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100+ Shakespeare Essay Topics

The enigmatic William Shakespeare remains one of the most studied literary figures, and writing essays on his comprehensive works can be as enlightening as it is challenging. At WriteOnDeadline, we understand the complexities and subtleties involved in crafting compelling essays about Shakespeare’s compositions. Therefore, we are here to assist you in navigating this journey through selecting intriguing topics and offering a helping hand in bringing your Shakespeare essay to life.

Table of Contents

What is a Shakespeare Essay?

A Shakespeare essay is a scholarly composition that explores the various aspects of Shakespeare’s works, including his plays, sonnets, and other poetic works. These essays can delve into themes like tragedy, love, betrayal, leadership, and supernatural elements, to name a few, all frequent in Shakespeare’s writings. Analyzing the historical context, linguistic techniques, character development, and unique plot twists are also integral parts of a Shakespeare essay, requiring a deep understanding of literature, Renaissance culture, and, importantly, Elizabethan English.

Choosing the Perfect Shakespeare Essay Topic: A Quick Guide

Embarking on the journey of writing a Shakespeare essay involves first selecting a topic that is not only engaging but also offers ample avenues for research and analysis. Here’s a quick guide on making this crucial choice:

• Passion Meets Relevance: Choose a theme or character from Shakespeare’s works that intrigues you the most. Your passion for the subject will fuel your research and writing process.
• Scope for Exploration: Opt for a topic that allows multiple perspectives and interpretations. The richness of Shakespeare’s work lies in its complexity and the myriad ways it can be understood.
• Resource Availability: Ensure there are sufficient resources and scholarly materials available for your chosen topic. The depth of your analysis will largely depend on the quality of the research you conduct.
• Originality is Key: While Shakespeare’s works have been discussed extensively, strive to find a unique angle or an under-represented theme that will make your essay stand out.

Captivating Shakespeare Essay Topics Lists

Delving into the world of Shakespeare requires a guide to the possible paths one can explore. Below are unique and engaging topics that can be the foundation of insightful essays.

Analyzing the Tragedies

• The manifestation of political power in “Macbeth.”
• Exploring the theme of revenge in “Hamlet.”
• The role of fate and free will in the tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet.”
• Moral dilemmas faced by characters in “King Lear.”

Delving into the Comedies

• Gender disguises and their implications in “Twelfth Night.”
• The concept of love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• Analyzing the comedic elements in “Much Ado About Nothing.”
• Portrayal of friendship in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

The Histories and Their Relevance

• Historical truths versus artistic license in “Richard III.”
• Exploring national identity in “Henry V.”
• The role of prophecy and divination in “Julius Caesar.”
• Leadership qualities depicted in “Henry IV, Part 1.”

Unraveling the Romances

• The supernatural elements in “The Tempest.”
• Realism and idealism in “The Winter’s Tale.”
• Exploration of forgiveness and reconciliation in “Cymbeline.”
• Depictions of loss and redemption in “Pericles.”

Sonnets and Poems

• The theme of immortality in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
• Shakespeare’s depiction of love in his sonnets.
• Analysis of narrative techniques in “The Rape of Lucrece.”
• The role of symbolism in “Venus and Adonis.”

Special Topics

• Shakespeare’s influence on modern literature.
• The relevance of Shakespeare in today’s world.
• Shakespeare’s portrayal of female characters.
• The use of soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s Worldview

• Shakespeare’s perception of the human experience.
• The idea of mortality in Shakespeare’s plays.
• How Shakespeare’s personal life influenced his work.
• The importance of nature in Shakespeare’s literature.
• Social hierarchies and class distinctions in Shakespearean plays.

Portrayal of Relationships

• Familial bonds in “King Lear.”
• Love versus infatuation in “Romeo and Juliet.”
• Friendship dynamics in “The Merchant of Venice.”
• Manipulative relationships in “Othello.”
• Power struggles in marital relationships throughout Shakespeare’s plays.

Villains and Antagonists

• The psychological profile of Iago in “Othello.”
• Lady Macbeth: Power, ambition, and guilt.
• Richard III’s quest for power and its implications.
• The role of jealousy in creating villains in Shakespeare’s works.
• Aaron the Moor’s malevolence in “Titus Andronicus.”

Supernatural Elements

• The importance of the Three Witches in “Macbeth.”
• The role of ghosts and apparitions in “Hamlet.”
• Prophecies and their influences in Shakespeare’s plays.
• The supernatural as a reflection of human psychology.
• Ariel vs. Caliban: Contrasting representations of the supernatural in “The Tempest.”

Philosophical Insights

• To be or not to be: An exploration of existentialism in “Hamlet.”
• The notion of predestined fate in “Romeo and Juliet.”
• The philosophy of dreams in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• The concept of time in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
• Views on ambition and its consequences in “Macbeth.”

Lesser Studied Plays

• Exploration of societal norms in “Troilus and Cressida.”
• Themes of betrayal and loyalty in “Coriolanus.”
• The tragic elements in “Timon of Athens.”
• Elements of satire in “All’s Well That Ends Well.”
• Role of disguise in “Measure for Measure.”

Historical and Political Analysis

• Shakespeare’s portrayal of Roman politics in “Antony and Cleopatra.”
• The Tudor myth in Shakespeare’s historical plays.
• Analysis of the political climate in “Julius Caesar.”
• Leadership dynamics in “Henry IV, Part 2.”
• The politics of love in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Language and Rhetoric

• Shakespeare’s innovative use of the English language.
• The power of soliloquies in driving plot and character development.
• Wordplay, puns, and their significance in “Twelfth Night.”
• Rhetorical devices in Mark Antony’s speech in “Julius Caesar.”
• The language of love in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Gender and Sexuality

• The role of cross-dressing in “As You Like It.”
• Examining the feminist aspects of “The Taming of the Shrew.”
• Gender roles and expectations in “Macbeth.”
• Exploration of sexuality in “The Sonnets.”
• Female empowerment in “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Religion and Morality

• Religious undertones in “The Merchant of Venice.”
• The interplay of sin, redemption, and justice in “Hamlet.”
• Examination of moral dilemmas in “Othello.”
• Pagan vs. Christian beliefs in “King Lear.”
• The concept of divine retribution in Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Character Development and Evolution

• Evolution of Macbeth: From hero to tyrant.
• Desdemona’s resilience and fragility in “Othello.”
• The transformation of Prince Hal to King Henry V.
• Juliet’s journey from innocence to maturity.
• The multifaceted nature of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Symbolism and Imagery

• The symbolism of blood in “Macbeth.”
• Light and darkness imagery in “Romeo and Juliet.”
• Nature imagery in “As You Like It.”
• The role of the handkerchief in “Othello.”
• Sea and land as contrasting symbols in “The Tempest.”

Settings and Their Implications

• The significance of the Forest of Arden in “As You Like It.”
• Venice vs. Belmont: Contrasting worlds in “The Merchant of Venice.”
• The claustrophobic setting of Elsinore in “Hamlet.”
• Social dynamics in the court vs. wilderness in “King Lear.”
• The island’s role as a microcosm of society in “The Tempest.”

Deceptions and Revelations

• The impact of Iago’s deceptions in “Othello.”
• Secrets and revelations in “Twelfth Night.”
• The tragic consequences of deceit in “Macbeth.”
• Mistaken identities in “The Comedy of Errors.”
• Portia’s cunning in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Love in Its Many Forms

• Unrequited love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• The destructive nature of obsessive love in “Antony and Cleopatra.”
• Familial love in “King Lear.”
• Friendship vs. romantic love in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”
• The portrayal of true love in “The Sonnets.”

