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The 10 Best Shakespeare Plays to Teach in High School

Which Shakespeare play should I teach this year? It’s a question that pops up frequently in teacher communities, and it’s one we’ve asked ourselves.

It’s a good question. Do we follow the trends and teach the most famous plays, building our students’ cultural awareness? Or do we buck the trends and teach something less common, exposing our students to something new? What about our personal favorites? What if we have struggling readers? What if we teach AP Lit, and we want to make sure our students have as many options for Q3 as possible?

It’s a lot to consider, and there’s no one right answer. When you’re considering the best Shakespeare plays to teach in your classroom, you have to consider your school curriculum guide, your local community, your students’ interests and ability levels, and your own comfort with the text.

But in our experience, the most commonly taught Shakespeare plays are the most common for a reason: they’re really good, and they work well with high school students.

Based on our experience in the classroom and the conversations we’ve participated in, we’ve got some thoughts on the ten best Shakespeare plays to use in the classroom, especially if you teach high school.

The Heavy Hitters: The Best Shakespeare Plays for the Classroom

These four tragedies are by far the most common Shakespeare plays taught in high school, and with good reason. They’re great literature, they offer ample opportunities for rich analysis and discussion, and they’ll certainly help build your students’ cultural toolkits.

Blog - In the Classroom - The 10 Best Shakespeare Plays to Teach in High School - best shakespeare plays

Hamlet

Hamlet seems to have crown jewel status when considering the best Shakespeare plays. It’s a compelling story: Hamlet’s uncle Claudius kills Hamlet’s father and marries Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet’s father appears as a ghost, begging Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet dithers around for a long time, pretends to go mad, and then nearly all the characters die in a massive bloodbath.

There are significant themes to explore about family obligation, the decision to take action, sense and madness, even existence itself, and if you are preparing your students for the AP English Literature exam, students who have a mastery of Hamlet are likely set for Q3, regardless of the prompt.

Choose this one if . . .

We recommend Hamlet if you teach advanced students who have encountered Shakespeare before. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, clocking in at 4,167 lines and a 4:02 runtime for the film version. And while it has a few action-packed scenes, there’s also a lot of pondering and philosophizing. It’s a rewarding read and worthy of analysis, but it’s intimidating for students’ first exposure to Shakespeare, and if you have struggling readers, other plays can better serve your purposes.

Tips for Teaching

  • Start with the 1996 Kenneth Branagh movie version: it’s long, but it’s well done and close to the original text. It helps students understand the basic plot (especially Hamlet’s feigned madness) and engages them in the story so that by the time they start reading, they can focus on the language rather than trying to figure out what’s happening.
  • Commit the time to do Hamlet well. Because of its length, Hamlet is an easy play for students to oversimplify, so if this is their “go-to” Q3 play in AP Lit, you’ll want to make sure they can discuss it with sophistication.
  • Make time for close reading. Hamlet includes some of Shakespeare’s richest dramatic monologues and soliloquies (“To be, or not to be,” anyone?), and working through them with students not only provides a great opportunity to grapple with challenging vocabulary and figurative language but leads to a stronger understanding of the play’s complex characters.
Blog - In the Classroom - The 10 Best Shakespeare Plays to Teach in High School - best shakespeare plays

Julius Caesar

We taught this one for so many years that it reads as easily as modern prose for us. It’s all about political machinations: Brutus, a respected senator, is concerned about Julius Caesar’s growing power and the threat it poses to the Roman republic. He loves Rome above all else, making him an easy target for Cassius, another senator, to manipulate him into joining a conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. After the assassination, Caesar’s protégé, Mark Antony, seeks vengeance, plunging all of Rome into civil war.

It’s easy to engage students initially because they already know some of the story from their history classes, and even if they don’t, assassination tends to be an attention-grabber. Once students are engaged, there’s a lot to work with: between Cassius and Mark Antony, the play is a masterclass in manipulation.

Choose this one if . . .

