Curated playlist
Male Shakespearean characters
- Prince HamletPrince Hamlet of Denmark stands at the center of what is likely the most analyzed character in the English literary tradition. Written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601, the tragedy bearing his name opens with a young prince…
- Touchstone (As You Like It)Touchstone stands in the court of Duke Frederick, a usurper who seized power from his brother. He wears the motley cap and bells that mark him as a licensed fool. His job is to speak truth to power while wearing a mask of nonsense.…
- Henry VIIIHenry VIII once dressed all in yellow, with a white feather in his bonnet, the day after he learned that Catherine of Aragon had died. He was King of England and Lord of Ireland from the 22nd of April 1509, and King of Ireland from 1542,…
- IagoIago has more lines in Shakespeare's Othello than Othello himself. With 1,097 lines, the villain of the play speaks more than its hero, a structural fact that hints at something strange and central about this character. Who is the real…
- Othello (character)Othello, the Venetian general at the center of Shakespeare's tragedy, was first brought to life on stage on the 1st of November 1604, performed before the court at Whitehall Palace. The man almost certainly playing him that night was…
- Philip II of FrancePhilip II of France was born on the 21st of August 1165 in Gonesse, the only son of King Louis VII and his third wife, Adela of Champagne. His birth was so longed for, arriving so late in his father's reign, that the boy was nicknamed…
- TheseusTheseus, the legendary hero of Athens, walked into a labyrinth armed with nothing but a hidden sword and a ball of thread. At the heart of that maze waited a creature that was half man and half bull, a monster that had been devouring…
- John FalstaffSir John Falstaff arrives on stage fat, drunk, and deeply in debt, and somehow the audience loves him anyway. He is a fictional knight who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare, and whose death is mourned in a fourth. His core…
- ShylockShylock loans 3,000 ducats to a Christian merchant named Antonio, and he sets the security at a pound of Antonio's flesh. That single clause turned a fictional Venetian Jewish moneylender into one of the most argued-over figures in all of…
- Thomas WolseyThomas Wolsey was born in about 1473 in Ipswich, the son of a man his enemies would mock as a common butcher. By 1515, he wore a cardinal's red hat, commanded more power than any Crown servant in English history, and sat at the centre of…
- John Howard, 1st Duke of NorfolkJohn Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, rode into the Battle of Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 1485 knowing something was wrong. The night before, according to a story later recorded, someone had pinned a note to his tent. It read: "Jack…
- DogberryDogberry, the bumbling constable of Messina, is one of William Shakespeare's most enduring comic creations. He arrives on stage armed with an inflated sense of authority and a spectacular gift for saying exactly the wrong word. A…