Struggling with your Shakespeare essay? At WriteOnDeadline, we offer unparalleled support and professional writing services to help bring clarity, precision, and creativity to your essays. Our team of experts is equipped to provide comprehensive guidance, from selecting a captivating topic to delivering a meticulously crafted essay. Don’t let the stress dim your academic sparkle; reach out to us and let’s create your masterpiece together!

Useful References

• Shakespeare Online
• The British Library – Shakespeare in Quarto
• Folger Shakespeare Library
• Shakespeare’s Works: A Comprehensive Resource
• Shakespeare Resource Center

50 Awesome Shakespeare Essay Topics You Should Consider for Your Literature Class

William Shakespeare is the most frequently discussed author in English Literature classes. By assigning the Shakespeare essay, teachers assess students' knowledge of his most distinguished works, as well as their overall ability to analyze literary pieces. Why is it so important? Because knowing Shakespeare's best stories and citing his most famous lines is the mark of how enlightened a person really is.

There are many types of academic essays, but if you stick with an essay on Shakespeare it will probably fall in one of the below categories:

• Descriptive essay (pick a particular idea and introduce it to the audience).
• Expository essay (shed light on a problem with the help of proven facts).
• Persuasive essay (take a position and try to justify it by citing evidence).

Picking Shakespeare essay topics is always challenging, which is why we decided to spare you the trouble and prepared a list of the top William Shakespeare essay topics.

Best Shakespeare Argumentative Essay Topics

• The topic of revenge & love: Does Hamlet reveal his feelings for Ophelia because of the desire for revenge?
• Discuss how real the ghost in Hamlet is.
• Sexual problems in William Shakespeare's works.
• The difference between historical events and the way Shakespeare interprets them.
• How convincing is the presence of the ghost in Hamlet ?
• Polonius's judgment: wrong or right perception?
• What do Shakespeare's characters use for achieving political goals?
• Does Hamlet deserve to die at the end?
• Analysis of films based on Shakespeare's poems.

Topics for Shakespeare Plays

• The role of emotions & social status in Shakespeare's works.
• Analysis of Comedy of Errors .
• William Shakespeare as a playwright.
• What are the similarities between Hamlet and Moby-Dick ?
• Melodrama - the primary genre of Shakespeare's plays.
• The most important feature of Shakespeare's plays (tragedy).
• The role of women in Othello .
• The influence of political events on the author.
• How Shakespeare brought about a revolution in literature.
• The most successful movies based on Shakespeare's famous plays.

Excellent Shakespeare Sonnets Essay Topics

• Choose The Dark Lady and argue the way she would be represented in the real world.
• The conflict between platonic love & carnal desire.
• Homoerotic desire in Shakespeare's sonnets.
• How should the sonnets be divided?
• Provide a couple of examples where Shakespeare criticizes himself for his inadequacies.
• The meaning of the black color in Shakespeare's sonnets.
• The images used by Shakespeare in his sonnets.
• In-depth analysis of sonnets 153-154.
• Methods used to characterize women's identity.
• The financial imagery in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Shakespeare Essay Topics - Female Characters

• The characters who dress up as boys (example: Viola ).
• Ladies with the power to do whatever they want ( Cleopatra ).
• Unassuming female characters who act for the sake of love.
• Shakespeare's common representation of women.
• The topic of sexism in Taming of the Shrew .
• Temptation in Macbeth .
• A feminist perspective on Shakespeare's famous works.
• The way Shakespeare depicts the relationships between men and women.
• Modern reaction to Shakespeare's representation of women.
• Describing female characters in Othello .

Stunning Essay Topics about Shakespeare

• Characters in Henry V .
• The issue of racism in Othello .
• The role of supernatural phenomena in Macbeth .
• What was Cassius' motivation?
• What was the central role of the Fool in King Lear ?
• How do 7 soliloquies represent Hamlet?
• Analysis of Othello's Desdemona.
• Racism in the art of Shakespeare.
• Characterizing King Duncan .
• Hermione from The Winter's Tale .

Which Format to Choose?

Once you are done selecting among the Shakespeare essay topics, think about the appropriate format for your essay. Go with the standard 5-paragraph essay, which usually comprises the following parts: an introduction, at least three body paragraphs, and conclusion. Make sure to include background orientation to the topic, and thesis in the introduction; provide arguments in support of the thesis statement (main idea of the writing) in the body paragraphs; summarize the body paragraphs and restate the thesis in the conclusion. The conclusion should leave a lasting impression on the reader so that you can do that with the help of a hook sentence of your choice:

• Literary quote.
• Rhetorical question.

It's also a good idea to finish your essay with an interesting fact from the author's life or a quote from his work proving your point.

What If You Are Running Out of Time?

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100 Shakespeare Essay Topics for You to Reflect On

Writing your essay on Shakespeare may seem difficult to most students, which is true… until you find our list of 100 amazing essay topics that you can reflect on and choose for your future paper! Even if you already have a problem assigned by your teacher, we are sure that our guide will help you to avoid the common mistakes. We have intentionally divided Shakespeare essay topics by subject, so you can instantly head over to the one that interests you!

Contents (Clickable)

   Take a Look These Great Shakespeare Essay Topics Before You Start:

Before we leave you to look through the vast amount of topics, we have a real treat for you! Our professional English tutors have picked several unique Shakespeare essay examples from our essay database. This way you can look through the actual papers to see the structure and get an idea of how it is done to receive the best grade possible! Since the students always ask us for essay examples, we have listened to your requests, so here you go:

• Shakespeare Hamlet – This paper is an excellent example of a structure that allows you to see what essay elements have to be included and how to do it right.
• Leadership Assignment: What Makes Shakespeare’s King Henry V a Perfect Leader? – For those who like to challenge themselves in an unusual way, this paper explores the soft skills and personality of King Henry V by comparing it with the present times.
• The Symbolism of Nature in Shakespeare’s Richard II – This paper analyzes metaphors, allegories, the mood, setting and the other poetic devices that majority of English literature essays require!
• Othello: Lago’s Character Analysis – Here we have an example of a paper that focuses on a specific element of a play (the character), so if you have a task of such kind, take a closer look!
• Critiques of Sonnets: Sonnet 130 and The Theme of Pain – For the creative minds among us is the paper that compares student’s personal sonnet to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130!

Now that we have the examples to start with, let us proceed with the list of our Shakespeare essay topics, divided by subject!

Before you start with a selection of a topic that fits you, make sure that you ask your college professor or a teacher about the following:

• Your chosen topic (if allowed to choose) and your thesis statement (if you already have it!).
• Style or a type of your essay (reflective, comparative, debate, analytical, review, etc.).
• Format requirements .
• Word count limit.
• Necessity of a draft and the first deadline.

Trust us, asking about the requirements twice and sorting the possible misunderstandings out will save you the time and nerves! Now, straight to the topics!

   A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Topics

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy play. It is set on Fairyland. It talks about the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus and the former queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta. The play also narrates of adventures of four Athenian lovers and six amateur actors.

• What types of love are present in the play? How is the love portrayed in the play? Enumerate scenes from the play to justify your answer.
• How is love portrayed in the context of the gender of the characters?
• Do you see any gender issues in the play? If so, cite them. Do you think that the gender issues you cited are still prevalent in today’s society? Why or why not?
• What are the behaviors of men and women in the play? Why do you think they act that way?
• What is the conflict in the play? Why do you think so?
• How did the characters develop in the play?
• Why do you think Puck is considered as the protagonist?
• Compare and contrast the characters’ perspective on love. Choose one human and one fairy character to make your comparison.
• Why is fantasy (Fairies and magic) present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? What is its significance? Do you think that it symbolizes something? Why or why not?
• What do you think is/are the significance of the settings of the play? How do the norms differ in each of the settings?
• What are the similarities and differences between the movie version and the play?
• What is/are the themes of the play?
• What is/are the darker aspects of the play? Cite and justify your claims.
• Why is the title of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream ?
• Read about the criticisms of the play. It can be a literary or a feminist critique. Do you agree or disagree with the critiques? Justify your answer.
• In what ways is this play considered a comedy? Cite some instances in the story.

