Twelve months. Thirty-eight plays. Thousands of lines of iambic pentameter that, at the start, I could barely parse and, by the end, had rearranged something inside my brain I did not know was out of place. That is what it is like to read all of Shakespeare’s plays in a year, in the shortest version I can give you.
I finished the challenge this past winter, and people keep asking me the same handful of questions. Was it worth it. How long did it actually take. Did I want to quit. Which play broke me. Which one I now cannot stop thinking about. This article is my honest attempt to answer all of that, and to tell you what really happens when you decide to spend a year living inside the complete works of one writer.
If you are considering your own Shakespeare reading challenge for 2026, or you simply stumbled here wondering whether anyone actually does this for fun, you are in the right place. I will walk you through the decision moment, the brutal middle stretch, the plays that blindsided me, the ones I now defend loudly at dinner parties, and what the whole experience actually did to my head. No fluff, no ranking listicles pretending to be wisdom, just the unvarnished account of a year spent reading every single play Shakespeare wrote.
Table of Contents
The Moment I Committed to the Shakespeare Reading Challenge
The decision did not arrive with any drama. I was sitting in a secondhand bookshop on a rainy Saturday, flipping through a battered copy of the complete works, and the shopkeeper mentioned that a regular customer had spent three years working through it and never finished. Something about that landed. Three years and never finished. I did not want that to be me with anything, let alone with the writer who supposedly shaped the English language more than anyone else.
I bought the book. On the bus home I counted the plays. Depending on which scholar you trust, Shakespeare wrote somewhere between thirty-seven and thirty-nine plays that survive. I settled on thirty-eight as my working number, the standard Folger count, plus I tacked on the sonnets as a bonus because once you start you might as well keep going. Then I did the math. Thirty-eight plays across fifty-two weeks is roughly one play every nine or ten days. That left me cushion weeks for life, illness, holidays, and the inevitable week where I just did not want to look at another history about an English king I had never heard of.
I set three ground rules for myself. First, I would actually read the plays, not skim or read summaries and call it done. Second, I would pair each play with a film or audio production where one existed, because Shakespeare wrote these to be performed, not consumed as silent text. Third, I would keep a running journal of one honest paragraph per play, no matter how short or how much I disliked what I had just read. That journal turned out to be the single best decision of the whole project, and I will explain why later.
What I did not do was overthink the reading order. Plenty of people agonize over whether to read chronologically, by genre, by reputation, or by some clever interleaved pattern. I went genre by genre, starting with the comedies because I wanted to warm up on shorter, lighter material before facing the histories and tragedies. In hindsight this was a reasonable call, though I would change one thing, which I will get to in the challenges section.
What I can tell you now, having finished, is that the moment of commitment is the easiest part. The hard part is week fourteen, when you are deep in the Henry VI cycle and wondering whether anyone has ever actually enjoyed these plays or whether scholars have been politely lying for four hundred years.
What It’s Like to Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays in a Year: The First Month
The first month felt almost easy, and that is a trap. You start with the comedies, the language is comparatively light, the plots move quickly, and you convince yourself you are a natural. The Comedy of Errors took me a single afternoon. A Midsummer Night’s Dream I finished in two evenings and immediately wanted to read again. Love’s Labour’s Lost slowed me down with its wordplay, but I was still in the honeymoon phase and did not mind.
Here is the practical breakdown of what the time commitment actually looked like. Most plays run between twenty and thirty-five thousand words, which sounds like a lot until you realize a typical novel is eighty to a hundred thousand. A standard Shakespeare play, read at a normal pace with occasional pauses to look things up, took me about three to five hours of focused reading spread across a week. Add an hour or two for watching a production, and you are looking at maybe six hours per play. Over thirty-eight plays, that is roughly two hundred and thirty hours in a year, or about forty-five minutes a day if you spread it evenly. That is less time than most people spend on social media in a week.
On editions, I owe you an honest opinion because this is where beginners waste a lot of money. I started with a single-volume complete works, the heavy hardback I bought that rainy Saturday, and I used it for the first eight plays. Then I switched to individual Arden editions for the plays I cared about most, and the difference was night and day. Arden footnotes are generous, the introductions are essays in their own right, and you learn ten times more from one annotated Arden than from a bare text. The Pelican and Folger editions are excellent lighter alternatives if Arden feels too dense. My advice, having tried both routes, is to buy a complete works for breadth and then upgrade to annotated editions for the dozen or so plays you actually fall in love with.
