Yes. Of those 4, only The Tempest is top-drawer Shakespeare although, to be honest, The Winter's Tale is the only one of the other three I've actually read/seen performed.

The Tempest--which is one of my favorites--was one of his very last plays and certainly his last great one; it's hard not to see the ending, e.g. the breaking of the staff, as symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not.

>his most widely regarded plays

I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.

My theater troupe (www.rudemechanicals.com) has never done Cymbelline -- the only play we haven't done. We had it on our schedule to be performed next month, but obviously that didn't happen.

I directed Pericles myself, and it was actually a hoot, albeit with a cheat. The plot is such a mess that I literally put the two writers, Shakespeare and Wilkins, on stage, and pretended that the play's bizarre plot twists were the result of the two fighting over control.

Our Winter's Tale was less of a farce. We set it in the 1960s, with the Bohemians as "bohemians". It was lovely -- still not anybody's favorite Shakespeare play, but a worthy project.

We're doing Zoom shows to keep ourselves occupied until we can get back on stage. And when we do I'll finally get to do a version of Midsummer I've been prepping for years, lit mostly with black lights. It'll be beautiful. (I've directed it twice before, and my troupe has done it several other times as well. Audiences do love that play.)

Midsummer is great. And, yes, it offers a lot of opportunities for interpretation that I've appreciated over the years. I'm sure your version will be a lot of fun. Good luck!

> directed Pericles myself, and it was actually a hoot, albeit with a cheat. The plot is such a mess that I literally put the two writers, Shakespeare and Wilkins, on stage, and pretended that the play's bizarre plot twists were the result of the two fighting over control.

Love this!

>We set it in the 1960s

One of the things I've come to appreciate as I've seen more Shakespeare and, perhaps, gotten older is that I better appreciate alternative settings and interpretation rather than wanting the "authentic" version. One favorite of mine a few years ago was that Bedlam out of Brooklyn did two completely different versions of Twelfth Night.

>"The first three plays you mention are rarely performed, and for good reason: they're kind of a mess."

A mess in which sense? Theatrical? Could you elaborate. I'm genuinely curious.

Well, the plots are really bad, even by Shakespeare's standards. Cymbelline is a mess of mistaken identities and increasingly arbitrary subplots that require a literal deus ex machina to resolve: Jupiter himself shows up and just tells everybody how to end the play. Pericles started life as a collection of unrelated short stories, crammed together haphazardly. The Winter's Tale has a terrible main character, so the plot just goes completely elsewhere for 17 years, followed by a completely unmotivated and really bizarre quickie "redemption". In each case you leave the theater having no idea how to feel about anything. They weren't funny, but neither have they resolved dramatically. They just kinda stop.

That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie.

The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp.

But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often.

So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.

Thanks for your perspective and the wonderfully detailed response. That's quite interesting about Julie Taymor. I wish I would have been able to see that and now I'm curious to read a review. Do you have some online Shakespeare resources that you cold recommend for reading more about these types of elements discussions of Shakespeares works and career arc?