   Julius Caesar Research Paper Topics

Julius Caesar is a historical and tragedy play. It is based on the events of the Roman civilization.

• How did Caesar rise into power? And what factors have led to his downfall?
• Do you think that ambition led to Caesar’s downfall? Do you think that he is ambitious to a fault? Justify your argument.
• Discuss the political setting/dynamics of the play. How do politics work during Caesar’s time?
• Discuss the setting of the play. You can also highlight the culture and values of the Roman Republic.
• What is/are the role of women in the play and the Roman Republic?
• What role/s do superstitions play in the story?
• What compelled Brutus to murder Caesar, his close friend? Do an analysis.
• How did Brutus and Anthony manage to sway the people’s opinion on Caesar? What were their tactics?
• How are fate and free will manifested in the play?
• Research any political assassination (Ex: Martin Luther King’s assassination ). What are the similarities or differences between your chosen political assassination to Caesar’s assassination?
• Write a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Homer’s The Odyssey.
• How did Plutarch and Shakespeare portray Julius Caesar?
• Compare and contrast one character from Julius Caesar to another character from Shakespeare’s other work (s) (Ex: Othello )
• In your opinion, do you think that the death of Caesar was justified?
• If you were in Brutus’ shoes, would you kill Caesar? Why or why not? Justify your answer.
• Do you think that Brutus was a dishonorable man, considering that he is a traitor to his country and his friend? Why or why not?

   King Lear Essay Topics

King Lear is another of Shakespeare’s tragic plays. Set in ancient Britain, King Lear decides to give up his power and to divide his kingdom amongst his daughters, namely Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril. The largest land will go to the daughter who can profess her love to him the most.

• What are the themes tackled in King Lear?
• What is the significance of old age and death in the play?
• King Lear has a subplot. Discuss the role the subplot plays in the story and give examples.
• In what ways does King Lear fit the template of a tragic hero?
• Between Edmund, Gloucester, and King Lear, who is the most sympathetic character? Take note that these characters have changed as the play progresses.
• What is the role and significance of the Fool in King Lear? Cite examples from the play.
• Write a comparative analysis of King Lear and Oedipus Rex.
• In your opinion, who among the characters is the most interesting? Why?
• How does Shakespeare build tension in King Lear? Cite instances from the play.
• Relate the characters Edmund, Goneril, and Regan with Machiavelli’s principles. Which of the characters are the most Machiavellian? In what ways do Machiavelli’s principles manifest in the characters?
• How is King Lear similar to Kurosawa’s film Ran in terms of characters, plot, and the themes ?
• Discuss and analyze the parent-child relationship in King Lear.

   Macbeth Essay Topics

It is a tragedy about a Scottish general named Macbeth . The plot revolves since the moment when the three witches prophesied that he would be the King of Scotland someday.

• What instances led to Macbeth’s madness? How did he change as a person?
• What is the significance of the three witches in the play? How are they characterized?
• Enumerate the prophecies of the three witches. How were these prophecies fulfilled?
• What do ambition and power signify in the play?
• Do you think that Macbeth is misogynistic? Why or why not? Give examples.
• What do you think is the difference between kingship and tyranny?
• Blood is present in Macbeth. What do you think it symbolizes?
• What role does the weather play in Macbeth? Write down what it symbolizes.
• Are gender roles/issues present in the play? How are these roles/issues illustrated in the play?
• Compare and contrast Macbeth and Malcolm. What makes these men similar and different?
• Is Lady Macbeth or Macbeth most responsible for King Duncan’s murder? Justify.
• Give two minor characters and write how they contributed to the play.

   Othello Essay Topics

Othello is about a general (moor) in the Venetian army and Iago, his ensign. It is one of Shakespeare’s tragic plays.

• What is the role of revenge and jealousy in the play? Give examples.
• Discuss racism in the context of the play. Then, relate it to racism during the Elizabethan period.
• How do other characters portray Othello? How does Othello portray himself? Elaborate on the role of race in the play.
• In your opinion, do you think that Othello is a well-rounded character? Does he fit the template of a tragic hero?
• Do a character analysis of Desdemona.
• Do a feminist critique of Desdemona.
• How did Othello’s flaws lead to his downfall?
• Analyze Iago’s plan . Do you think that it was well-planned or were there luck and opportunity involved?
• Iago is skilled in persuasion. How did Iago manage to convince Roderigo and Brabantio?
• Discuss the role of irony in the play. How is irony used to conceal Iago and Othello’s plans?
• How is loyalty presented in the play? Discuss both its positive and negative aspects of the characters.
• Why do you think that Othello and Desdemona’s relationship was bound to fail? Why was it doomed to fail right from the beginning of the play?
• Do a cultural and historical-critical analysis of Othello.
• Interpret Othello in a Marxist perspective.

   Romeo and Juliet Essay Prompts

While almost anyone knows the plot of the play well, it is still really difficult to come up with a good essay prompt! Have no fear as we know our job! For those who have forgotten, Romeo and Juliet is a romantic tragedy play centering on Romeo and Juliet and the Capulet-Montague family feud.

• Do you agree that Friar Lawrence is to be blamed for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet?
• Why do you think that Romeo and Juliet are considered as “star-crossed lovers”?
• Do you think that the themes in the play are also present in today’s time? Why or why not?
• What is the role of fate/destiny in the play? Do you consider fate/destiny as part of the play’s theme?
• Do you consider Juliet as a feminist? Why or why not?
• How are men and women perceived in Romeo and Juliet?
• Choose one or two characters from the play and do character analysis.
• What is the role of Mercutio in the play? Do you think that he is only a supporting character? Justify your answer.
• How did Juliet develop as a character in the play? What sort of changes occurred and why did the said changes happen?
• Compare and contrast the maturity level of Romeo and Juliet. How have they matured throughout the play? Cite instances.
• How did the Montague-Capulet family feud drive the play’s plot?
• Discuss the parenting styles of Romeo and Juliet’s family. What is the impact of their parenting styles on the young couple?
• Relate the philosophy of death with the couple’s suicidal tendencies.
• Do you think that Romeo and Juliet love each other? Or is it just pure lust or infatuation? Justify your answer.
• Do you think that the couple’s suicidal tendencies are part of pure love or being addicted to love?
• Relate the Romeo and Juliet’s suicidal tendencies to young love.

   The Merchant of Venice Essay Topics

The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy play centered around the story of Bassanio, a young Venetian, who needs 3,000 ducats to impress the heiress Portia of Belmont. It is also about the merchant named Antonio, who is short on cash because he invested it on his ships.

• Compare and contrast Venice and Belmont. What does the difference in setting signify?
• What purpose do the three caskets serve in The Merchant of Venice? How do the caskets work as a plot device? What do the choices of Portia’s suitors signify in the play?
• How are the female characters portrayed in the play? What was the status of women in the Elizabethan era?
• What is/are the influence/s of radical feminism in The Merchant of Venice?
• Discuss racism and discrimination in the play. Cite instances to justify your argument.
• How is Portia’s life different or similar to the other characters in the play? Describe the similarities and differences.
• Discuss the friendship of Antonio and Bassanio. What does their friendship say about their personalities?
• Write about the relationship between Shylock and Jessica. In this context, do you sympathize or despise Shylock? Do you sympathize with Jessica? Why or why not?
• Do you think The Merchant of Venice is a comedy considering that it is mostly known for its dramatic scenes? Why or why not?
• Do you think that Shylock is a well-rounded character? If so, what makes him well-rounded?
• Do you sympathize with Shylock? Why or why not?
• Why do you think Shylock is justifying his revenge for Antonio? Justify your answer.
• Who is the most interesting character in the play? Why do you find him/her interesting?
• Do you see Portia as a radical feminist? Justify your answer.

