Ten of the best Shakespeare characters

Today is Shakespeare's birthday. For the Guardian, in 2012 Robert McCrum came up with a list of the ten best Shakespeare characters, including:

The Nurse: Romeo and Juliet

Juliet’s nurse is a character who seems to have stepped straight off the high street in Stratford. It’s quite a small role, only 9% of the text, according to the RSC Shakespeare, but it gives the obsessive, all-consuming passion of the star-cross’d lovers a vital human counterpoint. The nurse is as garrulous as Polonius but grounded in everyday life, with a heart of gold. A wonderful crowd-pleaser, she provides, for Shakespeare, a point of contact with the audience for whom this tragic version of Pyramus and Thisbe might seem, in Romeo’s own words, “too flattering-sweet to be substantial.”

Read about the other characters on the list.

Also see: Ten notable Romeo and Juliet stories.

--Marshal Zeringue