The rhythm of one play per week became its own kind of structure in my life. Monday I would read the first act, usually cold, getting the names and setting straight. By Wednesday I had finished the play. Thursday through Saturday I watched a production, ideally two if I could find them, and on Sunday I wrote my journal paragraph. That cadence was sustainable for about three months before it started to feel like homework, which is when the real challenge began.
Challenges Along the Way
Every reading project of this size has a wall, and mine hit around the histories. The Henry VI trilogy in particular nearly ended the whole thing. These are early plays, sometimes co-authored, packed with shifting allegiances and a cast of nobles whose names all blur together if you do not have a family tree taped to your wall. I spent more time on those three plays than on the next five combined, and I genuinely questioned whether I had made a mistake starting with the histories before the tragedies.
The vocabulary was the other steady challenge, and it does not get easier the way you might expect. You learn that wherefore means why, not where, and that anon means soon. You pick up that marry is an oath and that soft is an interjection meaning wait. But Shakespeare also uses words that have simply vanished from the language, or worse, words that look familiar but meant something completely different in early modern English. False friends everywhere. I kept a small notebook of words I had to look up, and by the end of the year it had over four hundred entries.
What saved me, more than any single strategy, was adapting my approach midway through. Around month five I stopped trying to understand every word on first read and started reading each play twice. The first pass I read quickly, following the story and letting the language wash over me. The second pass, usually alongside watching a filmed production, I slowed down and dug into the footnotes. This doubled my time per play but tripled my comprehension, and it is the single piece of advice I would give anyone attempting this challenge.
There was also a motivation dip around the middle of the year that I did not anticipate. After the initial excitement wore off and before I had reached the masterpieces, there was a stretch of about six weeks where reading felt like obligation. I wanted to quit at least twice. What pulled me through was the journal, because going back and rereading my early entries reminded me how much I had already gained and how much I would lose by stopping. Community helped too. I found a small online group of people working through the complete works at different paces, and trading reactions to plays with strangers who were just as obsessed turned out to be genuinely sustaining.
The hardest single play for me to understand was Timon of Athens, which is an odd, uneven, possibly unfinished work about a man who gives away his fortune and then turns violently misanthropic when his friends abandon him. The tonal shifts are jarring, the structure feels broken, and I genuinely could not tell for long stretches whether I was missing something or whether the play itself was the problem. Reading later that scholars think Thomas Middleton co-authored it and that it may never have been performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime helped, but at the time it was pure slog.
Surprises and Discoveries
This is the section I most wanted to write, because the surprises were the best part of the entire year. Going in, I thought I knew Shakespeare. I had read Hamlet and Macbeth in school, seen a few films, and absorbed the general cultural understanding that he was the greatest writer in English. What I did not expect was how many plays I had never heard of would end up among my favorites, and how many of the famous ones would land more quietly than I anticipated.
The biggest surprise was Measure for Measure. I had it filed mentally as one of those problem plays, the awkward genre-mashups that scholars argue about, and I expected to tolerate it at best. Instead it became one of my top three plays of the entire year. The moral complexity is staggering. A deputy tasked with cleaning up Vienna’s morality demands that a nun sleep with him in exchange for her brother’s life, and the play refuses to resolve this cleanly even at the end. I sat with it for days afterward, genuinely unsettled, and reread it within a month. Nothing in my prior Shakespeare exposure had prepared me for how dark and modern this play feels.
The second surprise was how much I loved the late romances. The Tempest I expected to enjoy, and I did, but The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline blindsided me. These plays do not behave like the comedies or the tragedies. They break apart and reassemble, they jump across decades and oceans, they stage impossible returns from the dead and ask you to accept them on faith. There is a dream logic to them that I found more moving than anything in the more famous tragedies, and The Winter’s Tale in particular contains the stage direction Exit, pursued by a bear, which is the greatest single stage direction in the history of theater and I will not be taking questions.
A third surprise, and one I want to flag for anyone in a similar position, was the discovery that Shakespeare repeatedly returns to the same handful of concerns across every genre and every period. Disguise and mistaken identity. The gap between public performance and private feeling. The cost of mercy versus the cost of justice. The way power corrupts not the wielder but everyone around them. Once you start noticing these patterns, you cannot stop, and the plays begin talking to each other across decades of his career. This is something no individual play can teach you. It only becomes visible when you read them all.
