I ran into Norman Podhoretz who read my post about All’s Well that Ends Well, and was astonished that I had not been made to read all of Shakespeare in college. This was his vintage of Columbia, looking down on my vintage of Yale. At the risk of deepening his disdain, here are the other Shakespeare plays I realize I have never read or seen:

Two Gentlemen of Verona

Love’s Labor’s Lost

King John

Merry Wives of Windsor

Troilus and Cressida

Measure for Measure

Timon of Athens

Henry the Eighth

Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher)

There are some odd things about this list. Measure for Measure has been a hot play all my life (it is thought of as a dark comedy). Merry Wives of Windsor became an opera, and Two Gentlemen of Verona became a musical, which suggests they must have something going for them. Troilus and Cressida was popular with wingers because of the speech on natural hierarchy (“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center/Observe degree, priority and place”) which James Burnham always used to quote. Meanwhile, I did read Titus Andronicus and Henry the Sixth Part I–real hounds, both of them. My favorite slasher-film moment of Titus Andronicus is when the heroine, whose tongue has been ripped out and hands cut off, communicates by holding a stick in her mouth and writing in the sand.