35<\/p>\n
The Two Gentlemen of VeronaDenton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu in a two-man production for the Globe to Globe festival in 2012. Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n
With its improbable plot, comic opera outlaws, and attempted rape being rewarded with the \u201cmutual happiness\u201d of a double marriage, this early study of friendship and betrayal is no one\u2019s favourite comedy. Yet it has hints of later, greater plays, boasts some memorable lines (\u201cThe uncertain glory of an April day\u201d) and often works on stage, most recently in a Greg Doran production with Oxford students<\/a>.<\/p>\n 34<\/p>\n CymbelineJohn Wood at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon Avon, 1988. Photograph: Donald Cooper\/Alamy<\/p>\n Dr Johnson talked of its \u201cunresisting imbecility\u201d and Shaw called it \u201cfor the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order\u201d. The plot is a mish-mash of Holinshed and Boccaccio, classical Rome and Renaissance Italy, but in Imogen it contains one of Shakespeare\u2019s most celebrated heroines: the soul of honour and faith beautifully embodied over the years by Peggy Ashcroft, Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench.<\/p>\n 33<\/p>\n The Two Noble KinsmenJonathan Oliver, Geraldine Alexander, Yolanda Vazquez and Martin Turner at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe in 2000. Photograph: Alastair Muir\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n Omitted from the First Folio, this is now accepted as Shakespeare\u2019s final work, on which he collaborated with John Fletcher. Based on Chaucer\u2019s The Knight\u2019s Tale, in which two Theban cousins fall for the same woman, it has some authentically Shakespearean lines (\u201cgive us the bones \/ Of our dead kings that we may chapel them\u201d). However, when the play opened Stratford\u2019s Swan theatre in 1986, it was Fletcher\u2019s scenes, involving a jailer\u2019s crazed daughter played by Imogen Stubbs, that came off best.<\/p>\n 32<\/p>\n Henry VIIIThe embodiment of virtue \u2026 Jane Lapotaire as Queen Katharine with Paul Jesson as Henry VIII, directed by Gregory Doran for the RSC. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n This is the play that in 1613 caused the original Bankside Globe to burn down because of the firing of stage cannon. Also co-written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, it is a bit of a loose cannon itself, but has some fine farewell speeches and works well in performance. I remember Jane Lapotaire<\/a> playing Queen Katherine as the embodiment of virtue, and there was a stirring revival<\/a> in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford where the bells rang out to celebrate the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth.<\/p>\n 31<\/p>\n All\u2019s Well That Ends WellZoe Caldwell and Angela Baddeley in Tyrone Guthrie\u2019s 1959 production in Stratford. Photograph: Central Press\/Getty Images<\/p>\n With its stubbornly unheroic hero and its opportunistic heroine, this is a hard play to love: \u201cneither heart-rending nor heart-warming,\u201d wrote the critic John Peter. But since Tyrone Guthrie\u2019s groundbreaking 1959 production, which mixed Chekhov, The Army Game farce and touches of Franz Leh\u00e1r, successive directors have proved it highly stageable. And in the cowardly Parolles (\u201cSimply the thing I am \/ Shall make me live\u201d), it has a character who has attracted actors from a young Laurence Olivier onwards.<\/p>\n 30<\/p>\n King JohnAntony Brown and Ralph Fiennes in Deborah Warner\u2019s 1988 RSC production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n I have had a soft spot for this play ever since, while studying it for A-level, I saw Douglas Seale\u2019s Stratford production seven times. If the play has come back into fashion, with notable revivals by Deborah Warner, and by Barrie Rutter and Conrad Nelson for Northern Broadsides<\/a>, it is because it is about the destructiveness of the quest for power and the pervasiveness of cynical expediency summed up in the Bastard\u2019s speech about \u201cThat smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity.\u201d<\/p>\n 29<\/p>\n Timon of AthensSimon Russell Beale, right, as Timon of Athens in Nicholas Hytner\u2019s National Theatre production in 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n What have Benjamin Britten and Duke Ellington got in common? Both wrote incidental music for this odd play that, like King John, has lately acquired a new popularity. Peter Brook, who directed a brilliant production in Paris in 1974<\/a>, cited it as an example of how Shakespeare\u2019s plays are like planets that move nearer to us at certain moments in time. This story of a compulsive philanthropist who turns into a neurotic misanthrope has been given extra resonance by modern-dress productions by Cardboard Citizens, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner in a National Theatre version<\/a> set amid towering office blocks adjacent to a wasteland frequented by the disenfranchised.<\/p>\n 28<\/p>\n PericlesToby Jones and Kathryn Hunter in Phyllida Lloyd\u2019s Pericles at the National Theatre, 1994. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cA mouldy tale,\u201d said Ben Jonson, and one that was clearly co-authored: few things in the canon are more dramatic, after two acts of functional verse, than Shakespeare\u2019s arrival with language of thrilling density (\u201cThe seaman\u2019s whistle \/ Is as a whisper in the ears of death\u201d). And although the plot is a series of loosely linked happenings, modern directors have given it stylistic unity, from Tony Richardson, who treated it as a glittering oriental kaleidoscope, to Yukio Ninagawa, who played it as a parable about contemporary refugees<\/a>.<\/p>\n 27<\/p>\n The Taming of the ShrewSocial outcasts \u2026 Jasper Britton and Alexandra Gilbreath in Greg Doran\u2019s production for the RSC. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The barbaric idea of female subjugation presents an obvious problem for a modern audience. But while theoretically indefensible, the play remains theatrically popular thanks to the inventiveness of directors and actors. You can treat it as the dream of a drunken tinker. You can make it, as Michael Bogdanov did, a neo-Marxist attack on the cash nexus. Best of all, as Jasper Britton and Alexandra Gilbreath proved under Greg Doran\u2019s direction<\/a>, you can suggest that Petruchio and Kate are both social outcasts who find a healing power in love.<\/p>\n 26<\/p>\n The Merchant of VeniceUrbane \u2026 Patrick Stewart, right, as Shylock in the RSC\u2019s 2011 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Another problematic play: it is hard to see it in a post-Holocaust world as the fairytale described by actor-director-theorist Harley Granville-Barker. But it invariably works when given a strong social context. Peter Zadek\u2019s 1995 production set it in a milieu of high finance. Trevor Nunn, at the National in 1999, placed it squarely in 1930s Germany with Nazism on the rise. Rupert Goold in 2011<\/a> used modern Los Angeles as a backdrop with Patrick Stewart\u2019s Shylock an urbane tycoon and Susannah Fielding\u2019s Portia starting out as a gameshow host and, unforgettably, ending up as a lonesome bride realising her husband\u2019s real passion is for Antonio.<\/p>\n 25<\/p>\n The TempestElly Condron as Iris in a Gregory Doran production in Stratford in 2016. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The critic Anne Barton called it \u201can extraordinarily obliging work of art that will lend itself to almost any interpretation\u201d. It is also a great poem but a flawed play: since Prospero holds all the cards, the tension is minimal. The solution is for actors to create their own internal struggle. John Wood<\/a> played Prospero as a Freudian wreck who used supernatural powers to shield himself from human contact. Michael Bryant gave us a man who had dabbled in diabolism. Simon Russell Beale was a Prospero swathed in private guilt whose bookish solitude had provoked his usurpation.<\/p>\n 24<\/p>\n Julius CaesarSimon Manyonda and Paterson Joseph as Lucius and Marcus Brutus for the RSC in 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n A fascinating play that poses a structural problem: the loss of dramatic momentum after the Forum scene. One answer is to scrap the interval. Another is to find a unifying, preferably topical, concept. Orson Welles in the 1930s gave the play a fascist setting and, more recently, New York\u2019s Public Theater made Caesar a Trump-style dictator<\/a>. Greg Doran in 2012 transposed the action to modern Africa and deployed a cast of colour headed by Paterson Joseph. No less radical was Phyllida Lloyd\u2019s all-female production that showed a group of women prisoners, led by Harriet Walter as Brutus, staging their own version of political assassination.