The 2000-year period of Shakespearean tragedy is one inbred clusterfuck all happening at the same time. Who becomes king?

definitely not hamlet

Choices for inclusion here are totally arbitrary btw, although I'm assuming Hamlet is out from the get-go due to being a useless twat.

I would be tempted to go for Macbeth for sheer brutal economy but on the other hand if Iago put his mind to it I think he could take him.

Macbeth - bottler
Edmund - thick
Edgar - thick and wet
Hamlet - lazy dopesmoking student
Claudius - thinks with his nob
Iago - OG MAKAVELI FOR REAL
Aaron - too goth
Brutus - thick, wet and shitty PR skills
Coriolanus - mummy's boy

^^^ Best post ever.

Indeed. I was going to vote Edmund, but now...

Kent u fools

sorry

u base football-players

iago, jesus, no contest

anyway, real answer is Vincentio

by MILES

iago's basically the ultimate manipulator and it always annoyed me that shakespeare had to resort to a totally out-of-character error on his part just so he didn't get away with it

Yeah it's like Max Branning from Eastenders all over again.

Anyway we are not taking LADY MACBETH as a variable here and with that in mind I think she would have had Iago sussed.

Iago is only the ultimate manipulator because everyone else in Othello is a stupid fuckwit.

But he's bad, deep down revelling in it bad. More so than any of the other characters here. Edmund for example has a kind of teenage wannabe attitude to his bad boy-ness.

lady macbeth couldn't hack it in the end though :(

Was gonna say, like her husband she was not good under pressure.

i mean, to be undone by your own conscience in the end, that's just pathetic

VINCENTIO ffs, he is AWESOME, knows how to curry popular favour, work a crowd, engineer a situation to his advantage while incognito, wear disguise, deal justice, wax hardman, pipe down when things ain't so sweet, and would definitely find some way of coming out on top. He's the interactive, savvy Obama to the primitive, flawed if highly entertaining Sarah Palins that make up the rest of the field

No Richard III no credibility.

Granted that the play Vincentio is in is not a tragedy.

Yeah but Iago is playing a fancy tippy-tappy long game whereas Macbeth would just hoof it up to the big lad. I'm sure Macbeth would blow it with a few minutes remaining but I'm thinking Iago wouldn't have the space to play his natural game.

^^argument disqualified on the grounds of it being gibberish

whereas Aaron is pure Jon-Parkin-will-eat-you antifootball

It's like how Federer can't beat Nadal then.

idk the point with iago is that you don't realise he's the enemy. no one plays against him.

Oooh good point.

(The side question to this poll is which one gets the most sex)

but aaron has probably cut his eyes out and disembowled him before he can really hatch any of his plans xp

Brutus is such a bore. Why is he on the list? He's like Hubert Humphrey.

i also wished that emilia had been on iago's side - with her smarts and quick wit they'd've been an unbeatable team

hamlet prob gets laid most

aaron doesn't need reasons to smite - he's JUST evil, darling

hamlet gets laid quite a lot but also spends a lot of time deliberately avoiding sex out of some kind of misplaced sense of guilt

Also fucks his mum.

someone familiar with titus andronicus please make the case for aaron

Hamlet - Danish exchange student, heir to throne. Banging morning noon and night I wd imagine.

where's henry bolingbroke? he stripped that sissy richard ii of this throne right quick.

Aaron doesn't even get the most brutal bit in Titus Andronicus but he's way up there on the sex thing and not just because he's black.

but, though not having read all of these guys' plays before, I'd go with iago.
baddest of the bad; evil personified.

i don't think iago makes sense here - the poll says 'who becomes king', iago's humble birth rly counts against him here & I think he buys into the feudal system too much himself to do a tamburlaine.

aaron gets madlaid

iago's humble birth rly counts against him here & I think he buys into the feudal system too much himself to do a tamburlaine.

Dude Thatcherism.

Dud Thatcherism.

Aaron has Tamara, who's basically his own personal sex-doll, and he rapes/fucks/violates pretty much every other woman he gets his hands on

anyway the answer is Fortinbras turning up with a huge army at the end, kind of a trump card against all this scheming stuff.

I deliberately left Fortinbras out of this for that very reason. Winning by default isn't very glamorous so let's pretend he just doesn't exist.

the poll asks "king or emperor or counsel or whatever" - in which i include power behind the throne

fortinbras = cheating

edmund is the really scary guy on this list -- totally psychopathic and unpredictable, right up to his pointless last-minute conversion. since hamlet probably wouldn't even try to be king, it's really down to edmund vs. iago for me, and iago seems like he's got the edge.

Edmund's conversion is hinted at continually throughout the last couple of acts IIRC

Richard III really should be in here instead of wussy Hamlet. Not that I think he'd win but he's at least trying to become king - Hamlet seems to think he's in an emo murder mystery.

also, he's made to be a patsy by whichever one of Regan and Gonerill he's plugging (I forget which)...he's not really in control of his own destiny, or at least as much as he thinks he is xp

he gets to shag both R and G - and yeah i was gonna say, if edgar and edmund are here then goneril at least should be

Richard III is excluded due to technically not being a tragedy but yeah he could have been a contenda.

oh wait, it's both yeh xp

indie pick: Ulysess

agree that iago's manipulations are largely defined by his fealty to / betrayal by Othello -- he wouldn't manipulate himself into power, he'd just force circumstances where everyone else would have to destroy each other, provided he had the motivation to do so. iago's not a kingly type, he's rather ruthlessly anarchic i would think.

