#othello

Are there no stones in heaven But what serve for the thunder?

I'm curious about people's levels of familiarity; I intend no judgment or elitism and it's absolutely fine not to be a completionist, btw. I didn't think I would've intended to have read them all at age 25; it just sort of happened that after I passed the halfway point in the middle of 2023, I came out of a reading slump and was motivated to finish. Fwiw I consider myself a hobbyist (I am not involved in academia or professional theater) but I realize that that label is usually attributed to people with less experience.

I also have always loved seeing other bloggers' Shakespeare polls where they put certain plays or characters up against each other, but I'm often left wondering if it's really a 'fair' fight all the time if you're putting up something like Hamlet or Twelfth Night against one of the more obscure works, like the Winter's Tale. It's not a grave affront to vote in those polls if you don't know every play, but I am curious about it.

MORE PRECISE POLLS:

Comedies

Tragedies

Histories

Please say why you chose, I'm interested and please share for bigger sample

jonathan "paranoid" sims is paranoid in the same way that hamlet's a procrastinator and othello's jealous and macbeth's ambitious.

crucially, none of those characters possess even an ounce of the trait they're most commonly associated with. hamlet doesn't procrastinate, if anything everything falls apart the moment he acts without verifying the facts. and from then on, his problems stem from an impulsive tunnel vision driving him forward. othello isn't jealous, the correlation between othello and jealousy comes from iago's famous line of "beware jealousy, it is the green eyed monster." othello's fatal flaw is distrust and insecurity. macbeth doesn't have many personal ambitions, he's just very susceptible to peer pressure.

and jonathan archivist sims isn't paranoid. he wasn't paranoid for even a second of the podcast. if anything, he's naive for a large chunk of it. but since he works at Gaslighting Central, everyone around him is telling him that he's being paranoid when he worries about getting brutally murdered at the workplace; the thing that happened to his predecessor, all of her assistants, and the vast majority of his friends.

elias's "don't be so dramatic jon" and notSasha's "let's have no more of this paranoia" have become as defining for jon as iago's "green eyed monster" line became for othello.