Four plays is a small slice of Shakespeare, but it is enough to show the range: two tragedies that never leave the page without a body, a comedy that has been staged continuously for four centuries, and a court tragedy written for a king.
There is no single order for the plays, because they were performed before they were printed and the dates in each case are the printing or the first staging, not the writing. The table follows the years recorded on the book pages here.
Word counts are for the texts on this site. Hamlet and Macbeth sit at about 35,000 and 18,000 words respectively, which is why one is a long evening and the other a short one.
The dates are the accepted ones: Romeo and Juliet 1597 with the first quarto, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet around 1600, and Macbeth 1623, the First Folio, since no quarto of the play survives. Word counts come from the texts on this site, and they are why the plays read faster than their reputation suggests: at 300 words a minute even Hamlet is two hours.
The four are also four different problems. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has no protagonist and four plots that resolve by magic; Romeo and Juliet solves its plot in the first scene and spends the rest on the consequences; Hamlet refuses to solve it for four acts; Macbeth solves it in the first act and spends the rest regretting it. Read in that order you get a short course in how tragedy is built.
Where to start
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — At 18,000 words it is the shortest play here, it is a comedy rather than a tragedy, and it is the easiest test of whether reading Shakespeare on the page works for you.
William Shakespeare in publication order
Numbered by the date on each book page. Word counts and reading times are for the text on this site.
| # | Year | Title | Form | Words | Reading time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1597 | Romeo and Juliet | Tragedy | 25,000 | 1 h | First printed in quarto in 1597. |
| 2 | 1600 | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Comedy | 18,000 | 1 h | First printed in quarto in 1600. |
| 3 | 1600 | Hamlet | Tragedy | 35,005 | 2 h | Written around 1600; first printed in 1603. |
| 4 | 1623 | Macbeth | Tragedy | 18,000 | 1 h | First printed in the 1623 Folio. |
| All four | 96,005 | 5 h |
How to read William Shakespeare
- Shortest first. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth are both about 18,000 words; Romeo and Juliet is 25,000 and Hamlet 35,005. Two evenings will cover the first pair.
- Tragedy or comedy. Dream is the only comedy here. The other three end badly: Verona, Elsinore and Scotland, in that order of body count.
- Read the long one last. Hamlet rewards knowing how the others work. Its soliloquies assume an audience used to being addressed directly.
Each play page carries a scene-by-scene summary, the word count, reading time and the EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files, plus the films and the stage history that made the play famous.
William Shakespeare’s shelf · Classic fiction · All authors · Books by decade.