Group #1

Because the plot is relatively straightforward and students have heard of Caesar and ancient Rome, this is a good play to use with beginning Shakespeare scholars and struggling readers. It’s also easy to modify and excerpt (see below) without losing too much of the experience. If this is you, be sure to check out our Tips for Teaching below: this was our primary audience for 15 years, so we’ve learned a lot!

Group #2

Julius Caesar is also a great fit for honors or PreAP sophomores. Between the rich figurative language and Brutus’s and Mark Anthony’s funeral speeches (classics of rhetorical analysis), the play is perfectly suited for preparing students for both AP English Language and AP English Literature. It doesn’t take much work to master the plot, so students can really dig into the language.

Tips for Teaching

  • If you’re teaching struggling readers (or just short on time), consider ending with Act 3. The first half of the play is all about the scheming and plotting of the conspirators, and once Caesar is assassinated in Act 3, the play shifts focus to Mark Antony’s efforts to seek revenge. While there’s a clear through line, the second half feels like a different play, and students tend to be less engaged once Caesar dies. If you want students to know how the story ends, you can easily assign a summary or a scavenger hunt to help them get the essential details.
  • Set Brutus and Cassius side by side for comparison. Brutus and Cassius both want to kill Caesar, but they have very different motivations for doing so, and the difference is clear for students. We’ve found that students of varying ability levels are able to formulate reasonable arguments about this topic.
  • Don’t use this one to introduce the definitions of tragedy and the tragic hero. Many of Shakespeare’s tragedies offer clear examples of these terms, but Julius Caesar is messy. We’ve read arguments for three different characters as the tragic hero, the title character dies in Act 3, and Brutus (our choice for tragic hero) doesn’t fit the qualities of the tragic hero quite as neatly as, say, Macbeth.
  • Be aware that students don’t love the film version. Of course, our students will take any opportunity to watch rather than read, but the best version is probably the 1953 Marlon Brando version (in black-and-white), and it just doesn’t appeal to students the same way more modern adaptations do.
Updated Edition Folger Shakespeare Library version of Macbeth by William Shakespeare with detailed notes from the world's leading center for Shakespeare studies. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Our #1 pick for best Shakespeare play to teach in high school.

Macbeth

If you told us we could only recommend one Shakespeare play to teach, it would be Macbeth, hands down. Who wouldn’t be interested in the story? A loyal and respected Scottish noble hears a prophecy from three witches that he will become king. With encouragement from his wife, he kills the king, starting down a path of increasing betrayal, cruelty, and bloodshed that ultimately ends with his own demise.

There’s enough action here to engage your struggling and reluctant readers, and the short scenes move the play along. But there are also rich themes about power and ambition that will work for many AP English Literature Q3 prompts. 

Choose this one if . . .

No matter who your audience is, it’s hard to go wrong with Macbeth. We particularly recommend Macbeth if it’s your students’ first introduction to Shakespeare or you have struggling readers, and especially if you have struggling readers in your AP Lit class. The short scenes, heavy action, and scheming make it feel less intimidating than other Shakespeare plays, and students have strong opinions about Macbeth and his wife.

Tips for Teaching

  • Thank the ELA gods that Denzel Washington has come through for us. For years, it was tough to find a film adaptation of Macbeth we were comfortable showing in class. Filmmakers love to do strange things with Macbeth, whether it’s setting it on the World War I battlefield or sexualizing the witches and Lady Macbeth in ways that made us squirm when we thought about watching them with students. But the 2021 adaptation is an excellent, well-acted staging of the original text.
  • Consider a final essay about the way Macbeth changes over the course of the play. Not only does Macbeth’s change point clearly to the theme and fit the beginning-middle-end organization we encourage with our students, but both our struggling readers and our AP Literature students were able to craft meaningful (or, at least, plausible) arguments in response to the prompt.
  • Use Macbeth to introduce (or practice with) symbolism. While the symbols are pretty obvious (and thus easy for students to spot)—blood, water, dagger—they carry a lot of meaning and are worthy of discussion.
  • Make time to examine the soliloquies. Just as with Hamlet, there are some rich soliloquies that offer rich close reading experiences for readers of all levels. Our AP students crafted strong analytical paragraphs explaining how Shakespeare uses literary techniques to convey his purpose, and because we did our close reading after students had already read the full play, they were able to place the passage in context more meaningfully than they sometimes (often) do.
Blog - In the Classroom - The 10 Best Shakespeare Plays to Teach in High School - best shakespeare plays