There you go! Now that you have found your way through Shakespeare essay topic, prompts, and the ideas, it is always good to check up with brief biographical information that is advisable to include in your essay!

   Who Is William Shakespeare?

We may know his plays well, but most people know very little about the person behind the plays that we usually read in school!

   William Shakespeare’s Early Life

William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. However, scholars speculated and acknowledged that he was born on April 23, 1564. He was an actor, a playwright, and a poet.

On November 28, 1583, 18-year-old William married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway (Yes, that’s his wife’s name!) in Worcester, located in Canterbury province. The couple’s first child was Susanna (May 26, 1583). They had twins- Hamnet and Judith two years later. Later on, 11-year-old Hamnet died of unknown causes.

   Shakespeare’s Career, Death, and Legacy

Documents have shown that William was a managing partner in an acting company in London called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men by early 1590s. The name was changed to King’s Men when King James I was crowned in 1603.

The company was popular, and William was said to have his works sold and published. Moreover, he was known to work as an actor and playwright in London by 1592.

He dedicated his poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley.

Out of 37 of his plays, 15 of them were already written and produced. William and his business partners built the Globe, their own theater, in 1599 located on the Thames River.

William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, when he was only 52-years-old. Interestingly, he was not recognized until the 19th century, beginning from the early 1800s and until the Victorian age. Of course, William’s Shakespeare’s works are still read and studied, so the legacy lives on!

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Essays on William Shakespeare

What makes a good william shakespeare essay topic.

When it comes to crafting an exceptional essay on the works of William Shakespeare, the choice of topic is paramount. The right topic can breathe life into your essay, making it captivating, unique, and unforgettable. Here are some innovative tips to help you brainstorm and select an essay topic that will mesmerize your readers:

- Research and Immerse Yourself: Begin by immersing yourself in the vast repertoire of William Shakespeare's works. Dive into his plays, poems, and sonnets. This deep exploration will provide you with invaluable insights into his themes, characters, and writing style.

- Personal Passion: Opt for a topic that ignites a genuine spark of interest within you. When you are truly passionate about the subject matter, it will shine through in your writing, captivating your readers and making your essay more compelling.

- Unveiling the Unexplored: Seek out uncharted territory and lesser-known aspects of Shakespeare's works. Instead of treading the well-worn path of common themes or characters, venture into the hidden gems that lie within his literature.

- Contemporary Connections: Explore the relevance of Shakespeare's works in today's society and connect them to modern-day issues. Examining the timeless themes and their impact on the present can render your essay thought-provoking and engaging.

- Characters and Relationships Under the Microscope: Shakespeare's characters are multifaceted and intricate. Choose a topic that allows you to analyze their motivations, relationships, or character development within his plays.

- Comparative Analysis: Engage in a comparative exploration of Shakespeare's works alongside other literary pieces, historical events, or even contemporary movies or plays. This fresh perspective will make your essay stand out from the crowd.

- Social and Cultural Context: Delve into the social and cultural milieu that shaped Shakespeare's plays. Discuss how his works were influenced by the Elizabethan era and how they mirror the society of that time.

- Unveiling Symbolism and Imagery: Shakespeare's works are a treasure trove of symbolism and vivid imagery. Select a topic that allows you to analyze and interpret these literary devices, offering profound insights into the text.

- Controversial Contemplations: Shakespeare fearlessly explored contentious themes such as power, love, and morality. Choose a topic that tackles these provocative issues, sparking a lively debate among your readers.

- Unconventional Interpretations: Present a fresh and unconventional interpretation of a particular play, scene, or character. Challenge conventional ideas and encourage critical thinking with your unique perspective.

Remember, a remarkable Shakespeare essay topic should be captivating, original, and thought-provoking. By considering these recommendations, you will be able to select a topic that will enrapture your readers and showcase your exceptional analytical skills.

Essay Topic Ideas for William Shakespeare

Prepare to be dazzled by these outstanding essay topics on William Shakespeare:

• The Empowerment of Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies
• Fate and Its Grip on Romeo and Juliet
• The Fine Line Between Madness and Sanity in Hamlet
• Love's Intricacies and Deception in Much Ado About Nothing
• Unraveling the Allure of Power and Ambition in Macbeth
• Exploring the Dark Depths of Evil in Othello
• Shakespeare's Brave Confrontation of Racism in The Merchant of Venice
• The Mighty Influence of Language and Wordplay in A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Revenge and Justice Collide in Titus Andronicus
• The Greek Mythology Odyssey within Shakespeare's Plays
• The Symbolic Tapestry of Nature in King Lear
• Gender Roles and Identity in Twelfth Night
• Time's Elusive Spell in The Tempest
• The Supernatural's Sinister Dance in Macbeth
• The Illusion of Appearance versus the Reality of Truth in Measure for Measure
• The Complexities of Love's Dominion in Antony and Cleopatra
• The Intricate Weaving of Politics in Julius Caesar
• Jealousy's Venomous Touch in Othello
• The Struggle between Duty and Desire in Hamlet
• A Profound Exploration of Human Nature in Troilus and Cressida

Provocative Questions for Your William Shakespeare Essay

Prepare to embark on an intellectual journey with these thought-provoking essay questions on William Shakespeare:

• How does Shakespeare challenge traditional gender roles in his plays?
• What is the significance of the supernatural elements in Macbeth?
• How does Shakespeare explore the theme of power and its corrupting influence in his tragedies?
• Analyze the portrayal of love and relationships in Shakespeare's comedies.
• To what extent does fate play a role in Romeo and Juliet, and are the characters responsible for their own destinies?
• Discuss the concept of madness and its impact on the characters in Hamlet.
• How does Shakespeare employ symbolism and imagery to convey his themes in The Tempest?
• Analyze the role of loyalty and betrayal in Julius Caesar.
• How does Othello's race affect the outcome of the play?
• Discuss the portrayal of revenge in Shakespeare's plays.

Creative William Shakespeare Essay Prompts

Ignite your creativity with these captivating essay prompts on William Shakespeare:

• Imagine you are a director staging a modern adaptation of one of Shakespeare's plays. How would you interpret the setting, costumes, and overall production to make it relevant to a contemporary audience?
• Write a heartfelt letter from one of Shakespeare's characters to another, expressing their deepest desires, fears, or regrets.
• Create a powerful monologue from the perspective of a minor character in any of Shakespeare's plays, unveiling their untold story or hidden emotions.
• Write a riveting dialogue between Shakespeare and a modern-day playwright, discussing the enduring appeal and relevance of his works.
• Imagine you are a literary critic tasked with analyzing a previously undiscovered Shakespearean sonnet. Interpret its meaning and discuss its significance within the context of his other works.

William Shakespeare Essay FAQ

Q: How should I begin my essay on William Shakespeare?

A: Commence with a captivating introduction that sets the stage for your essay and introduces your thesis statement. You can start with a compelling quote, an intriguing fact, or a thought-provoking question.

Q: Can I choose a lesser-known play by Shakespeare as my essay topic?

A: Absolutely! Exploring lesser-known plays can provide a fresh perspective, allowing you to delve into unexplored themes and characters. Just ensure that you provide enough context and background information for your readers.

