Isaac Butler

This is an impossible question, right?

There is a stable top tier of Shakespeare plays that almost everyone agrees on.

And that's love.

The top five is Hamlet, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Henry IV Part I, and a fifth play of your choosing, right?

So I'm going to set those aside because otherwise it's like, otherwise it's like, oh, Revolver is the best Beatles album, right?

It's like, come on.

And so I want to talk about one that I love, that I teach whenever I can, that I reread over and over again, Measure for Measure.

Measure for Measure is a brilliant play.

It's one of the plays where actually, because I teach it, so I can tell you this, it's

Even if you don't have a lot of Shakespeare knowledge, it's actually a very crystal clear on the page play.

It's a play about sexual politics.

It's a play about the hypocrisies of Puritanism.

It's a play about gender and sex.

It has the greatest...

but longest euphemism for sex I've ever heard, which is fishing for trout in peculiar rivers.

And it can't really be nailed down to a coherent interpretation, in part because its last scene, the main character never, like basically doesn't speak in the entire last scene.

And so what her opinion on what has happened is not known.

And it's such a tricky play.

Every time I read it, I discover something new about it.

So Measure for Measure is my choice.