www.silverguide.site –

Thank you for Michael Billington’s brilliant and fascinating ranking of Shakespeare’s plays, which will surely give rise to much debate (To see or not to see? Every single Shakespeare play – ranked!, 22 April).

I’d like to make a case for promotion of The Tempest from its lowly 25th position. Admittedly my fondness for it started with doing it for A-level in 1968, but, having the good fortune to see both the all-female women’s prison version, starring Harriet Walter, and the RSC magical hi-tech production within a few months, I think its versatility deserves a higher ranking. I would swap it with The Winter’s Tale, which for me is just a bit too weird.
Marian Sainsbury
Edinburgh

• I studied A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school in the 1960s. I thought it was dreadful, with no redeeming qualities. I saw it a few years ago at the Globe and decided it was excellent and very entertaining. If only school had said “and this is where the clog dancers come on”. It was equalled by Hamlet the Musical, which I saw at Richmond theatre. That Hamlet was magnificent.
Maxine Leyland
Coulsdon, London

• I enjoyed Michael Billington’s ranking of Shakespeare’s plays. I really wish he had been there to give me a content warning before I saw my King Lear at Leeds Playhouse, starring Warren Mitchell – better known then as Alf Garnett. The sight of his willy during the naked scene on the heath has haunted me ever since.
Ian Garner
Keighley, West Yorkshire

• Correspondence on this could last for decades… Othello is far too low, and Love’s Labour’s Lost far too high. Bravo to you, Mr Billington, though.
Robert Sutton
Ulverston, Cumbria

• In ranking Henry IV (Parts One and Two) as Shakespeare’s best play, Michael Billington mentions the cameo part of Justice Shallow. In York Shakespeare Project’s 2011 production, set in a church built before the events depicted, I played opposite him as Justice Silence. There were no lines – clue in the name – but I did have to wobble drunkenly across the nave on a bike, be caught from falling by a knight at arms, then carried off over his back. The “fugal delicacy … of English life”.
Harold Mozley
York

• What a pleasure to read Michael Billington’s ranking of Shakespeare’s plays. As ever with these ranked articles, at least half the fun is in disagreeing (Cymbeline the second worst? Never!) rather than agreeing (Twelfth Night the second best? Yes!). And there’s the bonus of a classic Billingtonian pun (re As You Like It): “you sometimes can’t see the wooed for the trees”.
David Gouldstone
Cambridge

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