Shakespeare Plays Available in Video Format
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All’s Well That Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus
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Henry IV, part 1
Henry IV, part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, part 1
Henry VI, part 2
Henry VI, part 3
Henry VIII
Julius Caesar
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King Lear
Love’s 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 and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter’s Tale
Shakespeareana

Available versions

1983: Don Taylor

2014: Robin Lough


Two Gentlemen of Verona
1983: Don Taylor

This is the BBC Shakespeare version of this play. It is a product from fairly late in the run of the BBC Shakespeare series, and its production costs were apparently fairly modest, but it has some very beautiful sets and costumes, and some fine music.

None of the actors are the A-listers of some of the other productions, but they all turn in very creditable performances. The silliness and florid wordplay of the first part of the play is handled deftly; when the texture of the play gives way in the second part to the dark emotional depths of Proteus’s betrayal of Julia, she carries the added weight with gravity; similarly Joanne Pearce’s Silvia has grace and class.

True to the principle articulated in Shakespeare in Love, this is genuinely a play with “a bit with a dog”. It’s curiously charming. There’s one scene where the dog’s expressive antics are a scene-stealer.

None of the excellence of the performance can go very far toward redeeming the fundamentally distasteful nature of parts of the play, but one can’t expect it to.

This production is the only one of the BBC Shakespeare Plays series I can recall that has the musical support of The Consort of Musicke, and their performance of both the incidental music of the play and background period pieces lends the performance a certain flair that few of the others have achieved. It’s one of the earliest appearances of Emma Kirkby on film, as well, and she is one of the luminous voices of the last forty years in early music. That may be more of interest to aficionados of early music than to Shakespeare students as such, but I imagine the intersection of the two groups is not negligible.


Antonio: Michael Byrne

Crab: Bella

Cupid: Charlotte Richardson

Cupid: Jonathan Taylor

Duke of Milan: Paul Daneman

First Outlaw: Adam Kurakin

Host: Michael Graham Cox

Julia: Tessa Peake-Jones

Launce: Tony Haygarth

Lucetta: Hetta Charnley

Lutenist: Bill Badley

Lutenist: Robin Jeffrey

Lutenist: Tom Finucane

Panthino: John Woodnutt

Proteus: Tyler Butterworth

Second Outlaw: John Baxter

Servant: Daniel Flynn

Silvia: Joanne Pearce

Sir Eglamour: Frank Barrie

Speed: Nicholas Kaby

Third Outlaw: Andrew Burt

Thurio: David Collings

Valentine: John Hudson