'The Merchant of Venice'. Followed by 'King Lear'.

I think you'd have to sub-divide a question like that into Comedy, Tragedy, Romance, Problem play.

Comedy: A Mid-Summer Night's Dream, for the very tight plotting and the multi-level social structure against which the themes are played out.

Tragedy: Macbeth, for the supernatural elements.

Also, a distinction needs to be made between what reads well and what performs well on stage.

King Lear is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy on the printed page, for example, but I've never once seen a good production. Episodes such as the cliff scene make it virtually unstagable.

I haven't read all of Shakespeare's plays, so I don't think it's too fair to name a favourite....but of the ones I've read:

My favourite tragedy is Hamlet

And my favourite comedy is The Comedy of Errors

I'm actually planning to take a Shakespeare course next semester, but I'm not too sure. I wanna to take the course because I love Shakespeare, but I've had the professer that teaches it before and he's a very hard teacher (and even with the easy professers, college is hard enough as it is).

Karen Armstrong says she sometimes gets reproachful comments from readers, along the lines of, "That was a hard book!" and she feels tempted to say, "Well, of course - it was about God!" (See The Case for God.) Some of us feel that way about Shakespeare; I have a T shirt that says, "Chaucer. Because Shakespeare Was Too Easy," but that was before I taught Shakespeare. Anyway, Othello is my favorite tragedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream my favorite Shakespearean comedy. In both cases, tight plotting demands split second timing of the players. Hamlet, of course, gives the laddie at centre stage all the long speeches, and I think it's over-rated as a result.

I have a Shakespeare story--

Years ago I saw James Earl Jones in Othello (I wasn't captivated by his performance. He kept beating his chest like a gorilla.) Christopher Plummer was a brilliant Iago.

James Earl Jones lives in the same town I do.

One day, I was at our town dump bringing in the recycling when I saw that Jones was parked right next to me and was standing right next to me.

Without thinking, I became Desdemona and said to him, "I saw Othello's visage in his mind."

He turned on me with an angry expression and said, "You saw WHAT?"

I just cowered away and said, "Oh, nothing, nothing..."

I agree that to pick favorites, you have to divide the plays by tragedy, comedy, history, problem play.

I love cut-and-paste Shakespeare best. By that I mean, I love certain passages from different plays.

Twelfth Night.

I think my favorite is "Forbidden Planet." I like the scene where the pilot tries to teach Alaira Morbius about making out, and also the part where Dr. Morbius has to confront the monsters from his own id.

I also got to see the rock musical version when it played at the Cambridge Theatre in London in 1989. It was jolly good, although some wags who knew the lines were showing off by yelling them ahead of the actors, like "Prospero, Prospero, wherefore art thou Prospero."

btw--The Tempest is a Shakespeare play that greatly vexes the Oxfordians, because it takes place in the still-vexed Bermudas (thereby dating it to 1610 at the earliest). Vexing the Oxfordians is worth the price of admission by itself.

The Lion King.

Good call.

For the written word-King Lear
For the play-McBeth
For the movie-Tromeo and Juliet.

That version is good too, but I was taking about this one: