what are your faves??
now, end my suspense.
yeah, until i took the intro class at ksu, i was woefully unaware.. hated it in high school and was for the first few days in the intro class.
but my prof was a stud. he was positively gleeful when he'd peel back all the layers and help us understand what he was actually telling the audience. and i've been in with shakes ever since.
what are your faves??
my top 3 are probably:
1. Hamlet
2. Merchant of Venice
3. Henry IV (Falstaff! I mean he was like george costanza on steroids)
Interesting that you would mention Hamlet & MoV. Another excerpt from the introduction:
During my previous study of
The Merchant of Venice, I noted that the humor broadly fell into two categories: Jokes about Jews, and jokes about genitals (clever, I know). Since the latter category is by far the more pervasive in Shakespeare’s
oeuvre, the present paper will first give
The Merchant of Venice a more thorough treatment, and then
extend (see what I did there?) this analysis to
Hamlet, a less obvious selection. I hope to address precisely what function these jokes serve in context and what, if any, larger meaning they help to develop. Before we relegate the Bard to the status of smut-peddler, it is important to consider his plays in their rhetorical context, namely in relation to audience. We must remember “that his audiences were far more sophisticated in their listening skills than we are, and that sexual punning was much more a part of normal discourse in everyday life” (Kiernan).
--
btdubs, the subheadings for those sections were:
The Merchant of Venice, or the Power of the Penisand
Hamlet, or $!#*-ry Matters