Q: Should I include direct quotes from Shakespeare's works in my essay?

A: Including quotes can enhance your analysis and provide evidence to support your arguments. However, make sure to seamlessly integrate and analyze the quotes, rather than using them as mere filler.

Q: Can I incorporate modern examples or references in my essay on Shakespeare?

A: Yes, incorporating modern examples or references can help readers connect with the themes and relevance of Shakespeare's works. Just ensure that the examples are relevant and enhance your analysis, rather than overshadowing it.

Q: How can I make my Shakespeare essay stand out from others?

A: To make your essay shine, choose a unique and thought-provoking topic, offer fresh interpretations, and employ engaging language and writing style. Support your arguments with evidence and provide a well-structured analysis.

Remember, writing a Shakespeare essay is an opportunity to showcase your critical thinking and analytical skills. Embark on a thrilling journey through the world of Shakespeare and let your creativity illuminate your writing!

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April 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom - April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom

Playwright, Poet, Actor

English Renaissance

Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing,Twelfth Night, Macbeth, etc.

William Shakespeare, widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in history, possessed a unique and influential style of writing. His works demonstrate a mastery of language, poetic devices, and dramatic techniques that continue to captivate audiences centuries later. Shakespeare's writing style can be characterized by several distinctive features. Firstly, his use of language is rich and vibrant. He employed a vast vocabulary and crafted elaborate sentences, often employing complex wordplay and puns to create layers of meaning. Shakespeare's writing is renowned for its poetic beauty, rhythmic verse, and memorable lines that have become ingrained in the English language. Secondly, Shakespeare excelled in character development. His characters are multidimensional, with complex emotions and motivations. Through their soliloquies and dialogues, he explores the depths of human nature, delving into themes of love, jealousy, ambition, and morality. Each character's speech and mannerisms reflect their unique personality, contributing to the depth and realism of his plays. Lastly, Shakespeare's dramatic structure and storytelling techniques are unparalleled. He skillfully weaves together intricate plots, incorporating elements of comedy, tragedy, romance, and history. His plays feature dramatic tension, unexpected twists, and powerful climaxes that keep audiences engaged and emotionally invested.

One of Shakespeare's major contributions was his ability to delve into the depths of human emotions and the complexities of the human condition. Through his plays, he explored themes such as love, jealousy, ambition, revenge, and moral dilemmas, offering profound insights into the human psyche. His characters, like Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, and Othello, are iconic and have become archetypes in literature. Shakespeare's language and wordplay revolutionized English literature. He introduced new words, phrases, and expressions that have become an integral part of the English lexicon. His plays are a testament to his mastery of language, employing poetic techniques such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, and iambic pentameter to create rhythm, beauty, and depth in his writing. Moreover, Shakespeare's plays transcended the boundaries of time and place, showcasing universal themes and resonating with audiences across cultures and generations. His works continue to be performed and adapted in various forms, including stage productions, films, and literary adaptations, further solidifying his contribution to the world of literature.

Film Adaptations: Many of Shakespeare's plays have been adapted into films, bringing his stories to life on the silver screen. Notable examples include Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" (1968), Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" (1989), and Baz Luhrmann's modernized version of "Romeo + Juliet" (1996). TV Series and Episodes: Shakespeare's works have been featured in TV series and episodes, either through direct adaptations or by incorporating his themes and characters. For instance, the popular TV show "The Simpsons" has parodied Shakespeare in episodes like "A Midsummer's Nice Dream" and "Tales from the Public Domain." Shakespearean-Inspired Films: Some films draw inspiration from Shakespeare's works without being direct adaptations. Examples include "Shakespeare in Love" (1998), which explores the fictionalized romance between Shakespeare and a noblewoman, and "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999), a modern-day adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew." Literary References: Shakespeare is often referenced in literature, showcasing his enduring influence. For instance, Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel "Brave New World" features characters who quote Shakespeare, and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" includes a clandestine resistance group called "Mayday," derived from "May Day" in Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

1. Shakespeare is known for writing 39 plays, including tragedies like "Hamlet," comedies like "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and histories like "Henry V." 2. Shakespeare is credited with introducing over 1,700 words to the English language, including popular terms such as "eyeball," "fashionable," and "lonely." 3. Shakespeare's works have been translated into more than 80 languages, making him one of the most widely translated playwrights in history. 4. Shakespeare's plays continue to be performed and studied worldwide, with an estimated 17,000 performances of his works every year. 5. Despite his literary fame, little is known about Shakespeare's personal life. There are gaps and uncertainties surrounding his birthdate, education, and even the authorship of his works. 6. The Globe Theatre: Shakespeare's plays were performed at the famous Globe Theatre in London, which he co-owned. The reconstructed Globe Theatre stands in London today and offers modern audiences a glimpse into the world of Elizabethan theatre. 7. In addition to his plays, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, which are celebrated for their lyrical beauty and exploration of themes such as love, time, and mortality.

William Shakespeare is an essential topic for essay writing due to his immense significance in the world of literature and his enduring influence on various aspects of human culture. Exploring Shakespeare's works provides a rich opportunity to delve into themes of love, tragedy, power, and human nature. His plays and sonnets continue to captivate readers and audiences with their universal themes and timeless relevance. Studying Shakespeare allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the English language itself, as he contributed numerous words and phrases that are still in use today. Additionally, his innovative use of language, poetic techniques, and complex characterizations showcase his unparalleled mastery as a playwright. Furthermore, Shakespeare's impact extends beyond literature. His works have been adapted into numerous films, theater productions, and other art forms, making him a cultural icon. His plays also provide a valuable lens through which to analyze historical and social contexts, as they reflect the values, beliefs, and conflicts of the Elizabethan era.

"All that glitters is not gold." "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, Whoever knocks!" In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be, or not to be, that is the question." In the 21st century, "to code, or not to code, that is the challenge.

1. Shakespeare, W., Shakespeare, W., & Kaplan, M. L. (2002). The merchant of Venice (pp. 25-120). Palgrave Macmillan US. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-07784-4_2) 2. Shakespeare, W. (2019). The tempest. In One-Hour Shakespeare (pp. 137-194). Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429262647-9/tempest-william-shakespeare) 3. Johnson, S. (2020). The Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765). In Samuel Johnson (pp. 423-462). Yale University Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300258004-040/html?lang=de) 4. Denvir, J. (1986). William Shakespeare and the Jurisprudence of Comedy. Stan. L. Rev., 39, 825. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/stflr39&div=38&id=&page=) 5. Demmen, J. (2020). Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of early modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare. ICAME Journal, 44(1), 37-68. (https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/icame-2020-0002) 6. Liu, X., Xu, A., Liu, Z., Guo, Y., & Akkiraju, R. (2019, May). Cognitive learning: How to become william shakespeare. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6). (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3290607.3312844) 7. Xu, W., Ritter, A., Dolan, W. B., Grishman, R., & Cherry, C. (2012, December). Paraphrasing for style. In Proceedings of COLING 2012 (pp. 2899-2914). (https://aclanthology.org/C12-1177.pdf) 8. Craig, H. (2012). George Chapman, John Davies of Hereford, William Shakespeare, and" A Lover's Complaint". Shakespeare Quarterly, 63(2), 147-174. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41679745) 9. Zhao, Y., & Zobel, J. (2007, January). Searching with style: Authorship attribution in classic literature. In Proceedings of the thirtieth Australasian conference on Computer science-Volume 62 (pp. 59-68). (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=3973ff27eb173412ce532c8684b950f4cd9b0dc8)

Relevant topics

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Shakespeare's plays, listed alphabetically by title

List plays by genre word count speech count date.