Hamlet seems to think he's in an emo murder mystery

My oft-repeated theory is that Hamlet is a satire of Revenge Tragedies.

while also being, like, a totally fucking awesome linguistic/moral clusterfuck

That is a really well-known theory NV!

The thing with this poll is that none of these guys even win their home play, against much weaker competition? Clusterfuck pretty clearly ends with pile of bodies on floor, Cassio rules in Cyprus.

i have never heard this hamlet-as-satire theory

I didn't know that GP. Good. I think the only theory I know about re: Hamlet is Stephen Dedalus' and the joke of that is there isn't really a theory at all.

Information No results found for "hamlet queer theory".

xpost

Well yr average Elizabethan/Jacobean revenge drama is ripe and histrionic, and the heroes tend to revenge first and ask questions later. Hamlet not only turns that inside out by having a dithering inept protagonist, but virtually all of its deaths are misfires or comedy blunders. The first time Hamlet himself pulls his finger out and takes action, he stabs the wrong dude - not coincidentally the play's most annoying character. Ophelia basically histrionics herself to death. Epic body count ends up with power seized by an outsider in a neat little trick of realpolitik.

(actually maybe it isn't - maybe I internalised it as a mainstream view because you said it in like 2004! i don't know!)

My oft-repeated theory is that Hamlet is a satire of Revenge Tragedies.

Harold Bloom said the same thing about Titus Andronicus.

bloom's book has a lot of funny speculation about what it would be like if various characters had to face off -- could iago withstand the charms of rosalind?? etc. etc.

i like orson welles's theory that hamlet went to england after all, started drinking heavily, got old and fat, and changed his name to falstaff.

titus andronicus was shakey's first play, hence was pretty much showboating from start to finish

"ooh look i just made the biggest, baddest, most loquacious revenge tragedy EVAH there's a new kid on the block FEAR MY QUILL"

It's a shame I'm deliberately excluding the history plays from this because Falstaff would have the 'which character from Shakespearean comedy would be the first to roll down a hill in a barrell?' poll nailed.

wkiw falstaff

also polonius totally isn't the play's most annoying character - he's a hoot, his errors of judgement have real levity to them

in fact there are loads of pretty damn irksome* characters, from ophelia to osric to oh god everyone who isn't hamlet more or less

polonius is probably marginally the most inept character

*not in a "wd not watch" way, in an "i am fascinated by your clumsy unknowing of your drama's momentum, much as i am fascinated by hamlet's (twisted) comprehension of it" way

There are definitely lolz in "long-winded, pompous cock" characters, I don't mean he is annoying to the audience so much as that he is dude where you have a real sense of HOORAY EAT IT when he gets kebabed.

lol not surprising to me that nv finds polonius annoying and lj finds him hilarious

that scene (act 2 sc 1) where he forgets his line is A+++ meta lulz for all-time

lj IS polonius

lj IS polonius

― lex pretend, Sunday, March 15, 2009 7:59 PM (32 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hah i was very close to making this exact post but i chose instead to hint at it

Oh but I don't find Lewis annoying nor would I like to see him stabbed up behind an arras.

To be honest I assumed he'd already been stabbed in the arras.

no, just a handie

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

(Lewes I'm sorry but some things are just a bit too difficult to resist)

A good T/S would be Edmumd vs Iago. Edmund's evil has no motivation other than (maybe) his enjoying being the patsy in a love triangle; that's why his last-minute act of goodness never bothered me.

My view of Edmund is perma-coloured by seeing Robert Lindsay do him in a BBC version I think. Also, never seen a well-directed stage performance of Lear. I think it's a bit much perhaps.

That's not my meaning - but breathe his faults so quaintly
That they may seem the taints of liberty,
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind,
A savageness in unreclaimed blood,
Of general assault

When you're a teenager watching in English class the urge to shout "Power to the People!" is so overwhelming that a spell standing outside in the corridor inevitably ensues.

I've just re-read some of the Edmund bits of Lear and I've got a feeling he might win this by virtue of fucking his way to the top.

and he loves it! No higher motives infect his ambition.

man Richard III would eat all these motherfucking ponces for breakfast

It's been eons since I read Richard III but I remember him feeling kind of like a badass and also kind of like a bumbling idiot. No specifics to support me, I just remember feeling, from the get-go, this is never going to work. Granted, it's a tragedy, that's kind of the deal, but there's a desperate overkill quality to his schemes, like A Simple Plan or Fargo where to cover for the first crime now they have to kill some innocent babies - shit, now I've gotta...

much like the legendary superheroes poll, so much of this depends on context. at different ends of a country plotting, hard to see Iago beaten. In a pitched scramble, Macbeth pwns.

Edmund = Rorschach
Hamlet = Dr Manhatten
Macbeth = Ozymandias

um . . .

macbeth closer to the comedian

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Can't argue with that shit.

I suspect machinations.

oh dammit I meant to vote Aaron

Vincentio still wins if we're talking all of Shakespeare. He's the boss.