Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
1603 · 406 pages
Hamlet's father appears as a ghost and demands revenge, and the prince spends the play failing to take it. Four centuries of readers have found their own divided minds in his hesitation.
★ 9.9
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
King Lear
1607 · 316 pages
An old king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and the truthful one says least. Shakespeare wrote nothing bleaker, and the last scene is unbearable.
★ 9.8
Macbeth
1606 · 223 pages
Witches promise a soldier the crown, and he and his wife murder their way to it. Shakespeare's shortest tragedy moves like a nightmare, and the guilt arrives before the blood dries.
★ 9.4
Faust, Part One
1808 · 176 pages
Having learned everything and felt nothing, a scholar bets the devil that no moment will ever satisfy him. Then Mephistopheles introduces him to a girl named Gretchen, and Goethe follows the damage down.
★ 9.2
Plays
Ivanov; The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard
1904 · 358 pages
Three sisters long for Moscow, a family loses its cherry orchard, and everyone talks around what hurts. Chekhov made the unspoken the real action, and modern theater took its shape from him.
★ 9.2
Othello
1603 · 314 pages
Iago tells the audience exactly how he will destroy his general, then does it with a handkerchief and patient lying. His reasons never explain it, and watching Othello believe him is agony.
★ 9.0
Waiting for Godot
1953 · 85 pages
Two tramps wait by a tree on a country road for a man who sends word each evening that he will come tomorrow. Beckett stripped drama to this and it never went back.
★ 9.0
The Three Theban Plays
429 BC · 430 pages
No drama has matched the moment Oedipus understands. He investigates the crime poisoning his city and the trail turns toward him. His daughter later defies the state to bury her brother.
★ 8.8
Death of a Salesman
1949 · 139 pages
Willy Loman, a traveling salesman worn down to nothing, argues with his grown sons and with people who are not in the room. Audiences have recognized their own fathers in him since 1949.
★ 8.7
A Streetcar Named Desire
1947 · 128 pages
Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister's New Orleans apartment with nothing left, and her brother-in-law Stanley sets about destroying what remains. No American play has staged desire and cruelty this nakedly.
★ 8.7
The Oresteia
458 BC · 335 pages
Agamemnon comes home from Troy to a wife who has spent ten years planning her welcome, and the killing runs down the generations until Athena stops it by seating the first jury.
★ 8.6
The Tempest
1611 · 259 pages
Prospero raises a storm to strand the men who stole his dukedom on an island where a spirit and a monster obey him. What he does with that power reads as Shakespeare's farewell.
★ 8.6
Romeo and Juliet
1597 · 281 pages
At a party in Verona two teenagers from feuding families meet, marry the next day, and are gone inside a week. Everything they say to each other still sounds newly invented.
★ 8.1
A Doll's House
1879 · 72 pages
Nora Helmer forged a signature to save her husband's life and has been paying the debt in secret ever since. The play ends on a closing door that modern theater still hears.
★ 8.0
The Importance of Being Earnest
1895 · 431 pages
Wilde gives two idle men imaginary people, a wicked brother and an invalid friend, to escape their obligations, then sets them courting women who will marry no one but a man named Ernest.
★ 8.0
A Midsummer Night's Dream
1596 · 304 pages
Four Athenians run into the woods to escape a forced marriage, a fairy potion lands on the wrong eyelids, and a weaver acquires a donkey's head. Shakespeare makes desire look gloriously stupid.
★ 7.4
The Recognition of Sakuntala
400 · 147 pages
King Dushyanta secretly marries a girl raised in a forest hermitage, then a curse erases her from his memory. Kalidasa writes the forest so beautifully that Goethe borrowed the play's prologue for Faust.
★ 7.3
Henry V
1599 · 292 pages
Outnumbered in France, a young king talks his army into fighting at Agincourt, promising that whoever survives will remember the day forever. After the battle he reads out the names of the dead.
★ 7.3