Shakespeare Free Online: 7 Plays and Where to Start
Shakespeare is free everywhere and read almost nowhere, and the reason is usually the first ten minutes. A play opens mid-conversation, in verse, with characters who all know each other and nothing to tell you who they are. Give it those ten minutes and the language stops being an obstacle — but only if you started with the right play.
Seven are in the BingeReaders free library, free to read in the browser. Here they are, with an honest note on which to open first.
Start here: Macbeth
The shortest tragedy and the fastest. Macbeth is a couple who decide to murder their way to a throne, and it goes wrong immediately — no subplots, no delays, nothing to keep track of. If you read one Shakespeare play in your life it should be this one, and if you're returning after a bad school experience it's the one that will change your mind.
Then: A Midsummer Night's Dream
The comedy that works without help. A Midsummer Night's Dream has four young people lost in a wood, a fairy quarrel, and a troupe of amateur actors staging the worst play ever written — and the jokes are physical enough to land even when a line goes past you.
Hamlet
The famous one, and much stranger than its reputation. Hamlet is a revenge play in which the avenger spends four acts refusing to do it, and half the lines you know by heart are in here. It's also the longest play Shakespeare wrote, so it isn't the place to begin.
Romeo and Juliet
Everyone thinks they know it and almost nobody has noticed how funny the first two acts are. Romeo and Juliet opens as a comedy and turns, in a single scene, into the tragedy it was always going to be — and Mercutio is the best-written character in it.
The Tempest
Shakespeare's last solo play and his quietest. The Tempest is a magician on an island settling old scores and then, unexpectedly, forgiving them. Short, strange, and the best one to read in a single sitting.
King Lear
The hardest and the greatest. King Lear is an old man dividing his kingdom on the basis of flattery, and the play gives him no comfort at all for it. Read it third or fourth, not first — it's relentless, and it deserves your attention rather than your endurance.
The Merchant of Venice
The most uncomfortable play here, and worth reading for exactly that reason. The Merchant of Venice is structured as a comedy and contains, in Shylock, a character it cannot contain — the play argues with itself, and four centuries of readers have argued with it.
How to read a play without stalling
Three things make it much easier, and none of them involve a study guide:
- Read the first scene twice. Once to work out who is who, once for what they're saying. Everything after it is downhill.
- Don't stop for individual words. A line you half-understand still moves the scene. Momentum beats precision on a first read.
- Read the speeches aloud, or nearly. Verse is punctuated for a voice, not an eye — the rhythm tells you where the sense breaks, which is the thing footnotes cannot do for you.
All seven plays are in the BingeReaders free library, free to read with no download and no account. A free account keeps your place scene to scene and lets you highlight the lines worth keeping — which, with Shakespeare, is most of them.