This here? This is a sports blog. We were talking about the big England-Denmark match, you see, so talk naturally got around to the two nations' most famous shared cultural legacy: Hamlet. Opinions were offered—someone said Hamlet is the least interesting character in Hamlet, someone else got close to pulling a knife on them for that take—but it was generally agreed that Hamlet, the play, slaps. That naturally segued into talk of which of William Shakespeare's other, non-Danish plays slap. That naturally transitioned into a ranking.
The Defector staff rated each of the Bard's plays from the First Folio on a 10-point (except for Ray, who rated them from "226" to "leprosy"). Plays we have not seen we did not rate ("What the shit is King John?" was asked), and those plays not rated by enough voters were tossed out of the list. We are ignoring the whole authorship question entirely. The ratings were averaged to produce these conclusive rankings, and let me tell you, there are few experiences more absurd than looking at a timeless classic work, one which has endured in the public imagination for centuries, one generally held to be among the pinnacle of English-language literature—and thinking, "you know what, that's an 8."
- Hamlet
- Macbeth
- Othello
- King Lear
- Henry V
- Romeo and Juliet
- The Tempest
- Henry VI, Part III
- Julius Caesar
- Much Ado about Nothing
- Troilus and Cressida
- Love's Labour's Lost
- Twelfth Night
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Henry IV, Part I
- Henry IV, Part II
- Henry VI, Part I
- Measure for Measure
- The Taming of the Shrew
- Merchant of Venice
- As You Like It
- Richard II
- Coriolanus
- Henry VI, Part II
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- All's Well That Ends Well
- Cymbeline
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Richard III
- The Comedy of Errors
- The Winter's Tale
- Henry VIII
- Getting hit by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
- Antony and Cleopatra
Note: King John and The Two Gentlemen of Verona did not receive enough rankings to qualify. Edward III, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre were not included in the First Folio and are generally believed to be collaborations, and were not considered here.