• All's Well That Ends Well (1602)
• Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
• As You Like It (1599)
• Comedy of Errors (1589)
• Coriolanus (1607)
• Cymbeline (1609)
• Hamlet (1600)
• Henry IV, Part I (1597)
• Henry IV, Part II (1597)
• Henry V (1598)
• Henry VI, Part I (1591)
• Henry VI, Part II (1590)
• Henry VI, Part III (1590)
• Henry VIII (1612)
• Julius Caesar (1599)
• King John (1596)
• King Lear (1605)
• Love's Labour's Lost (1594)
• Macbeth (1605)
• Measure for Measure (1604)
• Merchant of Venice (1596)
• Merry Wives of Windsor (1600)
• Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
• Much Ado about Nothing (1598)
• Othello (1604)
• Pericles (1608)
• Richard II (1595)
• Richard III (1592)
• Romeo and Juliet (1594)
• Taming of the Shrew (1593)
• Tempest (1611)
• Timon of Athens (1607)
• Titus Andronicus (1593)
• Troilus and Cressida (1601)
• Twelfth Night (1599)
• Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594)
• Winter's Tale (1610)

Program code and database © 2003-2024 George Mason University . All texts are in the public domain and can be used freely for any purpose. Privacy policy

List of Shakespeare Plays

Read our list of Shakespeare plays below, sorted alphabetically, by date written and by word length.

Shakespeare wrote at least 37 plays during his lifetime, possibly more (there is at least one ‘lost’ play – Cardenio). Then there are a number of plays that most academics agree Shakespeare was involved in writing at least part of, collaborating with other writers , such as Love’s Labour’s Won, Edward III, Sir Thomas More, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Each list of Shakespeare plays contains links to a page on each play which contains a range of resources: plot summaries ,  character information ,  settings , famous quotes , and much more:

List of Shakespeare plays: Alphabetical

Alphabetical list of Shakespeare plays

All’s Well That Ends Well   (1602)

Antony and Cleopatra   (1606)

As You Like It   (1599)

The Comedy of Errors   (1589)

Coriolanus   (1607)

Cymbeline   (1609)

Hamlet   (1600)

Henry IV, Part I   (1597)

Henry IV, Part II   (1597)

Henry V   (1598)

Henry VI, Part I   (1591)

Henry VI, Part II   (1590)

Henry VI, Part III   (1590)

Henry VIII   (1612)

Julius Caesar   (1599)

King John   (1596)

King Lear   (1605)

Love’s Labour’s Lost   (1594)

Macbeth   (1605)

Measure for Measure   (1604)

The Merchant of Venice   (1596)

The Merry Wives of Windsor   (1600)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream   (1595)

Much Ado About Nothing   (1598)

Othello   (1604)

Pericles   (1608)

Richard II   (1595)

Richard III   (1592)

Romeo and Juliet   (1594)

The Taming of the Shrew   (1593)

The Tempest   (1611)

Timon of Athens   (1607)

Titus Andronicus   (1593)

Troilus and Cressida   (1601)

Twelfth Night   (1599)

The Two Gentlemen of Verona   (1594)

Winter’s Tale   (1610)

List of Shakespeare plays by date

List of Shakespeare plays by Length

List of Shakespeare plays by length

Hamlet – 30,557 words

Richard III – 29,278 words

Coriolanus – 27,589 words

Cymbeline – 27,565 words

Othello – 26,450 words

King Lear – 26,145 words

Henry V – 26,119 words

Troilus and Cressida – 26,089 words

Henry IV, Part II – 25,689 words

Henry VI, Part II – 25,439 words

The Winter’s Tale – 24,914 words

Antony and Cleopatra – 24,905 words

Henry VIII – 24,629 words

Henry IV, Part I – 24,579 words

Romeo and Juliet – 24,545 words

Henry VI, Part III – 24,294 words

All’s Well That Ends Well – 23,009 words

Richard II – 22,423 words

The Merry Wives of Windsor – 21,845 words

Measure for Measure – 21,780 words

As You Like It – 21,690 words

Henry VI, Part I – 21,607 words

Love’s Labour’s Lost – 21,459 words

The Merchant of Venice – 21,291 words

Much Ado About Nothing – 21,157 words

The Taming of the Shrew – 21,005 words

King John – 20,772 words

Titus Andronicus – 20743 words

Twelfth Night – 19,837 words

Julius Caesar – 19,703 words

Pericles – 18,529 words

Timon of Athens – 18,216 words

The Two Gentlemen of Verona – 17,129 words

Macbeth – 17,121 words

The Tempest – 16,633 words

A Midsummer Night’s Dream – 16,511 words

The Comedy of Errors – 14,701 words

The Bard, writing a complete list of Shakespeare plays?

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William Shakespeare

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 7, 2019 | Original: October 3, 2011

Considered the greatest English-speaking writer in history and known as England’s national poet, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has had more theatrical works performed than any other playwright. To this day, countless theater festivals around the world honor his work, students memorize his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed. They also hunt for clues about the life of the man who inspires such “bardolatry” (as George Bernard Shaw derisively called it), much of which remains shrouded in mystery. Born into a family of modest means in Elizabethan England, the “Bard of Avon” wrote at least 37 plays and a collection of sonnets, established the legendary Globe theater and helped transform the English language.

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town 100 miles northwest of London, and baptized there on April 26, 1564. His birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death in 1616 and is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, dabbled in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; he also held a series of municipal positions before falling into debt in the late 1580s. The ambitious son of a tenant farmer, John boosted his social status by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic landowner. Like John, she may have been a practicing Catholic at a time when those who rejected the newly established Church of England faced persecution.

Did you know? Sources from William Shakespeare's lifetime spell his last name in more than 80 different ways, ranging from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.” In the handful of signatures that have survived, he himself never spelled his name “William Shakespeare,” using variations such as “Willm Shakspere” and “William Shakspeare” instead.

William was the third of eight Shakespeare children, of whom three died in childhood. Though no records of his education survive, it is likely that he attended the well-regarded local grammar school, where he would have studied Latin grammar and classics. It is unknown whether he completed his studies or abandoned them as an adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his senior, in a ceremony thought to have been hastily arranged due to her pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was born less than seven months later in May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Susanna and Judith would live to old age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died at 11. As for William and Anne, it is believed that the couple lived apart for most of the year while the bard pursued his writing and theater career in London. It was not until the end of his life that Shakespeare moved back in with Anne in their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years and Early Career

To the dismay of his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from the historical record between 1585, when his twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as an “upstart crow” (evidence that he had already made a name for himself on the London stage). What did the newly married father and future literary icon do during those seven “lost” years? Historians have speculated that he worked as a schoolteacher, studied law, traveled across continental Europe or joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a local politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as an actor, penned several plays and spent enough time in London to write about its geography, culture and diverse personalities with great authority. Even his earliest works evince knowledge of European affairs and foreign countries, familiarity with the royal court and general erudition that might seem unattainable to a young man raised in the provinces by parents who were probably illiterate. For this reason, some theorists have suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true identity used the person of William Shakespeare as a front. (Most scholars and literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, although many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have been written before or around 1592, encompass all three of the main dramatic genres in the bard’s oeuvre: tragedy (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” trilogy and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was likely affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted on the London stage. In 1594 he began writing and acting for a troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright and partnering with other members to establish the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement around 1612, Shakespeare penned the most famous of his 37-plus plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” As a dramatist, he is known for his frequent use of iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or not to be” speech) and ingenious wordplay. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to ancient Greece, featuring assorted casts of characters with complex psyches and profoundly human interpersonal conflicts. Some of his plays—notably “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by moral ambiguity and jarring shifts in tone, defying, much like life itself, classification as purely tragic or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first narrative poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a plague outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a second poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” hint that during his lifetime the bard was chiefly renowned for his poetry. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love and sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without its writer’s consent. (It has been suggested that he intended them for his intimate circle only, not the general public.) Perhaps because of their explicit sexual references or dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the same success as Shakespeare’s earlier lyrical works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare died at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, famously received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside a Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, some say, by the bard himself—warding off grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.” His remains have yet to be disturbed, despite requests by archaeologists keen to reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a collection of his plays, commonly known as the First Folio. In its preface, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote of his late contemporary, “He was not of an age, but for all time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue to grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have yielded a vast array of film, television and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare is believed to have influenced the English language more than any other writer in history, coining—or, at the very least, popularizing—terms and phrases that still regularly crop up in everyday conversation. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); and the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”).

