The 10 best Shakespeare characters | Culture

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The 10 best Shakespeare characters

The Cultural Olympiad is preparing to stage all his plays

Sat 24 Mar 2012 20.01 EDT First published on Sat 24 Mar 2012 20.01 EDT

  • Viola: Twelfth Night

    Viola, adrift in Illyria as the page Cesario, competes with Rosalind (in As You Like It) for one of Shakespeare’s best parts. The clincher, for me, is that Viola is his most sexually ambiguous character. Throughout the exposition of the plot, and the humiliation of Malvolio, she has an infectious energy that audiences love as she engages, like any properly complicated woman, with everyone around her. But it’s not just giddy flirtation. Her scene (Act III, Scene I) with Olivia, in which the frosty countess hovers on the brink of declaring her love for Cesario, is among the most intoxicating Shakespeare ever wrote

  • Beatrice: Much Ado About Nothing

    Beatrice and Benedick are, technically, a subplot. Beatrice, however, dominates the heart of this most misunderstood of Shakespeare’s plays, which is so much more than the romcom to which it is often reduced. Wise, witty and wounded, Beatrice has twice the dramatic potential of her romantic counterpart. Her call in Act IV’s wrecked wedding for him to “Kill Claudio” defines the breadth and depth of her character – mercurial, fiercely devoted, willing to risk everything – and also the dramatic genius of Shakespeare. Is this moment funny? Serious? Shocking? All three, simultaneously

  • The Nurse: Romeo and Juliet

    Juliet’s nurse is a character who seems to have stepped straight off the high street in Stratford. It’s quite a small role, only 9% of the text, according to the RSC Shakespeare, but it gives the obsessive, all-consuming passion of the star-cross’d lovers a vital human counterpoint. The nurse is as garrulous as Polonius but grounded in everyday life, with a heart of gold. A wonderful crowd-pleaser, she provides, for Shakespeare, a point of contact with the audience for whom this tragic version of Pyramus and Thisbe might seem, in Romeo’s own words, “too flattering-sweet to be substantial.”

  • Lady Macbeth: Macbeth

    Macbeth and his wife enjoy one of the darkest psycho-sexual relationships ever seen on the English stage. Lady Macbeth’s fiendish manipulation of her husband into acts of horrific violence makes her a supreme archetype. The play has the vertiginous momentum of a thriller and often works best when performed without a break. In that fatal trajectory, when Macbeth “sups full of horrors”, audiences see how his lust for power has been provoked by his wife’s sexual thrall. He has some of the great speeches, but she holds the play’s imaginative dynamo in her fascinating and demonic heart

  • Titania/Hippolyta: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

    The fairy queen and Theseus’s bride are often doubled in Shakespeare’s Dream, one of his very rare wholly original comedies, and a play that’s all about double vision. Titania’s absurd passion for Bottom the Weaver can be a scene-stealer. When Judi Dench took the role in Peter Hall’s recent production, she was front-page news. The play, more than many, has inspired some genre-bending productions, notably Peter Brook’s Dream of 1970. In probably the most influential production of recent times, Titania was played by the magical Sara Kestelman

  • Falstaff: Henry IV, Parts I and II, The Merry Wives of Windsor

    Sir John Falstaff is one of the great Shakespearean father figures, the incorrigible old rogue who accompanies the prodigal Prince Hal from riotous youth to sober maturity. Falstaff is a giant in all senses. With his massive girth and capacious appetites, he is the drunken, mendacious, lecherous English bounder with whom every audience identifies. The moment in Act V, Scene 5 of Part II, when the newly crowned King Henry repudiates his old sparring partner (“I know thee not, old man”), is one of the most shattering on the English stage. Falstaff was an immediate hit

  • Iago: Othello

    Actors love to play stage villains. Iago, the quintessence of evil, is a terrific part for the Shakespearean player, and the one with the most lines in this play – 31% to Othello’s 25%. In the playwright’s hands, Iago is also a tragic character, who eventually betrays himself through a disabling resentment mixed with excessive devotion. In a strangely sympathetic performance, Simon Russell Beale’s Iago stands out from recent productions for his glacial cunning and warped manipulation of “the Moor”. Iago’s final speech – “Demand me nothing. What I know I know” – is one of the great exit lines in the canon

  • Prospero: The Tempest

    This was the last play Shakespeare wrote wholly alone. It’s hard to resist reading Prospero as his farewell to a lifetime in the theatre. It’s not just a commanding role but a part with some of the poet’s loveliest lines. The speeches in Acts IV and V, in which the exiled duke of Milan brings down the curtain on the drama (“Our revels now are ended”) and then repudiates his art (“This rough magic I here abjure”), are thrilling and majestic. Prospero is one of Shakespeare’s great old men. His interaction with Ariel and Caliban demonstrates the playwright’s uncanny intuition of colonial relationships long before the heyday of empire

  • Lear: King Lear

    Hamlet is the young actor’s supreme test, but Lear is the one part to which every leading man aspires. The British stage has seen recent landmark performances from Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, for my money the greatest Lear of his generation. Madness, bloodshed and stage nudity: it’s a physically daunting role, occupying 22% of the script (Hamlet accounts for a massive 37%). In Act III, Scene I, the storm (“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks”) leads to one of the most extraordinary moments of western theatre – a high point in a play rich in astounding scenes. Shakespeare’s vision of humanity is bleak but strangely uplifting

  • The Bear: The Winter’s Tale

    “Exit, pursued by a bear” is Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction. The bear has no lines, of course, and is the ultimate walk-on part. But his appearance is more than just a dramatic contrivance. The bear rips Antigonus to pieces, leaving Hermione’s baby daughter to be rescued by an Old Shepherd, who gives this haunting romance a decisive shove towards its heartbreaking denouement. The baby grows up to become Perdita. Sixteen years later, the revelation of her true identity will lead to the scene where Hermione’s statue comes to life, and Leontes delivers one of Shakespeare’s most moving lines: “O, she’s warm.”
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