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
Henry IV, Part One
1597 · 274 pages
Falstaff is the greatest comic creation in English, a fat knight who lies about everything, and Prince Hal wastes his youth drinking with him while rebellion gathers against his father the king.
★ 7.2
Iphigenia; Phaedra; Athaliah
1691 · 317 pages
Phaedra confesses she wants her stepson, a father is ordered to sacrifice his daughter for a favorable wind, and a hidden boy threatens a usurping queen. Racine packs this into polite rhymed couplets.
★ 7.2
The Merchant of Venice
1598 · 288 pages
In Venice a merchant borrows from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender he has spat on, pledging a pound of his flesh. Shylock asks whether a Jew does not bleed, and the comedy never recovers.
★ 7.2
As You Like It
1600 · 320 pages
Banished from court, Rosalind hides in the Forest of Arden in men's clothes and coaches the man she loves in how to court her. She talks rings around everyone in Shakespeare.
★ 7.2
Much Ado About Nothing
1599 · 246 pages
Beatrice and Benedick insult each other so expertly that their friends trick each into believing the other is secretly in love. Their war of words gave English comedy its model for courtship.
★ 7.2
Lysistrata and Other Plays
411 BC · 241 pages
Twenty years into a war they never voted for, the women of Greece refuse their husbands until the men make peace. Aristophanes also hoists Socrates over the stage in a basket.
★ 7.1
Don Juan and Other Plays
1665 · 392 pages
Don Juan seduces, dodges his creditors, and believes in nothing, while his servant argues feebly for God and a stone statue accepts an invitation to dinner. Moliere never wrote anything more dangerous.
★ 7.1
The Glass Menagerie
1944 · 105 pages
Tom narrates the St. Louis apartment he escaped, where his mother relives the seventeen gentlemen callers of her girlhood and his limping sister tends her glass animals. Everything turns on one visitor.
★ 7.0
The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays
1666 · 400 pages
Alceste cannot tell a lie and is destroying himself over a woman who lives on flattery. Tartuffe, the fake holy man eating his host's house, is hypocrisy caught whole and played for laughs.
★ 7.0
The Crucible
1953 · 143 pages
Salem, 1692: girls caught dancing in the woods begin naming witches, and the town learns that an accusation cannot be answered. Miller wrote it while Congress hunted Communists, and audiences understood immediately.
★ 7.0
Life is a Dream
1635 · 96 pages
Spanish Golden Age drama peaks here. King Basilio locks his newborn son in a tower to outrun a prophecy, then has him drugged, brought to court, and told it was a dream.
★ 7.0
Four Comedies
200 BC · 242 pages
Plautus stole Greek plots and made them Roman, vulgar and fast. Shakespeare lifted his mistaken twins for The Comedy of Errors, Moliere lifted his miser, and farce has run on that machinery since.
★ 7.0
Henry IV, Part Two
1599 · 338 pages
Falstaff ages and the king dies while Prince Hal waits for the crown. Shakespeare wrote no colder scene than the new king telling his old tavern friend that he does not know him.
★ 7.0
The Complete Plays
1593 · 702 pages
Faustus signs away his soul for twenty-four years of power, Tamburlaine the shepherd burns his way across Asia, and Barabas poisons a convent. Marlowe gave English drama its first tragic grandeur.
★ 6.9
Mother Courage and Her Children
1939 · 126 pages
The greatest of the epic-theater plays follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman hauling her wagon through the Thirty Years' War, selling to whichever army is winning and losing all three children to it.
★ 6.9
Julius Caesar
1599 · 288 pages
Brutus is persuaded that killing his friend will save the republic. Antony stands over the body, says he comes to bury Caesar and not to praise him, and turns Rome around.
★ 6.8
Richard III
1592 · 448 pages
Richard tells the audience in his first speech that he means to be a villain, then makes them accomplices. He courts a widow beside the corpse of the king he murdered.
★ 6.8
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1962 · 257 pages
Two in the morning, a history professor and his wife receive a younger couple after a faculty party, and the drinking turns into a night of games designed to strip them bare.
★ 6.5
No Exit
1944 · 275 pages
Hell is other people, and Sartre proves it by locking a coward, a seducer, and a mother who drowned her baby in one bright room with no mirrors and no sleep.
★ 6.5
A Raisin in the Sun
1959 · 151 pages
Ten thousand dollars of insurance money reaches a Chicago apartment and a Black family goes to war over what it is for. Broadway had never staged a play by a Black woman before.
★ 6.4
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
1966 · 128 pages
Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.
★ 6.4
The Alchemist
1610 · 530 pages
Plague empties London, a master flees, and his butler turns the house into a con shop, selling the philosopher's stone to every greedy fool who knocks. Jonson built the swindle like clockwork.
★ 6.1
The Miser and Other Plays
1668 · 304 pages
Harpagon keeps a cash box buried in his garden, intends to marry his son's beloved himself, and gives his daughter to whoever asks no dowry. Moliere made him Europe's byword for greed.
★ 6.0
Three Major Plays
1631 · 300 pages
Lope de Vega wrote hundreds of plays and handed Spain a national theater. In Fuente Ovejuna a village murders its tyrant lord, and under torture every villager claims the killing for the town.
★ 6.0
The Robbers
1781 · 472 pages
Karl Moor, disinherited by his brother's forged letter, takes a robber band into the Bohemian forests and learns that idealism under arms turns to butchery. Romantic literature has been rewriting him ever since.
★ 6.0