I also expected to dislike the problem plays and instead found them the most intellectually stimulating category in the canon. Troilus and Cressida, which is neither tragedy nor comedy nor history and which was not even printed in the First Folio’s main table of contents, turned out to be one of the most corrosive and modern things I read all year. Its view of war, heroism, and sexual politics is so bitter that it feels like it was written last week. I had to keep reminding myself this came from the same pen as the romantic comedies.
On the flip side, a few famous plays landed softer than I expected. The Taming of the Shrew I found difficult to enjoy not because of the language but because of the gender politics, which are genuinely uncomfortable regardless of how cleverly the framing device tries to soften them. Romeo and Juliet moved me less than I had been told it would since adolescence, perhaps because I had been oversold on its romance and underprepared for how much of the play is actually about political violence between families. These are personal reactions, and part of the value of reading the whole canon is that you stop inheriting other people’s rankings and start forming your own.
The final surprise was a small one but it stuck with me. I had always assumed the sonnets were a side project, a private poetic exercise unrelated to the plays. Reading them after finishing all thirty-eight plays, I realized they share the exact same obsessive concerns with time, beauty, betrayal, and the limits of language. The same mind is at work in both. The plays and the sonnets are one continuous investigation into what it means to be human, and you only see the through-line when you have read enough of both.
Highlights and Favorites
People will ask you for your ranking the moment they hear you did this, so I will give you mine with one important caveat that the forum veterans warned me about. Recency bias is real. The plays you read last will feel freshest, and you will overrate them. The plays you read early, when you were still finding your footing, you may underrate simply because you did not yet know how to read Shakespeare. With that disclaimer, here are the plays that wrecked me in the best way.
King Lear was the single most devastating reading experience of the year. I had read it before, years ago, and remembered it as a tragedy about an old king dividing his kingdom. What I had forgotten, or never properly felt, is that Lear is fundamentally a play about a father realizing he has misunderstood his children, and a play about whether human suffering has any meaning at all. The storm scene, where Lear rages at the heavens, is the moment the year peaked for me. I set the book down and stared at the wall for ten minutes. Nothing else I read all year came close.
Hamlet was the other life-changing play, and it deserves every ounce of its reputation. Reading it again as part of the full canon, rather than in isolation, I finally understood why it towers. Hamlet is Shakespeare thinking out loud about thought itself, about whether reasoning your way to action is wisdom or cowardice, about what we owe to the dead and what we owe to ourselves. Every other play in the canon feels like it is in conversation with this one, and reading the tragedies around it sharpened my sense of how radical it is.
Among the comedies, Twelfth Night was my favorite, narrowly edging out Much Ado About Nothing. Twelfth Night has a melancholy undertow that the earlier comedies lack, and the treatment of Malvolio is cruel in a way that has haunted directors and readers for centuries. I loved it precisely because it does not resolve comfortably. Among the histories, my pick is Richard II, which is really a tragedy in historical clothing and contains some of the most beautiful poetry Shakespeare ever wrote. Richard’s descent from divine-right king to imprisoned philosopher is heartbreaking and gorgeously rendered.
I will spare you the full reverse-ranked list of all thirty-eight because, honestly, the ranking is less interesting than the experience of making it. What I will say is that the year gave me five or six plays I now consider part of my permanent inner library, the kind of works I will reread every few years for the rest of my life, and another dozen I am genuinely glad to have met even if I will not rush back to them. The remaining plays were worth reading once, and a few of them I will happily never open again. That distribution feels honest and real to me, and it is not the distribution I would have predicted at the start.
What I Learned: The Real Benefits of Reading Shakespeare in a Year
Here is where I get practical about what the experience actually did to me, because I think people want to know whether this is good for you in some measurable way or whether it is just an aesthetic indulgence. My honest answer is that it is both, and the measurable benefits surprised me.
My reading speed and comprehension in older and denser English improved dramatically. Texts that would have stopped me cold a year ago, whether Milton or the King James Bible or even dense modern literary fiction, now flow more easily. Your brain adapts to the syntax and vocabulary of early modern English faster than you might think, and the adaptation sticks. I am a measurably better reader than I was a year ago, and that alone makes me think reading Shakespeare is good for your brain in the same way that learning a closely related foreign language sharpens your facility with your own.
