Study guides

The plays

The texts most often set at GCSE and A Level, each with plot, characters, themes, quotations to learn, and links to films and free editions.

14 guides

• TragedyGCSEA Levelc. 1606

  Macbeth

  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.

• TragedyGCSEc. 1595

  Romeo and Juliet

  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 Levelc. 1600–01

  Hamlet

  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 LevelGCSEc. 1604

  Othello

  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.

• TragedyA Levelc. 1605–06

  King Lear

  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.

• RomanceGCSEA Levelc. 1611

  The Tempest

  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.

• ComedyGCSEc. 1598

  Much Ado About Nothing

  Soldiers return to a governor’s house. Benedick and Beatrice wage a war of wit while Claudio and Hero’s marriage is nearly destroyed by a staged infidelity. The title’s ‘nothing’ also sounded like ‘noting’ — overhearing — which is how this comedy works.

• ComedyGCSEA Levelc. 1601

  Twelfth Night

  Viola is shipwrecked, disguises herself as a page, and falls in love with Orsino while Olivia falls in love with the page. Below stairs, a cruel joke is played on Malvolio. It is a comedy of misrule that does not fully tidy its sadness.

• ComedyGCSEc. 1596–97

  The Merchant of Venice

  Antonio borrows from Shylock to fund Bassanio’s courtship of Portia. The bond is a pound of flesh. In court Portia, disguised as a lawyer, turns the law against Shylock. It is a comedy whose comic resolution is also a conversion and a confiscation.

• TragedyGCSEc. 1599

  Julius Caesar

  Cassius recruits Brutus to kill Caesar for the good of the Republic. The assassination happens at the play’s centre; the rest is about speeches, crowds, and a civil war that none of the conspirators can control.

• ComedyGCSEc. 1595–96

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Four lovers flee into a wood where fairies are already quarrelling. A weaver grows an ass’s head. A play about a play is rehearsed by workmen. By morning, order of a kind is restored — and we are not sure the dream has ended.

• HistoryA LevelGCSEc. 1592–93

  Richard III

  Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells us he will prove a villain and then does — seducing, slandering and murdering his way to the crown. The play is a star vehicle for evil and a piece of Tudor myth-making about how the Plantagenets ended.

• HistoryGCSEA Levelc. 1599

  Henry V

  The wild Prince Hal is now king. He invades France, takes Harfleur, wins Agincourt against the odds, and marries Katherine. A Chorus keeps reminding us that a wooden O cannot hold a war — so we must imagine it.

• RomanceA Levelc. 1610–11

  The Winter’s Tale

  Leontes is suddenly, baselessly jealous of his wife Hermione and his friend Polixenes. A child is abandoned, a son dies, a statue stands still for sixteen years. Then, impossibly, the play becomes a pastoral and a resurrection.