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
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17th century
1601 – 1700
Showing 31 books from the 17th century
The Holy Bible (King James Version)
Various
1611 · 1728 pages
God makes the world, loses the people in it, and spends the rest of the book getting them back. The English of this translation is the English later writers have had to answer.
★ 9.8
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
Don Quixote
1605 · 940 pages
An old man reads himself mad on chivalry, names himself a knight, and rides out with a farmer for a squire. Four hundred years on the book is still hilarious and still heartbreaking.
★ 9.7
Paradise Lost
1667 · 591 pages
Satan rebels in heaven, loses, and comes for the first two people. Milton meant to justify God and produced a devil so magnificent he nearly walks off with the greatest poem in English.
★ 9.5
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
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
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
Leviathan
1651 · 688 pages
Strip away the state, Hobbes argues, and life becomes a war of everyone against everyone, nasty, brutish, and short. The remedy is to hand all our power to one sovereign.
★ 8.2
Meditations on First Philosophy
1641 · 59 pages
Descartes sits by a fire and doubts everything, down to whether a demon feeds him the world. What survives is the thinking, and philosophy has argued from there ever since.
★ 7.5
Pensees
1669 · 333 pages
You are already betting on whether God exists, Pascal says, since refusing to choose is a choice. Around that wager sit fragments on why no one can sit alone in a room.
★ 7.4
The New Organon
1620 · 252 pages
Bacon names four idols that warp human thinking: our species, our upbringing, our sloppy words, and the philosophies we inherit. Clear them away, gather evidence patiently, and nature gives up its secrets.
★ 7.4
Two Treatises of Government
1689 · 464 pages
People are born free and equal, Locke argues, own what their labor makes, and create government by consent. One that breaks the trust may be thrown out. Jefferson took the argument whole.
★ 7.4
Ethics
1667 · 208 pages
Spinoza proves, in numbered propositions, that God and nature are one substance and that everything follows from it as necessarily as a theorem. Freedom is understanding that necessity, not escaping it.
★ 7.4
Pilgrim's Progress
1678 · 400 pages
Christian sets out with a burden on his back toward the Celestial City, through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. For two centuries only the Bible was read more widely in English.
★ 7.4
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 Anatomy of Melancholy
1638 · 547 pages
Melancholy comes from everything, the Oxford scholar Robert Burton concludes, from diet and air to love and religion. A thousand pages of quotation follow, and his one prescription is not to be idle.
★ 7.2
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
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1690 · 416 pages
Nothing is in the mind at birth, Locke says. It is blank paper, and everything you know arrives through the senses or through watching your mind work. British empiricism runs out from there.
★ 7.1
Discourse on Method
1637 · 207 pages
Good sense is the most equally distributed thing in the world, Descartes begins, then shows how to use it: doubt all you can, divide each problem, and rebuild only on what survives.
★ 7.1
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 Diary of Samuel Pepys
1669 · 352 pages
Nine years of Restoration London set down every night in shorthand. Pepys watched the Great Fire from a boat and he was as frank about his own adulteries as about the plague.
★ 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
The Nine Cloud Dream
1687 · 288 pages
Korea's supreme classical novel banishes a young monk, undone by eight fairies on a bridge, into a life of examinations, armies and love, granted in full so it can be seen through.
★ 6.4
Discourse on Metaphysics
1686 · 84 pages
Leibniz answers Descartes and Spinoza with a universe of self-contained substances, each carrying its whole history and future inside its own concept and mirroring the world from where it stands.
★ 6.3
The Passions of the Soul
1649 · 165 pages
Wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness: six primitive passions from which Descartes builds every feeling you have, located in the body's machinery rather than condemned as sins the soul must defeat.
★ 6.3
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 Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine
1694 · 504 pages
La Fontaine rewrote Aesop's animals as a comedy of French manners: the ant turns the cicada away, the fox flatters the crow out of his cheese. French children still learn them by heart.
★ 6.0
Of Plymouth Plantation
1651 · 256 pages
Plymouth's governor kept the record of his colony year by year, calling the coast a hideous and desolate wilderness. The early chapters carry the founding myth, the closing ones turn to lament.
★ 5.8