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What Is Shakespearean Literature?

Shakespearean literature is the body of plays, sonnets, and narrative poems created by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) — an English playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon who produced some of the most performed, quoted, and studied works in the history of any language. His 37 plays and 154 sonnets, written over roughly 25 years during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, established patterns of storytelling, character psychology, and poetic language that still shape how we think about drama, love, power, and mortality.

That’s the textbook summary. The more honest version: Shakespeare was a working playwright who wrote for money, borrowed his plots from existing sources, included dirty jokes for the groundlings, and somehow — through sheer genius with language and insight into human nature — produced works that remain alive 400 years later.

What He Actually Wrote

Shakespeare’s works fall into several categories, and each has a different flavor.

The tragedies are probably the most famous. Hamlet (1600-01) explores indecision, mortality, and the gap between appearance and reality. Macbeth (1606) dissects ambition and guilt. King Lear (1605) strips a powerful man down to nothing and asks what remains. Othello (1603) shows how jealousy and manipulation destroy trust. These aren’t just sad endings — they’re rigorous explorations of how human flaws lead to catastrophe.

The comedies are lighter but not shallow. A Midsummer Night’s Dream layers fairy magic over romantic confusion. Much Ado About Nothing features one of literature’s great verbal sparring couples in Beatrice and Benedick. Twelfth Night plays with gender, identity, and desire through disguise and mistaken identity. Shakespeare’s comedies are funny, but they often brush against darker themes — loneliness, exclusion, the fragility of social order.

The histories dramatize English kings from Richard II through Henry VIII. They’re political drama — power struggles, civil wars, leadership crises — told with surprising nuance. Henry V is often read as patriotic celebration, but it includes devastating scenes of war’s brutality. The history plays taught generations of English people their own national story, however dramatized.

The sonnets — 154 poems in a specific 14-line form — are intensely personal. They address a “Fair Youth,” a “Dark Lady,” and a “Rival Poet” whose identities remain debated. The themes are love, beauty, time, and mortality. Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) are among the most recognizable poems in English.

Why the Language Matters

Shakespeare invented or popularized roughly 1,700 words that we still use — “lonely,” “generous,” “assassination,” “bedroom,” “eyeball,” “uncomfortable,” and hundreds more. Phrases like “break the ice,” “wild goose chase,” “heart of gold,” “the world is my oyster,” and “kill with kindness” all come from his plays. His language is so deeply embedded in English that you quote Shakespeare without knowing it.

But beyond vocabulary, Shakespeare’s real achievement was putting psychological complexity into poetic form. Hamlet’s soliloquies don’t just describe indecision — they perform it. The rhythm hesitates, the syntax doubles back, the metaphors shift and contradict. You experience the character’s mental state through the language itself. No writer before Shakespeare did this as consistently or as effectively.

The blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) that forms the backbone of his plays creates a rhythmic pulse — da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM — that mirrors the human heartbeat. When characters are in control, their speech follows the rhythm smoothly. When they’re emotionally disrupted, the verse breaks and fragments. The form carries meaning.

The Theater Context

Shakespeare didn’t write for English classes. He wrote for a commercial theater company that needed to fill seats six days a week.

The Globe Theatre held about 3,000 people. Groundlings (standing audience) paid a penny. Better seats cost more. The audience was mixed — aristocrats and apprentices, scholars and illiterates, all watching the same play. Shakespeare wrote for all of them simultaneously — philosophical depth for the educated, physical comedy and bawdy humor for everyone else, and compelling stories that kept all 3,000 people engaged for three hours.

This practical context shaped his writing. He wrote roles for specific actors — the clown Will Kemp, the leading man Richard Burbage. He wrote quickly — about two plays a year, sometimes more. He recycled plots from Italian novellas, English chronicles, and classical sources. Originality in plot wasn’t the point. Originality in language, character, and dramatic structure was.

Performances were in daylight, on a thrust stage surrounded by audience on three sides. No sets to speak of. Minimal props. The language had to create the world — “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” tells you there’s a window. “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” tells you what time it is and how Romeo feels about her. Everything happened through words.

Why Shakespeare Endures

Four hundred years is a long time. Most literature from the 1600s is read only by specialists. Why does Shakespeare persist?

Universal themes. Power corrupts (Macbeth). Love makes people irrational (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Parents and children misunderstand each other (King Lear). Jealousy destroys trust (Othello). These aren’t Elizabethan problems — they’re permanent human problems. Every generation recognizes itself in Shakespeare’s characters.

Psychological depth. Shakespeare’s characters think in ways that feel recognizably modern. Hamlet’s self-doubt, Lady Macbeth’s guilt, Shylock’s grievance, Prospero’s weariness — these aren’t types or allegories. They’re complex people with contradictory motivations, exactly like real people. No earlier dramatist achieved this consistently.

Adaptability. Shakespeare’s plays work in almost any setting. Romeo and Juliet has been set in 1950s New York (West Side Story), feudal Japan, apartheid South Africa, and modern-day gang warfare. The stories are so structurally sound and thematically flexible that they survive transplantation to any culture and era.

Performance. Unlike many classic texts, Shakespeare’s plays are written to be performed, not just read. A good production of Hamlet or The Tempest is a living experience — funny, moving, immediate. The page gives you poetry. The stage gives you theater. And theater is Shakespeare’s natural habitat.

Approaching Shakespeare

If Shakespeare intimidates you, here’s practical advice. Start with a performance, not the text. Watch a good film version — Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing or the 2010 The Tempest with Helen Mirren. Hearing the language spoken by skilled actors makes it vastly more accessible than reading it cold.

If you want to read, use a well-annotated edition — the Folger editions are excellent and free online. Read with the footnotes. Look up unfamiliar words. Don’t try to understand every line on first reading — get the gist and let the language wash over you. Meaning accumulates.

And don’t be precious about it. Shakespeare wrote popular entertainment. His plays include fart jokes, sword fights, cross-dressing, ghosts, witches, and a man who gets transformed into a donkey. The reverence that surrounds Shakespeare in education sometimes obscures how wild, funny, and alive the work actually is. It was written to entertain a rowdy crowd of 3,000, and it still does.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many plays did Shakespeare write?

Shakespeare wrote 37 plays (some scholars count 38 or 39, depending on attribution disputes). These include roughly 10 histories (like Henry V), 17 comedies (like A Midsummer Night's Dream), and 10 tragedies (like Hamlet and Macbeth). He also wrote 154 sonnets and several longer narrative poems. All of this was produced over about 25 years — roughly 1589 to 1613.

Why is Shakespeare's language so hard to understand?

Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, which differs from today's English in vocabulary, grammar, and idiom. About 10-15% of his words are unfamiliar to modern readers. But the bigger challenge is his density — Shakespeare packs more meaning per line than most writers, using metaphor, wordplay, and compressed syntax. Once you adjust to the rhythm, it gets much easier. Watching performances helps enormously.

Did Shakespeare actually write his plays?

The vast majority of scholars say yes. The 'authorship question' — claims that someone else wrote under Shakespeare's name — has been around since the 1850s but lacks credible evidence. Contemporary records clearly identify Shakespeare as a playwright and actor. The alternative candidates (Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford) have their own problems. Academic consensus is firmly that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Further Reading

• Folger Shakespeare Library
• Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
• Shakespeare Birthplace Trust