Skip to main content
Dantes.io Logo
Dantes.io

Best resources to learnShakespeare

Study sheet

Shakespeare's plays and sonnets remain the core of English literature. You will learn how to read and watch the plays, the best editions and lectures, and the criticism that opens them up.

Where to start

Start with Folger Shakespeare, the Folger Shakespeare Library's free online texts of all the plays and poems, with modern spelling, line numbers and glossarial notes. If you only use one resource beyond the plays themselves, make it Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All, a paid critical companion to all thirty-eight plays. Emma Smith's free lectures, Approaching Shakespeare (Oxford lecture series), are the natural next step.

8 resources · · How we curate

📚Books(4)

bookPaid

Shakespeare's Language

Kermode traces the shift in Shakespeare's verse around 1600 toward compressed, elliptical, deliberately difficult writing, then reads the mature plays passage by passage. Prepares a reader to work through lines that resist paraphrase instead of skimming them.

advanced🇬🇧
bookPaid

Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide

The Royal Shakespeare Company director's workshop book, transcribed from sessions with Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Covers scanning the verse, antithesis, irony and soliloquy so a reader can hear how a line is constructed. The one resource that teaches the mechanics of the verse line - where the sense breaks, what antithesis does, how a soliloquy is steered - as transferable technique. It is why a reader stops bouncing off the language.

intermediate🇬🇧
bookPaid

Shakespeare After All

A thousand-page critical companion treating all thirty-eight plays in chronological order, drawn from three decades of Harvard and Yale lecture courses. Read alongside each play, it supplies context, image patterns and interpretive history.

intermediate🇬🇧
bookPaid

This Is Shakespeare

Twenty essays, one per play, arguing that the texts work through deliberate gaps and unresolved ambiguities. Readers finish with a way of reading a play as a set of open questions instead of hunting for a single fixed meaning. The strongest accessible entry point in print: it argues a transferable thesis about how Shakespeare's ambiguity works, so it functions as critical method rather than as a set of summaries.

beginner🇬🇧

🌐Websites(3)

website

MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive

An open-access archive of filmed Shakespeare productions from dozens of countries and languages, with scripts, interviews, glossaries and study modules. Viewers can compare stagings of the same play across cultures and see how performance settles textual questions. This is the only serious open-access performance archive, and cross-cultural staging comparison is itself an analytical method.

intermediate🇬🇧
website

Folger Shakespeare: Complete Texts of the Plays and Poems

The Folger Shakespeare Library's own scholarly editions of all 37 plays and the poems, free to read online with modern spelling, line numbers, glossarial notes and full-corpus search. Gives a reliable text without buying separate paperbacks.

beginner🇬🇧
website

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Website of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Stratford-upon-Avon charity that cares for Shakespeare's family homes and a major archive. Offers articles on his life, plays and sonnets, collection items and teaching materials that help readers place the works in historical context.

beginner🇬🇧

🎙️Podcasts(1)

podcast

Approaching Shakespeare (Oxford lecture series)

Thirty-two hour-long Oxford undergraduate lectures by Emma Smith, each taking a single play and one central critical question. Listeners come away able to build an argument about a play from textual evidence rather than repeating received readings. The best free university-level Shakespeare lecture series in existence, and it teaches critical method (what question to ask, what counts as evidence) rather than plot.

intermediate🇬🇧
Share this topic

More in Literature Analysis

See all 14 topics in Literature Analysis →

Frequently Asked Questions

Where should I start learning Shakespeare?

Start with Folger Shakespeare, the Folger Shakespeare Library's free online texts of all the plays and poems, with modern spelling, line numbers and glossarial notes. If you only use one resource beyond the plays themselves, make it Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All, a paid critical companion to all thirty-eight plays. Emma Smith's free lectures, Approaching Shakespeare (Oxford lecture series), are the natural next step.

What are the best free resources to learn Shakespeare?

Dantes has curated 8 resources for Shakespeare, including 4 books, 3 websites, 1 podcasts. All resources are hand-picked for quality — no algorithmic filler. Browse the full list above to find the format that works best for you.

Is Shakespeare hard to learn?

Shakespeare is approachable at the beginner level — there are resources here specifically for those starting from scratch. As you progress, intermediate and advanced material is also available to take your skills further.

What types of Shakespeare learning resources are available on Dantes?

For Shakespeare, Dantes has curated 4 books, 3 websites, 1 podcasts. Each resource type serves a different learning style: videos and YouTube for visual learners, books for depth, courses for structured progression, and websites for quick reference.

How does Dantes select Shakespeare resources?

Dantes is an algorithm-free learning directory. Resources are hand-curated based on quality, accuracy, and usefulness — not engagement metrics or paid placements. The goal is to surface the best learning material for Shakespeare, whether it's a free YouTube series, a classic textbook, or an open courseware from a top university.

Go deeper

Test your understanding of Shakespeare

Explain it out loud. An AI tutor listens and asks questions that expose gaps you didn't know you had.