Curated playlist
English Renaissance plays
- MacbethMacbeth is the shortest tragedy William Shakespeare wrote, more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear. It runs at barely half the length of Hamlet. Estimated to have first been performed in 1606, it dramatises the…
- HamletHamlet is the longest play William Shakespeare ever wrote, and it might require more than four hours to stage. A typical Elizabethan play needed two to three hours. The Second Quarto of 1604 runs to 28,628 words. By contrast, the First…
- The TempestThe Tempest opens with a ship shattering apart in a storm, sailors screaming, and a king convinced he is about to drown. Then, in the very next scene, a young woman named Miranda watches from the shore and weeps for the strangers she sees…
- As You Like ItAs You Like It, William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy believed written in 1599, opens not with a grand battle or a royal proclamation but with a wrestling match. A young man named Orlando steps into that ring carrying nothing but his…
- Twelfth NightTwelfth Night, or What You Will opens with a shipwreck and a woman washing up on a foreign shore, alone, believing her twin brother has drowned. From that moment of grief and isolation, William Shakespeare built what many have called "The…
- All's Well That Ends WellAll's Well That Ends Well is a play by William Shakespeare that has puzzled audiences and critics alike for centuries. It first appeared in the First Folio of 1623, listed among the comedies, yet it has never quite behaved like one. Its…
- Henry IV, Part 1Henry IV, Part 1 opens with a king haunted by the throne he stole. Written by William Shakespeare, probably in the mid-1590s and first published in quarto in 1598, the play was composed in the later years of Elizabeth I's reign, when…
- Romeo and JulietRomeo and Juliet begins with a curse. Before a single scene has played out, a Chorus steps forward to tell the audience that two young lovers are already doomed. "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life," the prologue announces, and…
- Measure for MeasureMeasure for Measure takes its name from the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 7 provides the phrase: judge as you wish to be judged, and expect the same measure returned. Shakespeare wrote the play in 1603 or 1604. Its first recorded…
- Henry IV, Part 2Henry IV, Part 2 opens not with a king or a hero, but with a personified figure called Rumour, a character who sets the tone for a play built on deception, pretense, and the slow unraveling of men who have lived too long in the wrong…
- Much Ado About NothingWilliam Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing during the years 1598 and 1599. The play first appeared in print when stationers Andrew Wise and William Aspley published a quarto edition in 1600. This early text described the work as…
- The Winter's TaleThe play The Winter's Tale draws its main plot from Robert Greene's pastoral romance Pandosto, published in 1588. Shakespeare made uncharacteristically slight changes to the source material, especially given the undramatic nature of the…
- Richard III (play)Richard III opens with a man addressing you directly, telling you exactly who he is and what he plans to do. "I am determined to prove a villain," says the Duke of Gloucester in his opening monologue. He means it literally. Over the next…
- OthelloOthello, written by William Shakespeare around 1603, opens with a secret. A Moorish general and a senator's daughter have eloped in the night, and before morning their marriage will become the pivot on which an entire civilization's…
- Troilus and CressidaTroilus and Cressida, written by William Shakespeare probably in 1602, arrives with a strange and unsettling preface. One printing of the 1609 quarto announces it as a play recently performed on stage. The other printing declares it a new…
- Antony and Cleopatra'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety': Enobarbus says this about Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Four centuries of argument have proved him right about her complexity. The King's Men first…
- Parnassus playsThe Parnassus plays are three satiric comedies that emerged from St John's College at Cambridge University between 1598 and 1602. They were written by students, performed by students, and aimed squarely at an audience of students gathered…
- Henry V (play)Henry V, Shakespeare's history play believed to have been written circa 1599, opens with an apology. A lone figure steps forward on the stage and asks the audience to forgive what they are about to see. The theatre is too small, the actors…
- Richard II (play)Richard II, Shakespeare's play about the last two years of a king's life, opens with a moment of supreme royal authority that contains within it the seeds of its own undoing. King Richard sits on his throne in full state, asked to settle a…
- King LearKing Lear asks a question that has unsettled audiences for four centuries: what happens when a man with absolute power demands to be loved? William Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Lear in late 1605 or early 1606, and its earliest…
- A Midsummer Night's DreamA Midsummer Night's Dream opens in Athens, four days before a wedding, with a father dragging his daughter before a duke and invoking a law that would see her put to death for refusing to marry the man he chose. That is the trigger. What…
- CoriolanusCoriolanus is a Shakespeare tragedy that opens not with a king on his throne or a lover in a garden, but with a food riot. Ordinary Romans are furious that grain stores have been withheld from them, and they have a name for the man they…
- CymbelineCymbeline begins with a king who has already lost almost everything. His two infant sons were stolen years before the play opens. His daughter, Imogen, has married in secret against his wishes. And his new wife, the scheming Queen, is…
- Julius Caesar (play)Julius Caesar, the play William Shakespeare wrote and first staged in 1599, begins with a paradox: it is named after a man who is not its hero. Caesar dominates the stage from the first scene, yet the drama belongs almost entirely to…
- The Taming of the ShrewThe Taming of the Shrew opens not with a wedding or a courtship, but with a prank. A mischievous nobleman finds a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly passed out, and decides to convince him he is a nobleman himself. Servants dress Sly in…
- Henry VI, Part 1Henry VI, Part 1 opens at a funeral. Henry V, conqueror of France and one of England's most celebrated kings, has died unexpectedly in his prime, leaving behind a child heir and a kingdom about to fracture. The dukes who gather to mourn…
- Henry VI, Part 3Henry VI, Part 3 opens not with a coronation or a council chamber but with armed men storming parliament. The victorious Yorkists, fresh from the First Battle of St Albans, march into the parliamentary chambers and their leader, the Duke…
- Henry VIII (play)Henry VIII, the collaborative play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, carried a secret for the first decade of its life: its real title was All Is True. The name Henry VIII did not appear in print until the First Folio of 1623. That…
- The Two Noble KinsmenWilliam Shakespeare wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613 or 1614, his final play before he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died in 1616. He did not write it alone. Another dramatist's name sits beside his on every surviving copy,…
- Pericles, Prince of TyrePericles, Prince of Tyre arrived in print in 1609 as a quarto edition and was reprinted five times before 1635, making it one of the most popular plays of Shakespeare's era. Yet it was left out of the First Folio in 1623, the great…
- Every Man in His HumourEvery Man in His Humour arrived on the London stage in 1598, and it announced Ben Jonson as a playwright with a philosophy. The play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, and among the original…
- VolponeThe year 1605 marked the beginning of a theatrical experiment in London. Ben Jonson wrote Volpone to premiere at the Globe Theatre during the spring of 1606. This production drew heavily on city comedy traditions and beast fable elements…
- The Comedy of ErrorsThe Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays, and it gave the English language something most plays never do: a common idiom. To call a chaotic string of blunders a "comedy of errors" is now perfectly ordinary…
- Titus AndronicusTitus Andronicus begins with a question no audience expects to face: what does a man do when Rome itself betrays him? William Shakespeare wrote this tragedy somewhere between 1588 and 1593, and it arrived on the London stage as something…
- Sejanus His FallSejanus His Fall arrived in 1603 from the pen of Ben Jonson, a play about one of the most dangerous men ever to serve a Roman emperor. Lucius Aelius Sejanus was the favourite of Tiberius, and Jonson built a tragedy around his destruction.…
- The Two Gentlemen of VeronaThe Two Gentlemen of Verona holds a peculiar distinction among Shakespeare's works: it may be the play that started everything. Written somewhere between 1589 and 1593, it features a cast of characters so small that no other Shakespeare…