secolo XVII
39 libri
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream EnglishYou get a play that keeps changing its mind about love, from the quarrelling lovers in the forest to Bottom blundering through his amateur performance. The language is playful and slippery, and Puck gives the whole thing a mischievous sense that human beings are never quite in control.
- Antony and Cleopatra EnglishThese two aren't young lovers, they're middle-aged, vain, magnificent messes who keep wrecking empires over each other, and you half want to shake them. Stay for Enobarbus, the dry-eyed friend whose barge speech about Cleopatra is worth the whole play.
- As You Like It EnglishOnce everyone escapes to the Forest of Arden, the play just relaxes, and you get Rosalind in disguise coaching her own lovestruck suitor in how to woo her. She runs the whole show, wittier than anyone around her, and the melancholy Jaques grumbling nearby only sweetens it.
- Coriolanus EnglishYou get a fiercely strange tragedy about pride, hunger, and the impossibility of speaking to people you despise. Coriolanus is magnificent and maddening, while Volumnia’s hard, hungry love gives the play its deepest ache; the Roman politics can feel blunt, but the language cuts.
- Cymbeline EnglishCome to it for Imogen, who stays clear-eyed and funny while everyone around her behaves appallingly (Iachimo hiding in a trunk to spy on her is genuinely creepy). The plot is a wild tangle, but the last scene, where every secret unravels at once, is weirdly satisfying.
- Don Quixote EnglishYou get a gloriously unruly ride with Don Quixote tilting at windmills and Sancho Panza trying to keep one foot in ordinary life, while the book keeps asking what stories do to the people who believe them. It’s long, digressive, and often bawdy, but its comedy gradually opens into real tenderness.
- Hamlet EnglishYou get a Hamlet who is grief-stricken, sharp-tongued, theatrical, and often genuinely funny, not just a gloomy prince. The play’s strange shifts, from the Players’ performance to the graveyard conversation, make reading it feel like thinking alongside someone who can’t stop testing what’s real.
- Henry VI, Part I EnglishYou get Talbot’s stern, oddly moving devotion to England, Joan of Arc rendered as both formidable and unsettling, and a kingdom already fraying under proud nobles and a weak king. It’s episodic and politically blunt, but the clash between heroic legend and ugly factionalism gives the play real bite.
- Henry VI, Part II EnglishHonestly the middle Henry VI is the fun one: court schemers picking apart poor Duke Humphrey while the king prays instead of ruling, then Jack Cade's rebellion turns the whole thing into gleeful anarchy. If you like watching power slip through weak hands, this scratches that itch.
- Henry VI, Part III EnglishGrim, relentless, and worth it for watching Richard of Gloucester wake up mid-play and decide to be a villain, in a soliloquy that basically births Richard III. If battle-heavy history isn't your thing, skip it, but Margaret taunting York with a paper crown is genuinely chilling.
- Henry VIII EnglishYou’ll like it for its grand, ceremonial feel and the sharp human cost beneath the pageantry, especially in Katherine of Aragon’s dignity and Wolsey’s sudden collapse. It’s episodic and more interested in public power than intimate character, so expect a stately history play rather than another Hamlet.
- Hudibras EnglishIf you enjoy watching a pompous Puritan knight lose an argument to his own squire (and a fight to a bear-baiting crowd), the rhymes alone will keep you grinning. Fair warning, the 1660s in-jokes get thick, so it rewards patience and a good footnoted edition.
- King John EnglishYou get a politically slippery Shakespeare, full of wavering loyalties, church pressure, and the Bastard Faulconbridge’s sharp, surprisingly modern commentary. It can feel episodic, but Constance’s fierce grief and the play’s uneasy question of who deserves a crown give it a darker charge than its neglected reputation suggests.
- King Lear EnglishYou get a brutal, strange study of pride and love, with Lear raging on the heath while his Fool keeps puncturing the grandeur. It’s bleak and sometimes deliberately difficult, but the language keeps opening up new depths each time you return to it.
- Macbeth EnglishYou get a dark, tightly wound tragedy where Macbeth’s imagination turns ambition into terror, and Lady Macbeth’s brisk certainty slowly gives way to something more fragile. The witches, the blood, and the repeated images of sleeplessness make the play feel feverish, especially aloud, though its compressed language takes a little patience.
- Measure for Measure EnglishShakespeare in a sour, fascinating mood: Angelo, the ice-cold deputy, propositions a novice nun and the play just sits with that ugliness. If you like your comedies uneasy, with an ending that leaves you arguing at the table, this one lingers.
- Much Ado About Nothing EnglishBeatrice and Benedick spend the whole play insulting each other so cleverly you'll want to read their scenes twice, and watching their friends trick them into admitting the obvious is pure pleasure. There's a nasty turn with Hero midway, but the comedy earns its way back.
- New Atlantis EnglishYou get a brief, unfinished utopian tale rather than a fully formed novel, with sailors discovering Bensalem and the astonishing research institution called Salomon’s House. It’s worth your time if you enjoy seeing science imagined as a public, almost sacred enterprise, though the characters stay more emblematic than alive.
- Othello EnglishIago talks to you directly, and the awful thing is you almost enjoy his company while he wrecks a good man's life over a handkerchief and some careful hints. It's painful in the way only watching preventable disaster is, so save it for when you can take that.