<\/p>\n 23<\/p>\n Romeo and JulietJessie Buckley and Josh O\u2019Connor in the National Theatre\u2019s 2021 film version. Photograph: Sky UK\/2021 Sky LTD<\/p>\n Hugely popular on stage and film. Of the latter, I infinitely prefer Simon Godwin\u2019s NT version with Jessie Buckley and Josh O\u2019Connor<\/a> to the inflated Baz Luhrmann movie<\/a>. In the theatre, a terrific first half is followed by a manufactured tragedy more dependent on bad luck than on character. I find I often remember the play for its Mercutio: Alec McCowen jesting until the very point of death, Bernard Lloyd savagely dismembering a life-size doll and Derek Jacobi as an ageing gallant<\/a> who enjoyed hanging out with the lads.<\/p>\n 22<\/p>\n The Merry Wives of WindsorGeorge Fouracres as Falstaff with Sophie Russell at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe in 2025. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n A grossly underrated play. Shakespeare\u2019s one comedy of bourgeois life is ingeniously plotted and shows a cash-strapped courtier, Sir John Falstaff, being outwitted and humiliated by a pair of middle-class housewives. It is a sign of the play\u2019s civic richness that it can adapt to different social contexts: traditional Elizabethan, postwar suburbia, Macmillan\u2019s materialist England and even the recent World Cup. In the character of Ford, brilliantly played by Ian Richardson and Ben Kingsley, Shakespeare shows that jealousy is an extension of the property-owning instinct.<\/p>\n 21<\/p>\n Richard IIISatanic \u2026 Laurence Olivier in the 1955 film. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cLong, confusing, elephantine in its ironies,\u201d wrote one editor. \u201cA horrific analysis of power, politics and violence,\u201d said Peter Hall. Either way, the hero has been a gift for actors from Richard Burbage onwards. Olivier on stage and film established the idea of Richard as satanic joker. Later actors have, in various ways, escaped that overpowering image: Ian Holm was part of the grand mechanism of history, Antony Sher turned disability into a source of feverish energy, Ian McKellen was a militaristic 1930s fascist. It\u2019s a play where the part is often greater than the whole.<\/p>\n 20<\/p>\n Much Ado About NothingSunlit \u2026 Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in the 1993 film. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n A rare comedy in which the main plot \u2013 involving a young girl falsely accused of unchastity \u2013 is outclassed by the subplot \u2013 which concerns Beatrice and Benedick. Memorable pairings include Judi Dench and Donald Sinden in a production set in colonial India, Sinead Cusack and Derek Jacobi in a world of shining mirrors, Zo\u00eb Wanamaker and Simon Russell Beale<\/a> bonding in a Sicilian mansion complete with swimming pool. Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in the latter\u2019s best Shakespeare movie also scintillated in a sunlit Tuscany.<\/p>\n 19<\/p>\n OthelloDavid Harewood, with Claire Skinner as Desdomona, directed by Sam Mendes at the National in 1997. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The big divide came in 1981 when Jonathan Miller cast Anthony Hopkins in the title role in a BBC TV production: a decision that provoked such an outcry that it is now rare to see a white actor in the part. The gain has been twofold. It has produced magnificent Othellos such as Willard White, Ray Fearon, Chiwetel Ejiofor and David Harewood. It has also put the eponymous character, rather than Iago, at the centre of a play that has a pulsating excitement, if not the philosophical depth of the other great tragedies.