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Study guides
Context, plot by act, characters, themes, key quotations with analysis, critics, and essay questions. Written for GCSE, A-level, AP Literature, IB and first-year university, and free to print.
Guides by text
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Hamlet
Revenge, delay, and the most examined mind in drama.
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Macbeth
Ambition, guilt, and a kingdom turned upside down.
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Romeo and Juliet
Love, haste, and a feud that outlives its reasons.
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Desire, misrule, and a play about making plays.
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Othello
Jealousy, reputation, and the most persuasive liar in Shakespeare.
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King Lear
Power given away, and what is left when it has gone.
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The Tempest
Magic, mastery, and the hard choice to forgive.
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Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Love, time, and fourteen lines that argue with themselves.
Studying a single speech?
The close readings take one famous passage at a time: what it says, how the verse works, and how to use it in an essay. They cover plays beyond these eight too, including The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Richard III, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
Tools for any text
- The Shakespeare essay planner. Thesis, paragraph plans and a checklist for any Shakespeare essay.
- The close reading toolkit. A method for annotating any passage: words, images, sound, metre, structure.
- Shakespeare’s language: a cheat sheet. Thou and thee, verb endings, false friends, and the terms examiners expect.
- The assessment map. What GCSE, A-level, AP Literature and IB actually reward, side by side.