The Complete Works of Shakespeare
All 44 works of the canon — 38 plays and 6 poems — each with a short guide to what it is and why you might pick it up.
Tragedies
- Titus Andronicus1594 · Shakespeare’s first tragedy and his bloodiest by a distance: a Roman revenge play of atrocity answered with atrocity, escalating to a banquet that has to be seen (or read) to be believed.
- Romeo and Juliet1595 · The most famous love story in the language, and a better play than its afterlife of balcony kitsch suggests.
- Julius Caesar1599 · Rome, 44 BC: Cassius recruits the honourable Brutus into a conspiracy to kill Caesar before he can become a king.
- Hamlet1600 · The centre of the canon.
- Troilus and Cressida1602 · The strangest of the tragedies — part war play, part corrosive comedy, wholly unclassifiable (the First Folio editors literally didn’t know where to put it).
- Othello1604 · A domestic tragedy with the machinery of a thriller.
- King Lear1606 · An old king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to perform their love for it; the one who refuses is the one who means it.
- Macbeth1606 · The shortest major tragedy and the fastest: a Scottish general hears a prophecy, writes to his wife, and within an act the deed is done and the consequences begin.
- Timon of Athens1606 · A jagged, possibly unfinished fable (likely co-written with Thomas Middleton): Timon spends his fortune on friends who vanish the moment he needs them, and swings from limitless generosity to limitless misanthropy without pausing at moderation.
- Antony and Cleopatra1607 · The world-historical love affair, told in middle age.
- Coriolanus1608 · Shakespeare’s last tragedy and his most political: a supreme Roman soldier who cannot perform humility before the crowd, in a city experimenting with giving the crowd a voice.
Comedies
- The Comedy of Errors1594 · Shakespeare’s shortest play and his purest farce: two sets of identical twins, separated in infancy, spend one day in the same city without knowing it.
- The Taming of the Shrew1594 · The most argued-about comedy: Petruchio arrives in Padua to “wive it wealthily” and takes on Katherina, the city’s famously sharp-tongued unmarried daughter.
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona1594 · Very likely Shakespeare’s first play: two friends, one girl disguised as a page, one outrageous final-scene forgiveness, and one scene-stealing dog.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream1595 · The perfect comedy.
- Love's Labour's Lost1595 · Four young men swear off women for three years of study; four women arrive on a diplomatic visit approximately five minutes later.
- The Merchant of Venice1596 · A comedy with a wound in it.
- The Merry Wives of Windsor1597 · Falstaff, transplanted from the histories into a small English town, decides to seduce two married women for their husbands’ money — sending both the identical love letter.
- Much Ado About Nothing1598 · Beatrice and Benedick have sworn off love in general and each other in particular, which their friends correctly diagnose as the opposite.
- As You Like It1599 · Rosalind, banished from a usurper’s court, escapes to the Forest of Arden disguised as a young man — and, meeting the lovesick Orlando, offers to “cure” him by letting him woo her in her disguise.
- Twelfth Night1601 · Shipwrecked Viola dresses as a boy, enters Duke Orsino’s service, and is sent to woo the countess Olivia on his behalf; Olivia falls for the messenger.
- Measure for Measure1604 · The Duke of Vienna leaves town (or pretends to), deputizing the icy Angelo to enforce long-dead morality laws.
- All's Well That Ends Well1605 · Helena, a physician’s daughter, cures the King and claims her reward: marriage to Bertram, the count she loves and who wants nothing to do with her.
Histories
- Henry VI, Part 21591 · The strongest of the three Henry VI plays as a piece of drama.
- Henry VI, Part 11592 · The opening of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy (the three Henry VI plays plus Richard III), written near the very start of his career.
- Henry VI, Part 31592 · Civil war without brakes.
- Richard III1593 · The first tetralogy’s payoff and Shakespeare’s first unmistakable star vehicle.
- Richard II1595 · The opening play of the second tetralogy (Richard II → Henry IV 1 & 2 → Henry V) and the canon’s most lyrical history.
- King John1596 · A standalone history from the mid-1590s, set a good two centuries before the Wars of the Roses plays.
- Henry IV, Part 11597 · The play where the histories become great literature.
- Henry IV, Part 21598 · The autumnal sequel: rebellion sputters on, the king sickens, and the great question — what happens to Falstaff when Hal becomes Henry V — moves toward its answer.
- Henry V1599 · The tetralogy’s finale.
- Henry VIII1613 · A late collaboration with John Fletcher, staged with such pageantry that its cannon burned the Globe to the ground in 1613.
Romances & Late Plays
- Pericles1608 · The first of the late romances, co-written (the first two acts are almost certainly George Wilkins’s) and preserved only in a mangled text — yet audiences have always loved it.
- Cymbeline1611 · A late-period everything bagel: ancient Britain and Renaissance Italy, a wicked stepmother and a wager on a wife’s virtue, a beheaded villain mistaken for a hero, and a final scene that resolves roughly two dozen plot threads in a single dizzying sequence.
- The Tempest1611 · On an island thick with music, the exiled magician Prospero raises a storm to bring his old enemies within reach — then spends the play deciding what to do with them, while his daughter falls in love and his servants, airy Ariel and earthy Caliban, strain toward freedom.
- The Winter's Tale1611 · King Leontes destroys his own family in a fit of jealousy that arrives without cause and departs too late — that is the first, wintry half.
- The Two Noble Kinsmen1614 · The true last play: a collaboration with John Fletcher, dramatizing Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.
Narrative Poems
- Venus and Adonis1593 · The poem that made Shakespeare famous.
- The Rape of Lucrece1594 · The “graver labour” promised after Venus and Adonis: the Roman story of Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece and its political aftermath — the crime that ended the Roman monarchy.
- A Lover's Complaint1609 · The short narrative poem printed with the Sonnets in 1609: a young woman by a river tells an old man how a beautiful, serially persuasive young seducer talked her into ruin — and admits, in the poem’s stinging final turn, that she would probably fall again.