<\/p>\n 18<\/p>\n Henry VI Parts One, Two and ThreeBloodlust \u2026 Helen Mirren as Queen Margaret with Alan Howard as Henry, directed by Terry Hands for the RSC in 1978. Photograph: Donald Cooper\/Alamy<\/p>\n The 1960s Wars of the Roses, directed by Peter Hall and John Barton, was a landmark adaptation. Terry Hands in 1978 gave us the plays uncut with Alan Howard as a saintly king and Helen Mirren as a blood-lusting Queen Margaret. Starting in 2006, Michael Boyd also triumphantly resurrected the complete trilogy, proving that Part Two, with its father-son tensions and panoramic portrait of England, was a harbinger of things to come.<\/p>\n 17<\/p>\n The Comedy of ErrorsLucian Msamati and Lenny Henry as Dromio and Antipholus at the National Theatre in 2011. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Shakespeare takes his plot from Plautus then ups the ante by giving us not one but two sets of identical twins. The result is a classic farce in which mistaken identity is enriched by an exploration of self and a biblical background of sorcery: Ephesus was for St Paul a place of \u201ccurious arts\u201d. The play\u2019s rediscovery began with a 1962 Clifford Williams production where Alec McCowen as the visiting Antipholus, after patiently listening to 37 lines of impassioned blank verse from his supposed wife, gravely inquired: \u201cPlead you to me, fair dame?\u201d<\/p>\n 16<\/p>\n Titus AndronicusRich humanity \u2026 Brian Cox as Titus Andronicus in Deborah Warner\u2019s 1988 RSC production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Since Peter Brook\u2019s landmark 1955 production, this play has rightly swung back into fashion. What is fascinating is how often female directors \u2013 including Jane Howell (for TV), Deborah Warner, Lucy Bailey and Blanche McIntyre \u2013 have been drawn to its wit, learning and rich humanity. Is there a more moving moment in all of Shakespeare than when Titus, responding to his brother\u2019s observation on the mutilated Lavinia that \u201cThis was thy daughter\u201d, simply says, \u201cWhy, Marcus, so she is\u201d?<\/p>\n 15<\/p>\n Troilus and CressidaVictim of the patriarchy \u2026 Juliet Stevenson\u2019s Cressida, with Clive Merrison and Anton Lesser, in Howard Davies\u2019s 1985 RSC production. Photograph: Alastair Muir\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n This cynic\u2019s Iliad, which casts a satiric eye on the realities of war, is another play that speaks to our own time: even the brilliant language, from the legal circumlocutions of Ulysses to the gutter eloquence of Thersites, runs what Peter Porter called \u201cthe gamut of human depravity\u201d. Ever since Juliet Stevenson played her in a 1985 Howard Davies production, Cressida herself has also been transformed from an icon of female changeability into the victim of a manipulative patriarchy.<\/p>\n 14<\/p>\n Richard IILyrical \u2026 Jonathan Slinger as the king in the RSC\u2019s 2007 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cCharles I in the first half, Jesus Christ in the second,\u201d said the critic Christopher Ricks of Ian Richardson\u2019s king: a brilliant summation of the performance and a seminal John Barton production in which Richardson and Richard Pasco alternated the lead roles, reminding us of the parallels between monarch and actor. Since then Alan Howard, Samuel West, Jonathan Slinger and Adjoa Andoh are among the many fine Richards in this most lyrical of histories.<\/p>\n 13<\/p>\n As You Like ItHelen McCrory as Rosalind in 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton<\/p>\n Helen Gardner called this \u201cShakespeare\u2019s most Mozartian comedy\u201d and went on to show that the Forest of Arden is a place of discovery where each character finds his or her true self. In over-decorated productions, you sometimes can\u2019t see the wooed for the trees but the play tends to be defined by its Rosalinds, who have memorably included Vanessa Redgrave<\/a>, Susan Fleetwood, Helen McCrory and, in Declan Donnellan\u2019s all-male production, a lithe Adrian Lester.<\/p>\n 12<\/p>\n Measure for MeasureBawdy \u2026 Dominic Dromgoole\u2019s 2015 production at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Once deemed unacceptably bawdy (\u201cThe play insults the respectability of Melton Mowbray people,\u201d declared a Leicester paper in 1935), this work now seems thrillingly timely in its portrait of the link between sexual and political power. There is always a shock of recognition when Angelo greets his victim\u2019s whistleblowing threat with: \u201cWho will believe thee, Isabel?