Favourite Shakespeare plays

Here’s the chance for a bit of listmania–what are your top five favourite Shakespeare plays, and why?
Before I list my own faves, I’d like to give you a bit of my own personal background regarding Shakespeare. As a child growing up in a French family, albeit mostly in Australia, Shakespeare didn’t actually feature high or even at all on my line of vision until I went to high school (except for the fact I had heard his name before–on a record my father bought, Shakespeare Songs and consort music, sung by the great counter-tenor, Alfred Deller; so I actually first met the bard as a songwriter, not a playwright!) My parents had a very dim opinion of the playwright. French translations of Shakespeare have been very, very bad until fairly recently, unlike the German, Italian and Russian ones, and French critical opinion of Shakespeare not been very high(he offended against Cartesian logic, apparently, and against classical structure). So I certainly did not approach him with any idolatry at all.
The first play of his I ever read was ‘The Merchant of Venice’. It was a revelation to me. We had the good fortune of having one of the most brilliant English teachers you could hope for, to introduce us to Shakespeare. She truly loved the works, but without any foolish reverence. She also arranged to take us on excursions to see the plays on the stage, and organised film days to watch screened versions. The plays burst on me with all the force of reality, of revelation, and of passion. The combination of extraordinary intelligence, imagination, daring eroticism, ribald humour, tragic spirit, natural magic, tragedy, compassion, marvellous characterisation, darting wit and thunder-and-lightning energy and lyricism–and so much more–that makes up the astonishing genius of Shakespeare, is something that has continued to nourish, inspire, challenge and liberate me. I don’t like everything of his equally, but everything of his is worth knowing, nevertheless. And the best is perfect.
So here’s my five top favourites..

1.Twelfth Night: not only the best of Shakespeare’s plays, but the best play ever written, in my opinion. A perfect gem, containing comedy, tragedy, the erotic and the tragic, the horrible and the hilarious, in a perfectly balanced cocktail, with some of the best and most complex characters ever penned–and the lightest, most wonderful of touches, yet with no tweeness whatsoever. I have seen this play many times–on stage as well as on screen(very best screen version is Trevor Nunn’s enchanting late 1990’s version, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Imogen Stubbs, Imelda Staunton, Richard E.Grant, Nigel Hawthorne, and Mel Smith.) I love this play so much that it’s directly inspired two of my novels–The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare(2003) and Malvolio’s Revenge(which comes out this year).
2.The Tempest: A close second to Twelfth Night. As you might imagine, this gorgeous play is also one of the inspirations of ‘The Tempestuous Voyage’. Such an assured, melancholy yet funny and romantic and utterly magical play!
3. Romeo and Juliet–simply the best portrait ever of youthful love, braggadacio, and wild emotion, crushed by the madness of revenge and feud. I still thrill to the glorious declarations of passion that Romeo and Juliet give to each other, and the intoxicating nature of the play.
4. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What a lovely, lightsome thing, so full of that combination of the earthy and the ethereal which makes Shakespeare’s fantasy absolutely real in every way..This play also inspired one of my own novels, Cold Iron(1998, reprinted 2001, also published in the USA as Malkin, 2001).
5. Othello–for its chilling portrayal of true evil, and the downfall of a good man, and a loving, innocent woman, this play has no rival. Iago freezes my blood every time, and though I sort of sympathise with Othello, I hate his guts too for being such a weak, trusting, blustering silly billy of a man who’d rather trust that creep of an ensign than his own beautiful, bright and loving wife. I saw a most wonderful stage performance of it recently, by Cheek by Jowl, an English theatre company, which featured an extraordinaryoung Nigerian actor as Othello–a suffering, blustering but noble mountain of a man, whose murder of his frail, tiny and gallant wife was the most shocking thing I–and most people in the audience, I think–had ever seen on stage in a long time. And Iago was played most wonderfully, sneakily well, showing the emptiness as well as the ugliness of evil, with the lightest of touches. His portrayal also made me realise something–in some ways, Iago is the very sinister version, the darkest shade of all, of an ambiguous, funny but also deeply unpleasant character like Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night..
OK, you might say. Where’s Hamlet, Richard III, the Henrys, As You Like It, and so on? Well, truth is I love them all–I’m not too keen on Titus Andronicus, I must say, though–but if push comes to shove those are the ones I love best of all. Over to you!