![]() So, in no particular order, here’s our pick of Shakespeare’s funniest characters: Dogberry Much Ado About Nothingĭogberry has entertained generations of audiences with his malapropisms and pompous demeanour as chief of the Watch – the voluntary civilian police in Messina. Many of the jokes in Shakespeare are based on puns that would have had the audience rolling about, but which we often miss. It is something that has to be explained to us today. The Elizabethan audience would have been aware that they were going to see a play with that dimension as soon as they read the title. The play is largely about the way we see and hear things and the plot revolves around characters misreading the things they see and hear. For example, the word ‘nothing’ was pronounced ‘noting’ and so the title ‘ Much Ado about Nothing’ misses its other meaning today. The pronunciation of English is much more diverse around the world than it was in Elizabethan London and many of Shakespeare’s puns don’t make much sense to us because some words that used to rhyme don’t anymore. ![]() There was a lot more to laugh at in a Shakespeare play than we realise today, because the English language has changed quite a bit and many of the jokes and puns are lost to the modern audience. They wanted violence, they wanted a love story somewhere in the play, and above all they wanted to be entertained with humour. This article picks out Shakespeare’s funniest characters across all of his plays (though perhaps surprisingly, not all these characters come from one of Shakespeare’s comedy plays!).Įlizabethan and Jacobean audiences expected certain things when they went to the theatre. ![]() Shakespeare wrote humour into all his plays and one of the vehicles of that is character. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15. ![]()
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