More subtly, my attention span improved. Shakespeare rewards slow reading and punishes skimming. There were weeks when I tried to rush a play and absorbed almost nothing, and weeks when I sat with a single soliloquy for an hour and came away transformed. The discipline of choosing depth over speed, week after week, rebuilt a muscle I had let atrophy in the era of phones and feeds. I did not expect that benefit and it may be the one I value most.
The bigger change was in how I think about character and motivation. Shakespeare is relentless in his refusal to let any character be simply good or simply evil. Even his villains have interior lives, even his heroes have ugly impulses, and the best plays refuse to tell you who to root for. After a year of inhabiting that moral complexity, I find myself slower to judge people in ordinary life, more curious about what is driving them, more willing to hold contradiction without resolving it. I am not claiming Shakespeare made me a better person, but he did make me a more patient observer of human beings, and I think that is worth saying.
My relationship with literature changed too. Before this project I treated reading mostly as entertainment or self-improvement, two categories that often feel like obligations. After a year of reading Shakespeare I started to trust that the great works survive for reasons you can only discover by actually engaging with them, not by taking their reputation on faith. I have since started working through other writers I had been intimidated by, and I am kinder to myself when a difficult book takes months instead of weeks. The Shakespeare year reorganized my reading life, and that reorganization is still unfolding.
The final thing I learned, and the one I least expected, is that there is real value in finishing a long creative project simply because you said you would. The completion itself changed something in me. I set out to read all of Shakespeare’s plays in a year, I did it, and now I know I am the kind of person who finishes what I start. That is a small and sturdy identity shift, and I would not trade it for any individual play on the list.
FAQs
How long would it take to read all of Shakespeare’s plays?
Reading all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays at a steady pace of about one play per week takes roughly nine to twelve months, depending on how much time you devote to each play and whether you pair the reading with film or audio productions. Most readers report spending between three and six hours per play, which works out to around forty-five minutes a day across a full year.
Are Shakespeare’s plays worth reading?
Yes, Shakespeare’s plays are worth reading, both for the enduring insight they offer into human nature and for the way they shaped the English language itself. Reading them in full, rather than only the handful taught in school, reveals surprising variety, including dark comedies, bitter problem plays, and dreamlike late romances that are often overlooked.
Is reading Shakespeare good for your brain?
Reading Shakespeare is good for your brain because it forces sustained attention, exposes you to complex syntax and unfamiliar vocabulary, and rewards slow, careful reading. After a year of consistent engagement, many readers report improved comprehension of dense texts, a longer attention span, and sharper interpretive skills that transfer to other challenging reading.
What is the hardest Shakespeare play to understand?
The hardest Shakespeare play to understand varies by reader, but common candidates include the Henry VI history trilogy for its dense political plotting, Timon of Athens for its uneven structure and possible co-authorship, and Troilus and Cressida for its bitter, genre-defying tone. Most readers find the early histories and the problem plays tougher going than the famous tragedies and comedies.
What grade level reading is Shakespeare?
Shakespeare’s plays are generally considered to read at roughly a tenth to twelfth grade level when measured by modern readability formulas, but those metrics understate the difficulty because they cannot account for early modern vocabulary, inverted syntax, and poetic compression. Most readers find Shakespeare genuinely challenging well into adulthood, which is why annotated editions like Arden and Folger are so widely used.
Conclusion: Was It Worth It?
Yes. Unambiguously, yes. If you are wondering whether it is worth it to read all of Shakespeare’s plays in a year, my answer after living through it is that the experience repaid the time many times over. I came out the other side a better reader, a slower thinker, and a person with five or six plays lodged permanently in my inner life. I would do it again, and I am already planning which writer to spend a year with next.
That said, I want to be honest about what it costs. This is not a casual undertaking. There were weeks I wanted to quit, plays I slogged through, and a stretch in the middle where the whole project felt like a chore I had inflicted on myself. The rewards are real but they are not free, and the only way to collect them is to actually finish.
If you are on the fence, my advice is simple. Pick a start date. Buy one annotated edition of your first play. Set a one-paragraph-per-play journal rule. And do not overthink the reading order, because the order matters far less than the commitment to keep going. The complete works of Shakespeare have been waiting four hundred years. They will wait for you to start.