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Reading path

All the World's a Stage

Shakespeare. We know almost nothing about him: a glover's son from Stratford, a marriage, a will that left his wife the second-best bed, and a silence into which he poured everyone. Bloom said he invented the human, and the claim only sounds like hyperbole until you notice that the way we overhear our own thoughts begins here. His characters are nuanced past the point of reason, and Hamlet sits at the centre as the most interpreted work in the language, a play read as everything because it refuses to settle into anything. Read him in order and the plays become a working life: the early histories, the comedies, the four great tragedies, the late romances that forgive everything. He arrives a jobbing player and leaves, twenty years later, having become the language we still think in.

In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.

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The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.

The route

  • 1. The Taming of the ShrewWilliam Shakespeare, 1591
  • 2. Titus AndronicusWilliam Shakespeare, 1592
  • 3. Richard IIIWilliam Shakespeare, 1593
  • 4. The Comedy of ErrorsWilliam Shakespeare, 1594
  • 5. Richard IIWilliam Shakespeare, 1595
  • 6. Romeo and JulietWilliam Shakespeare, 1595
  • 7. A Midsummer Night's DreamWilliam Shakespeare, 1595
  • 8. King JohnWilliam Shakespeare, 1596
  • 9. The Merchant of VeniceWilliam Shakespeare, 1596
  • 10. Henry IV, Part IWilliam Shakespeare, 1597
  • 11. Henry IV, Part IIWilliam Shakespeare, 1598
  • 12. Much Ado About NothingWilliam Shakespeare, 1598
  • 13. Henry VWilliam Shakespeare, 1599
  • 14. Julius CaesarWilliam Shakespeare, 1599
  • 15. As You Like ItWilliam Shakespeare, 1599
  • 16. HamletWilliam Shakespeare, 1601
  • 17. Twelfth NightWilliam Shakespeare, 1601
  • 18. OthelloWilliam Shakespeare, 1604
  • 19. King LearWilliam Shakespeare, 1605
  • 20. MacbethWilliam Shakespeare, 1606
  • 21. Antony and CleopatraWilliam Shakespeare, 1606
  • 22. CoriolanusWilliam Shakespeare, 1608
  • 23. The SonnetsWilliam Shakespeare, 1609
  • 24. The Winter's TaleWilliam Shakespeare, 1610
  • 25. The TempestWilliam Shakespeare, 1611