Shakespeare's farewell to the stage - and his most artistically successful collaboration with John Fletcher - is a pared down drama with an excellent subplot that doesn't deserve its relative neglect. ( )

[not seen]

I had this queued up to listen to for three days before I finally ripped through it in one gulp. And initially, I hated it. I mean, yeah yeah, love at first sight and all that, but damn, a pair of cousins actually somewhat joyful at being imprisoned together for the rest of their lives and swearing undying love for each other almost immediately become sworn enemies at the sight of a woman?

There's love at first sight, and then there's utter ridiculousness.

Anyway, okay, the story hinges on this, so fair enough, grudgingly accept it and move on.

...and then the jailer's daughter falls for the remaining imprisoned cousin, then goes stark raving bonkers when it's unrequited.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've officially entered J. Geils Band territory...

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win

And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It's gonna make you cry

I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure (in the worlds of Shakespeare)
Love stinks

Honestly, for the entire second half of this, my final play of Shakespeare's, that's the song that kept rolling through my head.

Regardless, it had a suitably tragic twist at the end, worth of the Bard, and overall, I think I enjoyed this one more than any of the previous few I'd gone through, so I'll take that as a win.

Final thoughts on Shakespeare? Don't fall in love in a Shakespeare play, cuz someone's gonna die. ( )

Shakespeare's final play, a collaboration with Fletcher, is more show than substance and allegedly often stolen by the Jailer's Daughter, who plays a small but crucial role in the main plot but ends up the lead character in a bizarre and controvercial subplot that even on the page is in some ways more interesting than the main action of two knights who fall instantly in love with their enemy's sister and fall to rivalry and rancour despite being cousins and also best pals five seconds earlier... Apparently one such modern day show stealer was Imogen Stubbs, which, given what I've seen/heard her do in other contexts, I find not so much plausible as inevitable.

So this is typical of late Shakespeare - an insubstantial Romance, this time based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale, with a silly plot and thin characters that can probably be made into a lively stage spectacle, at least, but far distant from the works that made his name echo down over four hundred years of history. ( )

This play is supposedly co-authored by Shakespeare and John Fletcher (of Fletcher & Beaumont fame) though that attribution is considered questionable. I have nothing to add to that debate but note the fact (which explains why this play isn't in my Kindle "The Complete Works of Shakespeare").

The play is apparently based upon one of Chaucer's tales and I found the setting of ancient Athens a bit forced and unlikely. For example, did the ancient Greeks in the time of Theseus do Morris dancing? Despite these oddities, I did enjoy the play. I may not have gotten as much out of reading it if I hadn't also watched it courtesy of Shakespeare's Globe Theater (https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/watch/#free-youtube-premieres) which cut a significant bit of the written text but made what was written much easier to understand. The Project Gutenberg text I read was based on a 1908 printed version which kept a lot of archaic spelling.

There was a lot of comedy in this play but I guess that overall I would classify it as a tragedy because of the way it ended. Often I find Shakespeare's comic relief in his tragedies not at all funny but this time I was chuckling a lot. ( )