\u201d Numerous fine productions have included Nicholas Hytner\u2019s with Roger Allam as a strong-voiced Duke, Trevor Nunn\u2019s set in a Freudian Vienna and Simon McBurney\u2019s where political prisoners were clad in Guantanamo Bay uniforms.<\/p>\n 11<\/p>\n Antony and CleopatraDreamlike \u2026 Judi Dench as Cleopatra and Anthony Hopkins as Mark Antony in Peter Hall\u2019s 1987 staging at the National. Photograph: Donald Cooper\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cThe last two acts contain the most heart-searching poetry that Shakespeare ever wrote,\u201d said Ivor Brown. True, but they can also be exhausting to watch. My theory is that the play works best when the leads are seen as victims of a self-intoxicating fantasy, and two productions caught this to perfection. For Peter Hall at the National in 1987, Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench lived in a state of dreamlike self-delusion<\/a>; and Peter Zadek\u2019s witty 1994 German-language version, starring Gert Voss and Eva Mattes, emphasised the vanity rather than the grandeur of these historic figures.<\/p>\n 10<\/p>\n Henry VAdrian Lester as Henry V at the National Theatre in 2003. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The greatness of the play lies in its ambivalence. As Emma Smith points out in her stage history, it can be seen alternately, or even simultaneously, as \u201ca heroic play about \u2018a mirror of all Christian kings\u2019 or a cynical play about a ruthless and hypocritical Machiavellian tyrant\u201d. Olivier and Branagh offered contrasting visions in their respective movies. And on stage, Albert Finney, Alan Howard, Adrian Lester and Geoffrey Streatfeild have all captured Henry\u2019s complexity.<\/p>\n 9<\/p>\n The Winter\u2019s TalePotent strangeness \u2026 Samantha Bond\u2019s Hermione, with John Nettles as Leontes, directed by Adrian Noble in 1993. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cOne of Shakespeare\u2019s most exuberant and resolutely moving achievements,\u201d wrote Paul Edmondson. It is also the finest of the late plays, in that the psychological realism of Leontes\u2019 jealousy co-exists with the potent strangeness of Hermione\u2019s restoration. That is why the play still grips us in the theatre: it is a resurrection myth and I often remember the play for its Hermione \u2013 especially as performed by Judi Dench, Samantha Bond and Alexandra Gilbreath.<\/p>\n 8<\/p>\n CoriolanusMoral ambivalence \u2026 Ralph Fiennes in his 2011 film version. Photograph: Lionsgate\/Allstar<\/p>\n Shakespeare\u2019s greatest Roman play, because of its political, moral and emotional ambivalence, has been claimed by both the left and right. But as Greg Doran once wrote: \u201cShakespeare sees both sides, empathises with both and yet is critical of both.\u201d Even Coriolanus himself is full of contradictions: an arrogant patrician who still refuses a 10th part of a conquered city\u2019s treasure. No wonder the part has yielded terrific performances from Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Greg Hicks and Ralph Fiennes.<\/p>\n 7<\/p>\n Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s LostJane Lapotaire, Carmen Du Sautoy, Alan Rickman, Avril Carson and Sheridan Fitzgerald in John Barton\u2019s Chekhovian 1978 production. Photograph: Donald Cooper\/Alamy<\/p>\n An early comedy that shows the first full flowering of Shakespeare\u2019s genius: a play in which verbal exuberance and high spirits are shadowed by transience, time and death. If I could recapture one production from the past, it would be John Barton\u2019s from 1978 which had a perfect Chekhovian blend of zest and melancholy. The great moment came when Glenda Jackson\u2019s French princess learned of her father\u2019s death and, in the words of Penelope Gilliatt, \u201cthe scene behind her darkened as though the wing of a vulture had flapped slowly over the sun\u201d.<\/p>\n 6<\/p>\n King LearGender-transcending humanity \u2026 Glenda Jackson, with Sargon Yelda as Kent, directed by Deborah Warner in 2016. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n For many, this is the great Shakespearean peak. For me, it is magnificent but flawed. As scholar AC Bradley wrote: \u201cThe improbabilities in King Lear surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in number and in grossness.