The Best William Shakespeare Plays and Books

Most Recommended Books

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream has always been a great favourite of mine, ever since my school days. I was introduced to it at school when I was about 11 or 12. I’ve seen many productions of it. It’s the first play I edited, for the New Penguin Shakespeare, in 1967. I very much enjoyed writing about it then. It’s a play about imagination, about Shakespeare’s own heart, in many ways. The Mechanicals’ scenes, as they’re called, in which Shakespeare portrays amateur actors putting on the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, actually tell us an awful lot about Shakespeare’s attitude towards the theatre and the acting profession. They’re also wonderfully playable.It’s a play that appeals very much to young people. I’m speaking now from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-Upon-Avon and we have what’s called ‘Shakespeare Week,’ when we engage with over 10,000 primary schools. The Royal Shakespeare Company put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which uses amateur actors, including schoolchildren.”

Stanley Wells, Literary Scholar

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

“Antony and Cleopatra is, in some ways, the most romantic of Shakespeare’s plays. It takes over, in a way, from Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet gives a wonderful exploration of young love, of first love, of romantic attitudes to love. Antony and Cleopatra are mature lovers. They are seasoned. They are disillusioned. It’s an extraordinarily rich play, poetically—as Romeo and Juliet is—but the poetry of Antony and Cleopatra is that of a mature person who has gone through a lot of experiences himself and is capable of expressing the disillusionment of middle-aged love as well as the raptures of it. “

Stanley Wells, Literary Scholar

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

“This is going to sound heretical, but I think that—particularly in the theatre—a lot of Shakespeare is too long. I think Act 4 in a lot of Shakespeare plays is a bit of a bum-number, and not much happens. I like to see Shakespeare intelligently cut, often to speed it up. Macbeth is a play that may have been cut. We don’t really understand the provenance of that text. It’s very short by Shakespearean standards and it’s very powerful because of that. There’s no subplot, there’s no parallel plot. Just this really intense journey through a psychological drama. It’s a really punchy play because everything is tightly headed in the same direction: the language, the imagery, the plot, the way the characters work. It’s a really superbly powerful, compact, condensed play.”

Emma Smith, Literary Scholar

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

” What I really like about this play is its sexual playfulness. It seems very modern in that way. There’s no way to play it straight. You’ve either got Orsino in love with Cesario, or you’ve got Olivia in love with Viola, and you’ve always got Antonio in love with Sebastian. It feels to me as if its subtitle What You Will, is a cheeky way of saying ‘whatever, anything goes’. I like the fact that quite often you see productions where at the end Olivia and Orsino are still mixing up the twin they are with and there’s still playfulness. “

Emma Smith, Literary Scholar

King Lear by William Shakespeare

“Lear is about all sorts of things but one of the things it’s about is people getting old and not ceding what their kids think they should to them and the kids trying to bully them.”

Kathleen Taylor, Science Writer

Five Books has a series of interviews with world-leading Shakespeare scholars discussing the best William Shakespeare plays and the best books on William Shakespeare.

Disillusioned when forced to study him at school but ready to engage with Shakespeare plays again? Or do you already know your Hamlet from your Lear but are keen to explore more about the man? Even if you are completely new to Shakespeare, our interviews with the world’s foremost Shakespeare experts will set you on the right path.

These include:

Sir Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford, and General Editor of The Complete Oxford Shakespeare; Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, and acclaimed expert of Shakespeare's First Folio; and James Shapiro, Professor of English at Columbia University, and award-winning author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.

Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me

From mine own library with volumes that

I prize above my dukedom.

(The Tempest, I. 2)