This illustrates that, as much as we would like life to be black and white, it is not. This does not mean it is grey. It means that in any political struggle, each side believes that it is right and cannot imagine how anyone could view the situation otherwise. 
 
I also love Julius Caesar because my father, an alcoholic who dropped out of school in ninth grade, would often cite passages aloud from Mark Antony’s funeral oration. This harks back to a time in this country when even poor people realized the beauty and power of language. Television put an end to that. 
 
Last week, I said goodbye to my best friend’s mother, who died on Wednesday. She was a woman I dearly loved, a tough customer from South Philadelphia with a heart the size of the Caucasus. She was the type on whose like we would not look again. Situations like this leave us without words, so we use Shakespeare’s. As I drove away from the hospital that night, I recalled, as I always recall in such circumstances, Brutus’s farewell to Cassius: “Forever and forever, farewell, Cassius / If we do meet again, why we shall smile; / If not, why then this parting was well made.” 
 
No one will ever write a more beautiful passage than that. We should all thank our lucky stars that we speak the language William Shakespeare invented. Happy Birthday, Bill. When comes such another? 
 
— Joe Queenan is the author of Closing Time: A Memoir. 

FRED SCHWARZ
King John has everything that makes Shakespeare great: murder, intrigue, family drama, sudden reversals, Frenchmen getting hosed, and a sonorous, easily memorized passage that can be casually dropped into conversation on virtually any occasion (“To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily / To throw a perfume on the violet / To smooth the ice, or add another hue / Unto the rainbow . . . ”). Plus it’s actually pretty good; you can follow the story without notes, and unlike obscurities like Pericles or Henry VIII, it has no scenes so awful that editors are forced to suggest they must have been written by someone else. The best part, though, is that nobody you know has read King John; half of them haven’t even heard of it. So you’ll get a much bigger return on investment than you would with, say, Othello or Macbeth. Anybody can quote from those, whereas if you quote from King John, your listeners will be impressed by the mere fact that you’ve read it — and if you mess up a couple of lines, no one will know. What more can you ask from a Shakespeare play? 
 
— Fred Schwarz is deputy managing editor of National Review.