\u201d Rather than itemise them, I prefer to dwell on some of the memorable Lears I have seen: Paul Scofield\u2019s testy patriarch; John Wood, who stressed the character\u2019s insane contradictions; Ian McKellen\u2019s endless intellectual curiosity; Glenda Jackson<\/a> for her gender-transcending humanity.<\/p>\n 5<\/p>\n MacbethYuko Tanaka and Masachika Ichimura in a production by Yukio Ninagawa at the Barbican in 2017. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Compact, relentless and intensely musical in its thematic use of language, this is simultaneously a great poem and play. One measure of Shakespeare\u2019s genius, as with Dickens, is his generosity to minor characters. The First Murderer here hauntingly tells us: \u201cThe west yet glimmers with some streaks of day.\u201d Despite a chequered stage history, the play has been given new life in the last half-century by intimate stagings from Trevor Nunn, Greg Doran, Rupert Goold and Kenneth Branagh<\/a> that make us complicit in the action.<\/p>\n 4<\/p>\n A Midsummer Night\u2019s DreamJoy Fernandes as Bottom in Tim Supple\u2019s innovative 2007 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cThe most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life,\u201d said Samuel Pepys, but it has enchanted audiences over the centuries, has inspired operas, ballets and films, and is open to an endless variety of stagings. Beerbohm Tree in 1900 gave audiences live rabbits and bluebell thickets; Peter Brook in 1970 set the action in a white cube filled with circus expertise; and Tim Supple in 2007<\/a> directed an innovative version that deployed seven south Asian languages. The magic lingers on.<\/p>\n 3<\/p>\n HamletGreat Dane \u2026 Mark Rylance at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe in 2000. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n A play whose vitality, as writer Terence Hawkes once said, \u201cresides in its plurality\u201d. What that means is that it takes on different colours depending on the time and place where it is seen, the text used and the way it is cast. As Oscar Wilde said: \u201cThere are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.\u201d The part, like the play itself, is limitless in its variations: Michael Redgrave gave us a tortured sensibility, Albert Finney a dangerous muscularity, Mark Rylance a pyjama-clothed solitariness, Angela Winkler a damaged vulnerability and Maxine Peake<\/a> a ferocious moral disgust.<\/p>\n 2<\/p>\n Twelfth NightSimon Russell Beale\u2019s Malvolio gets pranked in Sam Mendes\u2019s 2002 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p>\n In Shakespeare, wrote scholar Michael Dobson, \u201cthe categories of comedy and tragedy are no more mutually exclusive than they are in real life\u201d. This sublime play confirms that in its interweaving of mirth and melancholy, joy and cruelty, reality and dream. The gulling of Malvolio is hilarious in the moment but savage in its consequence. The climactic marital pairings imply a future of erotic confusion, and this most lyrical of plays ends with a song about the transience of human life and theatrical performance. It has yielded many unforgettable productions, including those by Peter Hall and John Barton, while Sam Mendes got it exactly right<\/a> when he staged it alongside Chekhov\u2019s comparably tragicomic Uncle Vanya with the same cast.<\/p>\n 1<\/p>\n Henry IV Parts One and TwoThe archetypal pub-charmer \u2026 Antony Sher as Falstaff in Greg Doran\u2019s RSC production. Photograph: Robbie Jack\/Corbis\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cThe twin summits of Shakespeare\u2019s achievement,\u201d wrote Kenneth Tynan 70 years ago and I heartily concur. For a start, they offer so much: a private drama about fathers and sons, a public portrait of a divided realm, a sense of the nation\u2019s diversity stretching from the taverns of London to the orchards of Gloucestershire. As so often in Shakespeare, there is also a rich ambivalence. Hal can be seen as a calculating, cold-blooded politician or as a man undertaking a self-imposed education in kingship. The king himself is simultaneously an unforgiving, rebellion-stirring patriarch and a guilt-ridden insomniac yearning for religious absolution.<\/p>\n