gek-opel said:
Julius Caesar all the way... there aren't really any saggy clock watching bits, the way it lifts off into almost a different play in the last third... fantastic... great film as well, btw... and plenty of gore... The actual poetry of the thing escapes me, (omens lots of omens and augeries I seem to recall)...
yes, /JC/ is fantastic. obviously as a display of rhetoric (the two famous famous speeches, which are supposed to collectively contain every rhetorical device ever, or something) it's compelling; as a personal study of a weak leader out of his depth it's humanising (favourite scene in this respect the one where caesar appears in his nightgown whingeing about how badly he's slept); and the shift after caesar's death is startling (must be equally so on stage - unfortunately i'm yet to see it performed) - you can really feel the terror and hollowness of the power vacum. and brutus is one of shax' most interestng characters....
owen re: pacing - well it can be a problem, but is by no means ubiquitous. /Lear/ is a bit of a baggy monster but inspite of that i've never found it anything other than compelling on stage or page. the clifftop scene (IV, vi) is one of the eeriest things in drama if done properly...edgar has something of james hogg's other-wordly gil-martin about him....and lear's mad ravings on the beach are actually spookily accurate, as well as poetic, representations of madness. and the ending....textual uncertainty ("my fool is hanged" - which fool - cordelia or (according to orwell) The Fool ,who disappears half way through the play?), gore, and the most moving stage entrance in shax. definitely my favourite tragedy.
otherwise..../The Tempest/ is of course wonderful - exotic, magical, defintely /not/ funny-ha-ha so much as funny-uh-oh, and full of shimmering shakespearian moments of ambiguity. for example in the final scene, when miranda and ferdinand, the "happy newly weds" at the end of what poses as a pastoral comedy (i.e. they should be about to return to the city refreshed and rejuvinated, basking in marital bliss....) are playing chess, and miranda accuses of f. of cheating. he deines it, and her reply still has us guessing:
"Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, / And I would call it fair play"