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Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar’

This essay about “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” analyzes the themes of political intrigue and moral conflict. It examines the motives and actions of key characters like Brutus and Cassius, highlighting their internal and external conflicts as they navigate the consequences of Caesar’s assassination. The discussion extends to the chaotic aftermath and the use of rhetoric by Mark Antony, emphasizing the impact of these dynamics on Rome’s fate and drawing parallels to modern political systems.

How it works

William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” is a rich tapestry of political intrigue and moral conflict, woven together to explore the tumultuous events leading up to and following the assassination of the titular Roman dictator. At the heart of the play is a profound exploration of the interplay between personal morality and public duty, a theme that resonates through the ages and remains pertinent in today’s political landscape.

The political intrigue in “Julius Caesar” is immediately evident in the conspirators’ plotting against Caesar.

Led by Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators are not merely power-hungry plotters; they are deeply concerned citizens who believe that the assassination of Caesar is necessary to prevent him from becoming a tyrant and to protect the Republic. Shakespeare portrays their actions with a degree of sympathy, complicating the audience’s response to their eventual deed. The moral conflict within Brutus, who is a close friend to Caesar yet also a staunch Republican, adds depth to this political maneuvering. Brutus’s internal struggle highlights the complexity of his character: he is virtuous and noble, yet fatally flawed by his overestimation of his own moral integrity and underestimation of the chaotic forces of ambition and corruption in others.

The essence of moral conflict in the play is encapsulated in Brutus’s soliloquy in Act 2, Scene 1. He says, “It must be by his death: and for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general.” Here, Brutus wrestles with his conscience, persuaded not by any personal grievance but by a reasoned, albeit speculative, argument that Caesar’s rule could harm Rome’s democratic institutions. His decision is based on hypotheticals and ideals, rather than concrete evidence of Caesar’s tyrannical actions, highlighting the precarious nature of political decisions that are based more on fear of potential outcomes than on reality.

On the other side of the moral spectrum is Cassius, a character driven by personal jealousy and political pragmatism. His motivations are less noble than Brutus’s, and he manipulates Brutus, knowing that Brutus’s honorable reputation is essential in lending credibility to the conspiracy. Shakespeare uses Cassius to explore the darker side of political intrigue—the way personal vendettas and ambitions can disguise themselves as public-spirited actions. This interplay raises questions about the authenticity of the motives in political actions and whether the end always justifies the means.

The political intrigue extends beyond the assassination itself, as the play also delves into the chaotic aftermath of Caesar’s death. The power vacuum leads to further moral conflicts among the surviving characters. Mark Antony, ostensibly a loyal friend of Caesar, reveals his own ambitions and ruthlessness. His famous funeral oration is a masterclass in political manipulation, as he uses rhetorical skill and emotional appeals to turn the populace against Brutus and his fellow conspirators. Antony’s actions underscore a central theme in Shakespeare’s plays: the persuasive power of language in politics.

Moreover, the public’s reaction to Antony’s speech reflects the fickle nature of public opinion and the ease with which it can be swayed by charismatic leadership, further complicating the moral and ethical landscape of political life. This fickleness can be seen as a commentary on the vulnerabilities of democratic systems, which are susceptible to the whims of a populace that can be easily manipulated by skilled rhetoricians.

Ultimately, “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” provides a profound commentary on the nature of power and morality. The characters are embroiled in a web of personal motives and public concerns, and their tragic fates reveal the often-destructive intersection of individual moral dilemmas and political machinations. The play not only asks whether it is justifiable to commit a wrong in the service of what one believes to be a greater good but also explores the disastrous consequences of such actions.

As relevant today as it was in Shakespeare’s time, “Julius Caesar” serves as a timeless reflection on the complexities of political life and the moral conflicts that accompany leadership and power. It challenges the audience to consider the weight of their own moral choices and the impacts those choices have on the broader canvas of human affairs.

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Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar'. (2024, May 21). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/political-intrigue-and-moral-conflict-in-shakespeares-the-tragedy-of-julius-caesar/

"Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar'." PapersOwl.com , 21 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/political-intrigue-and-moral-conflict-in-shakespeares-the-tragedy-of-julius-caesar/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar' . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/political-intrigue-and-moral-conflict-in-shakespeares-the-tragedy-of-julius-caesar/ [Accessed: 30 May. 2024]

"Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar'." PapersOwl.com, May 21, 2024. Accessed May 30, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/political-intrigue-and-moral-conflict-in-shakespeares-the-tragedy-of-julius-caesar/

"Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar'," PapersOwl.com , 21-May-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/political-intrigue-and-moral-conflict-in-shakespeares-the-tragedy-of-julius-caesar/. [Accessed: 30-May-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Political Intrigue and Moral Conflict in Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar' . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/political-intrigue-and-moral-conflict-in-shakespeares-the-tragedy-of-julius-caesar/ [Accessed: 30-May-2024]

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“Othello” Essay Titles

Introduction.

Great plays are full of engaging characters and dramatic plots, but examination questions will require you to demonstrate your understanding of “Othello” by focusing on how Shakespeare presents one key aspect or theme throughout the script. All of your thoughts and ideas should only refer to the key term of the essay title.

• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello is responsible for his own downfall.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello does not deserve to be called a tragic hero.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello is destroyed by his own guilt rather than the actions of other characters.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that the tragic outcome of the play results from the failure of Othello’s leadership.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello learns through suffering.
• With reference to Othello’s character arc, show to what extent you would agree with the view that Shakespeare’s play shows great men at their lowest.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello is destroyed by this own tragic pride rather than the actions of other characters.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Desdemona is the real tragic hero.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Desdemona is responsible for her own tragic ending.
• With reference to Desdemona’s role in the play, show to what extent you would agree with the view that Desdemona is a tragic hero.
• To what extent would you agree with the view that Shakespeare’s “Othello” is a strong criticism of attitudes towards women.
• To what extent would you agree with the view that Iago is the true villain of the play.
• To what extent would you agree with the view that Iago is destroyed by his own ambition.
• To what extent would you agree with the view that Iago is an overreacher.
• To what extent would you agree with the view that Iago was justified in attacking Othello.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello’s tragic suffering is typical of the genre.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that it is important that tragedies are realistic.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that there a simple binary opposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in tragedy.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that tragedies are exaggerated stories emphasising mankind’s destructive nature.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that spectacle is important to tragedy.
• To what extent you would agree with the view it is in the nature of Tragedy always to provide a clear moral message for the audience.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Othello’s tragedy teaches us to obey the will of the gods.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that there is a strong sense of divine order and design in “Othello”.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that the characters in each play are they merely victims of circumstance.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that Shakespearean tragedies still offer a clear moral message to a modern audience.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that the characters in tragedies do not change.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that physical and emotional cruelty is an important feature of Traged.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that tragedy is about power.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that tragedy is about conflict.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that tragedy is influenced by the religious and social contexts of the play.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that justice delivered by the end of “Othello”.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that the tragic ending of “Othello” is satisfying for an audience.
• To what extent you would agree with the view that there is a strong sense of tragic closure at the end of “Othello”.

