Shakespeare: Where to Start
The four central tragedies, two comedies, one history, and The Tempest for the farewell. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the book he raided most, brings up the rear.
- You 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.
- You 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.
- You 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.
- Iago 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.
- You get the rush of Juliet’s balcony scene, but also the play’s darker comedy, especially Mercutio’s wit and the adults’ baffling failures. It moves quickly, sounds beautiful aloud, and lets you feel how tenderness and impulsiveness can share the same breath.
- You 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.
- You 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.
- Falstaff alone is worth it, this huge lying coward who somehow makes you love him, and watching Prince Hal drink with him while quietly planning to outgrow him gets under your skin. Funnier than you expect from a history play, and sadder too.
- You 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.
No book Shakespeare thumbed harder. Ovid supplies the Pyramus and Thisbe of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with half the gods, ghosts, and transformations in the plays.