Shakespeare
Thirty-eight plays, and how to get into them.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote around 38 plays and 154 sonnets. He wrote for a working commercial theatre and a paying mixed audience, not for study — which is worth remembering when the language feels forbidding.
The genres
| Genre | Ends with | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Tragedy | The protagonist's death | Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello |
| Comedy | Marriage and reconciliation | Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| History | English monarchs, drawn from chronicle | Richard III, Henry V |
| Romance | Loss then restoration, late works | The Tempest, The Winter's Tale |
Blank verse
Most of the dialogue is unrhymed iambic pentameter — five iambs per line, an iamb being an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. It approximates the rhythm of spoken English while giving it shape.
Shakespeare uses the switch between verse and prose deliberately. High-status characters and heightened moments tend toward verse; comic scenes, servants and madness often drop into prose. Noticing where a character changes register is one of the most productive things to track on a first reading.
The language is not the obstacle it looks
Roughly 95% of the vocabulary is still current English. The difficulty is mostly compressed syntax, unfamiliar word order and topical reference — not archaic words. Reading aloud, and reading a scene through once for sense before analysing it, removes most of the friction.