- Quevedo is meaner and funnier than the picaresques you may know, and Pablo gets no mercy from anyone, least of all his author. The boarding school run by Cabra, a miser who starves his pupils nearly transparent, is grotesque comedy at full strength.
- Paradise Lost EnglishSatan gets all the best lines, and watching him talk himself into ruin is half the pull; the verse is dense and takes a slow ear, but once the rhythm clicks it carries you. Read it aloud when you can, even a page at a time.
- Pensées EnglishYou read it for the startling precision of Pascal’s fragments, especially his account of people staying busy so they never have to face themselves. It’s unfinished, argumentative, and deeply religious, so expect notes rather than a smooth book, but the intelligence keeps catching you off guard.
- Pericles EnglishFair warning, the first couple of acts are clunky (Shakespeare probably didn't write them), but stick around for Marina, who talks her way out of a brothel with sheer moral force, and a father-daughter reunion that can leave you quietly wrecked. Strange, sea-tossed, worth it.
- Poetry EnglishYou get the sonnets’ shifting voices, from tender devotion to jealousy and self-reproach, alongside the lush, mischievous stories of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Read it slowly; the wordplay can feel dense, but individual lines keep opening up long after you’ve put it down.
- Tartuffe EnglishYou'll spend most of it wanting to shake Orgon, who's so besotted with his pious houseguest that he ignores everyone, including his sharp-tongued maid Dorine, who steals every scene she's in. It's fast, mean, very funny, and reads in an evening.
- The Adventurous Simplicissimus EnglishYou get a wildly episodic, darkly funny ride through the Thirty Years’ War, as the naïve Simplicius survives soldiers, hermits, tricksters, and sudden changes of fortune. It’s shaggy and sometimes preachy, but its mud, hunger, bawdy absurdity, and sharp eye for human folly still feel startlingly alive.
- The Blazing World EnglishHalf of it is a woman becoming empress of a world run by bear-men and fish-men, half is long philosophical debates, and then Cavendish writes herself in as her own character. Deeply weird, sometimes shapeless, and weirdly ahead of its time if you have patience for 1666 prose.
- The Duchess of Malfi EnglishYou get a dark, ferociously theatrical tragedy where the Duchess’s private marriage collides with her brothers’ vicious control, and Bosola watches it all with a bitter, uneasy intelligence. The plot turns brutal, but Webster’s language and the play’s strange flashes of tenderness keep it from becoming mere gloom.
- The Merchant of Venice EnglishThe comedy bits are light (Portia testing suitors with riddle caskets), but Shylock's "hath not a Jew eyes" speech will sit with you for days. It's uncomfortable, deliberately or not, and that tension is exactly why it's worth arguing about afterward.
- The Merry Wives of Windsor EnglishYou get Falstaff at his most shameless, trying to seduce two respectable wives and being cheerfully outwitted by both. The plotting is broad, quick, and pleasantly ridiculous, with disguises, pranks, and a final woodland humiliation, so you’ll enjoy it most when you want Shakespeare being openly comic rather than profound.
- The Pilgrim’s Progress EnglishEvery character is named for exactly what they are (Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Giant Despair), which sounds heavy-handed until you're stuck in the Slough of Despond yourself and it lands.
- The Taming of the Shrew EnglishThe fun is watching Kate and Petruchio trade insults at full speed, two clever people who've finally met their match. Fair warning, the "taming" itself sits uneasily now, and Kate's last speech will either charm you or make you argue with the page.
- The Tempest EnglishYou spend time on an island with Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, where magic, resentment, and theatrical illusion keep changing the ground beneath you. It’s airy and strange rather than tightly plotted, but the movement toward forgiveness gives the play a quietly human weight.
- You get why people still quote it once Mephistopheles calmly admits he's in hell right now, standing there. The middle sags into slapstick with popes and horse traders, honestly, but Faustus watching his last hour tick away is worth the whole slim thing.
- The Two Noble Kinsmen EnglishYou get an unusual, slightly lopsided Shakespeare play here, with Palamon and Arcite’s fierce friendship turning into rivalry over Emilia, while the Jailer's Daughter brings a surprisingly tender, earthy counterpoint. The verse shifts between Shakespearean weight and Fletcher’s brisker comedy, so its strangeness is part of the appeal.
- The Winter’s Tale EnglishYou get Shakespeare at his strangest here: Leontes’ jealousy makes the early scenes painfully claustrophobic, then Paulina’s fierce intelligence and a sudden pastoral brightness change the air. It’s uneven and openly theatrical, but its movement from damage toward forgiveness stays with you.
- Timon of Athens EnglishYou’ll appreciate its strange, abrasive energy: Timon’s lavish generosity curdles into furious contempt, while Apemantus needles him with the honesty nobody else will risk. It’s a jagged, unfinished-feeling play, but if you like Shakespeare when he’s bitter, funny, and morally unruly, it stays with you.
- Twelfth Night EnglishYou get Viola’s clever, tender balancing act, Malvolio’s wonderfully sour self-importance, and a comedy that keeps slipping between farce and real loneliness. The mistaken identities can feel deliberately tangled, but the language is playful enough to reward reading aloud, especially when the characters are trying hardest to hide what they want.
- Two Treatises of Government saggistica EnglishFair warning, the First Treatise is Locke patiently dismantling a divine-right argument nobody holds anymore, so most people skim it. But the Second, where he builds government from consent, property, and the right to toss out bad rulers, still feels startlingly alive when you slow down for it.