Othello Comprehension Exercises

Othello’s Peripeteia

Othello’s Hubris

Iago’s Motivation

Othello’s Greatness

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Essay on William Shakespeare

500 words essay on william shakespeare.

William Shakespeare was certainly a very famous writer. The man is credited with an unbelievable thirty-eight plays, two narrative poems, several other poems and a whopping one hundred fifty-four sonnets. So let us take a peek inside the life of this genius with this essay on William Shakespeare.

                                                                                                                               Essay On William Shakespeare

Early Life of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is the world’s pre-eminent dramatist and according to many experts is the greatest writer in the English language. Furthermore, he is also called England’s National Poet and also has the nickname of the Bard of Avon. Such a worthy reputation is due to his top-notch unmatchable writing skills.

William Shakespeare was born to a successful businessman in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April in the year 1564. Shakespeare’s mother was the daughter of a landlord and came from a well-to-do family. About the age of seven, William Shakespeare began attending the Stratford Grammar School.

The teachers at Stratford were strict in nature and the school timings were long. One can say that William Shakespeare’s use of nature in his writings was due to the influence of the fields and woods surrounding the Stratford Grammar School on him.

Warwickshire was an interesting place to live, especially for those who were writers. Furthermore, the river Avon ran down through the town and because of this Shakespeare later got the title ‘Bard of Avon’. At the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman who in age was eight years older than him.

Illustrious Career of William Shakespeare

After his education, William Shakespeare became engaged in theatrical life in London. Furthermore, it was from here that his career likely took off. Moreover, by the year 1592, the popularity of William Shakespeare had grown to be very much.

Shakespeare became a member of one of the famous theatre companies in the city. Moreover, this company was ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’. Also, the theatre companies during that era were commercial organizations that were dependent upon the audience who came to watch the plays.

From the year 1594, Shakespeare became the leading member of the acting group and remained that for almost the entire rest of his career. By the year 1594, the production of at least six plays had taken place by William Shakespeare.

Evidence shows that Shakespeare became a member of a well-known travelling theatre group. After joining this theatre, Shakespeare did plays in the presence of many dignitaries in various places.

Shakespeare, throughout his life, came up with some outstanding pieces of English literature , involving memorable timeless characters with human qualities. Furthermore, the human qualities and struggles of Shakespeare’s characters are such that one can relate with them even today. Shakespeare retired from his acting profession in 1613 and became completely devoted to writing many excellent plays.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

 Conclusion of the Essay on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is, without a doubt, one of the greatest writers of all times. Furthermore, his excellence in story writing, narrative building, and character development is of the highest order. Individuals of such a high calibre appear once in a century or are even rarer than that.

FAQs For Essay on William Shakespeare

Question 1: Why is William Shakespeare so famous?

Answer 1:  William Shakespeare’s story writing skills are of an extremely high-quality. Furthermore, his works are characterized by outstanding narrative building around the topics of jealousy, mystery, love, magic, death, murder, life, revenge, and grief. That is why William Shakespeare is so famous.

Question 2: What are some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare?

Answer 2: Some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare are as follows:

• Romeo and Juliet
• The Merchant of Venice
• Much Ado About Nothing

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The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 (So Far)

To make sense of an ever-changing world, dip into these titles.

To make sense of an ever-changing world, we recommend skipping Dr. Google and going straight to the experts. Do you want to expand your knowledge about hot-button issues like wealth inequality, algorithmic overload , and conservative culture wars? There’s a book for that. Or maybe you’re more of a memoir type, looking to glean information through other people’s lived experiences. Whether you’re interested in identity, grief , or marriage , there’s a book for that, too.

Whatever your persuasion as a reader and a learner may be, we’ve rounded up our favorite titles of the year for expanding your mind and heart. Here are the best nonfiction books of 2024 (so far), presented in publication order. Watch this space for updates—we’ll continue adding to our list as the year progresses.

Filterworld, by Kyle Chayka

Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging that we seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld , you’ll be ready to start your own “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Limitarianism, by Ingrid Robeyns

“Billionaires shouldn’t exist”—or so goes the popular refrain. In this revolutionary volume, an ethicist expands that thought into a comprehensive plan to eradicate extreme wealth. Robeyns connects outrageous wealth to all manner of societal ills, from human-rights violations to the corporate ransacking of Earth’s natural resources. She also lays out a multi-pronged solution: We must legislate a wealth cap, she argues, coupled with measures like robust taxes and a universal basic income. Though we’re a long ways away from enacting Robeyns’s radical vision, Limitarianism is a thoughtful blueprint for the world so many of us want to live in—one where capitalism is curbed and greed is limited.

I Heard Her Call My Name, by Lucy Sante

In this candid and soulful memoir of gender transition, Sante recounts her experience of transitioning later in life, at age sixty-six. She describes an electrifying experiment with FaceApp’s “gender-swapping feature,” where the sight of her face (digitally altered to look more feminine) produced “one shock of recognition after another.” In one dimension of the memoir, Sante traces her realization of her true self and her process of coming out; in another, she reconsiders her entire life through the prism of what she knows now. Sante’s account of meeting her true self is arresting, intimate, and a work in progress. As she writes, "Transitioning is not an event but a process, and it will occupy the rest of my life as I go on changing."

This American Ex-Wife, by Lyz Lenz

In This American Ex-Wife , a blistering memoir-meets-manifesto about the fraught gender politics of marriage and divorce, Lenz details how the end of her marriage became the beginning of her life. Raised in a religious household and married at a young age, Lenz walked away from an unsatisfying partnership to rebuild her life on her own terms, only to discover that happiness and autonomy lay on the other side. Weaving together a detailed history of marriage, sociological research, cultural commentary, and a frank dissection of her own personal experiences, Lenz paints a damning portrait of marriage in America: “an institution built on the fundamental inequality of women.” Yet the book is also a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning—one in which couples can love freely, leave freely, and build meaningful partnerships based on the full and equal humanity of men and women alike.

Working in the 21st Century, by Mark Larson

Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working , a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Through a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Assembled in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich examination of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.

Splinters, by Leslie Jamison

In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was thirteen months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfillment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here, finding exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.

Harper Whiskey Tender, by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here, she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealize the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Native American history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together, the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.

Grief Is for People, by Sloane Crosley

In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First, her apartment was burglarized and her jewelry stolen; then, one month later, her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together. “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?, by Judith Butler

One of our foremost thinkers returns with an essential polemic on gender, an urgent front line of the culture wars. Butler argues that by turning gender into a “phantasmic scene,” conservative politicians have diverted political will from the most pressing problems of our time, like climate change, war, and capitalist exploitation. Butler explores how various movements around the world have weaponized gender to achieve their goals, with a particular focus on trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Who’s Afraid of Gender? calls for gender expression to be recognized as a basic human right, and for radical solidarity across our differences. With masterful analysis of where we’ve been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare

When Ian Fleming’s family approached Nicholas Shakespeare to write a biography of the late spy novelist, promising access to never-before-seen family materials, Shakespeare soon concluded that “under the jarring surface of his popular image,” he could “see a different person.” In this outstanding biography, the author uncovers countless sides of his complicated subject to construct “the complete man.” From Fleming’s youth spent at the vanguard of military and journalistic history to his later years as “a slave to a serial character,” Shakespeare constructs an exhaustive portrait of the author’s life and influences. Clocking in at just under nine hundred pages, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man leaves no stone unturned. It’s the definitive biography of an endlessly fascinating subject.

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