For GCSE, A Level & IB
Shakespeare, made examinable.
Plots, characters, themes and the quotations worth learning — written for students aged 15–18. Then a quiz, a language crib, and links to free films and texts.
Play guides
Fourteen set-text essentials with plot, people, themes and analysed quotations.
OpenTimeline
The canon in order, from the Henry VI plays to The Two Noble Kinsmen.
OpenLanguage help
Thou and wherefore, iambic pentameter, and a method for unseen extracts.
OpenWatch & read
Globe, RSC, National Theatre, Folger texts, and archive dramatisations.
OpenSet texts
Start with the plays most often examined
- TragedyGCSEA Level
Macbeth
c. 1606 · Medieval Scotland and England
A decorated soldier hears that he will be king, murders his way onto the throne, and discovers that the crown cannot quiet the mind that seized it. Macbeth is short, brutal and densely patterned — almost every image of blood, darkness, clothing or children comes back to haunt the plot.
- TragedyGCSE
Romeo and Juliet
c. 1595 · Verona
Two teenagers from feuding households fall in love, marry in secret, and are destroyed by haste, miscommunication and a city that treats honour as a blood sport. It is a love tragedy and a play about what adults fail to stop.
- TragedyA Level
Hamlet
c. 1600–01 · Elsinore, Denmark
The Prince of Denmark is told by his father’s ghost to revenge a murder. He delays, performs madness, stages a play, destroys the court, and dies in the wreckage. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy that keeps asking what thinking is for.
- TragedyA LevelGCSE
Othello
c. 1604 · Venice, then Cyprus
A celebrated Moorish general is destroyed by a lieutenant who knows how to weaponise jealousy, race and ‘honest’ reputation. Othello is intimate tragedy: the battlefield is a marriage bed, and language does the killing.
- RomanceGCSEA Level
The Tempest
c. 1611 · An unnamed island in the Mediterranean imagination
Prospero, deposed Duke of Milan, raises a storm to wreck his enemies on the island where he has lived with his daughter Miranda, the spirit Ariel and the enslaved Caliban. Magic, masque and colonial encounter share a stage. Then he drowns his book.
- TragedyA Level
King Lear
c. 1605–06 · Ancient Britain
An ageing king divides his kingdom on the basis of a love-test, banishes the daughter who will not flatter him, and is driven into storm, madness and knowledge. Lear is about power, family, and how little the cosmos seems to care.
How to use this desk
Read the play. Learn six quotations properly. Then sit the quiz.
Higher-band answers name a method, follow an image, and use context as a lens — not a bolted-on paragraph about ‘the Elizabethans’. The guides are written that way on purpose.
- 1
One play, one sitting
Plot first, then characters, then a theme tracked through two scenes.
- 2
Quotations with a job
Memorise speaker, act and what the image does — not a floating line.
- 3
Check the language
If wherefore still means where, open the crib before the extract question.