#comedies

Think about it: the women hold all the cards and all the power in that play, and the men are just running around trying to please them. Jack needs to find a way to get Gwendolen’s MOTHER’s approval of their union; her father doesn’t even show up. Algernon submits wholeheartedly to spending the rest of his life fulfilling Cecily’s fantasy and being the dream man she’s imagined in her head for years. The two protagonists are literally willing to CHANGE THEIR NAMES so they’ll have the name their girlfriends want them to have. And ultimately it’s Miss Prism - the unmarried older woman - who holds the answer to the entire play’s central mystery.

viola: im in love with this dude but im also pretending to be a dude, let's show him intense devotion in hopes he still falls for me

orsino: oh fuck i might be in love with this pretty boy. oh wait she's a girl??? phew for a moment i thought i wasn't straight hahahe let's get married

olivia: ahh im so in love with this pretty boy! oh wait she's a girl??? fuck i might not be straight...anyway let's marry her identical twin brother so it's basically the same right? hahah right?

sebastian: umm yea i have this totally platonic friend who keeps saying he loves and desires me but sure let's marry this random woman i met three minutes ago why not haha

(- @girlcodedhamlet ) (sideblog hence anon)

it makes sense that the histories feel intimidating; they can be! i don't think they're really harder to understand than the comedies or tragedies, but in my experience it's easy to spend the first few histories thinking, "what is the context here? who the fuck are all these people?" and you really just need a copy with good footnotes to explain who the fuck are these people. here is a prior post sort of about this! in general, my recommendations for history plays are either:

if you really want to Get Into It, read the main eight in chronological order: Richard II, Henry IV parts 1-2, Henry V, Henry VI parts 1-3, and Richard III. this way you start with the tetralogy shakespeare wrote later (starting with the henry VIs can be... uh... rough... i really would not make henry vi part 1 your first history play), so the going is a little smoother, and you get to build up the context in your head as if watching a long-running series. (full disclosure, this is what i did. i didn't care much for richard ii on the first go-around; i was getting my bearings amongst all these dudes named henry and york and such. but henry iv part 1 is one of the best plays shakespeare ever wrote, and actually so is r2 but you have to let it come to you like a skittish cat, and after a few acts i was in the swing of "wow, there's a lot of guys with identical names hanging around here")

alternatively, if you just want to try out one history, richard iii is probably the one that stands strongest alone? although it definitely works better with all the prior context ahead of it, but hey, i'm the guy who's always saying shit like, "you really should read the iliad and odyssey before you read the aeneid, you know, so it hits," and i recognize that some people like to start things calmly.

for the comedies and romances, imo "best" just depends on what you're looking for! ("easier"/simpler plays? stuff like what you've already read?) but some thoughts:

a midsummer night's dream is the first comedy taught in a lot of schools, and for good reason; i think the language is relatively simple for shakespeare but still beautiful and there's a lot to talk about thematically while also just a lot of good fun romping around.

much ado about nothing is also often taught in high school as the First Comedy, at least in my experience, for similar reasons--the wordplay is so fucking fun, and it's one of shakespeare's most famous plays for a reason. lots of crazy gender stuff happening in here. original enemies-to-lovers text and nothing else has done it that well since. enemies-to-lovers where the fantasy is "what if the man could actually sit his white ass down and listen, and also if everybody involved was hysterically funny"

if you want a more tragedy-inflected comedy, twelfth night often treads a very bittersweet path--it's ultimately still fun and cheerful, but there's a vein of grief running through the whole play that never fully resolves. in many ways, i think it's the other side of hamlet's coin.

as you like it is also a lot of fun (and a personal favorite) but not one of the famous ones; i think it's structurally interesting (there's kind of no plot), but maybe not what i would recommend as a first comedy? but follow your heart. if you like weird gender in the woods, go for it. and, again, if you want something more tragicomic, the so-called "problem plays" are... something! something to sink your teeth into, for sure. measure for measure in particular is really good except for how it's bad. but i wouldn't call it a comedy in anything but the thinnest generic sense, since that is a play about being blackmailed into having sex so your brother doesn't die

had to google which plays even count as romances. what the fuck even happens in pericles. i think if you want to read a romance you just gotta read the tempest. people swear by the winter's tale, but i am a secret hater and that play has never exceeded the sum of its parts for me. the tempest is The One among the romances and it's vexing and often cruel but it's also gorgeous and if you want the late-career floaty-genre weird stuff i simply cannot in good conscience send you anywhere else. (cymbeline? what the fuck is cymbeline?)

Heavy tone throughout the whole film

Everyone involved is an irredeemable piece of shit (and usually also ugly)

At least one insanely tense scene where one (or more) character absolutely loses their shit. Bonus points if it goes on too long

Somebody dies, silently, pointlessly, often off screen

No happy ending, best you can hope for is bittersweet