Romeo and Juliet

Steph didn’t read Romeo and Juliet until college because her high school teachers all went the nontraditional route. On the one hand, great: Steph got exposed to plays that others didn’t. But she also kind of felt cheated: everyone knows the story of the tragic star-crossed lovers, and it felt like a disadvantage not to have read it.

This right here is the main reason to teach Romeo and Juliet. Well, wait. That and the fact that it is about teenagers. It’s like Shakespeare wrote a YA play, and our students love to read about themselves and scenarios they could, maybe, find themselves in. Star-crossed romance between warring families? It’s not hard to draw them into this one.

Choose this one if . . .

We’d recommend this one for freshman and sophomore students of all levels. Freshman year seems to be when most American students read it, and for good reason. The story is high-interest, engaging, and easy to follow, and the language is rich enough for analysis with higher-level students. We piloted a study skills class with a group of very reluctant freshmen (whose reading levels were far below grade level), and they had strong feelings about the story when they read it in English, despite their usual disdain for reading.

We probably wouldn’t use this one for AP English Literature, however. Is it worthy of literary analysis in the same way? Absolutely. But it lacks the thematic complexity of some of the other tragedies, which makes it less of a go-to for the Q3 prompt. (We would, though, absolutely encourage our students to write about the play if it’s all they could think of on test day.)

Tips for Teaching

  • Be mindful of your students’ own development. We wanted to be careful not to condescend to students or criticize them in our teaching of this teenage love story. It’s easy, as an adult, to read Romeo and Juliet as a cautionary tale: dumb teenagers act impulsively over a crush and end up dead. But our students are still in the stage when first love is really big and they have big emotions about everything. It’s not kind or helpful to focus on teenagers’ foolishness in love or inability to make good decisions. (Plus, they’re pretty capable of judging Romeo and Juliet’s decisions all on their own.)
  • Consider making responsibility and culpability a significant part of your unit. There are a lot of complexities to examine in the question of “Who’s at fault here?” and students definitely have opinions about it. Because there are so many people to blame (for varying reasons and to varying degrees), students can craft a sophisticated argument in response to a relatively straightforward question.
  • Focus on key passages in class. If you don’t want to get bogged down in reading every line of the play together, you can use a scaffolded reading assignment with film clips (Leo and Claire, of course!) to guide students through the play and then select 1–2 key passages from each act for close reading. This approach allowed us to achieve a good balance between asking students to work independently and helping them with more complex analysis, and it didn’t drag the reading out.

What If I Want to Teach Comedy?

If you’re only going to teach one Shakespeare play, we definitely recommend teaching a tragedy. Not only are the tragedies more thematically meaningful, but students have to work really, really hard to figure out why the comedies are funny, and we’re not sure it’s worth the effort for most students.

Most of the humor in Shakespeare’s comedies comes from wordplay in language that is unfamiliar to modern readers. Not only do you need ample use of a dictionary, but you also need footnotes that explain cultural understandings and idioms that even most dictionaries won’t provide. Our students just . . . don’t find Shakespeare’s plays all that funny.

The storylines are also really convoluted: everyone is switching identities and lovers, there are an unreasonable number of twins, and there are a lot of side plots that are only tangentially related to the main plot. If your students are struggling readers, tackling the comedies demands a lot of them.

That being said, however, students can enjoy Shakespeare’s comedies, especially if you allow them to watch a film version, and if you have more advanced students, they may find the work to untangle the language worthwhile. This would also work well for teachers and students interested in the creation and structure of plays, especially for an Elizabethan audience. So a room full of eager drama students might do better with the comedies than your typical English class.

If you’re interested in teaching a comedy, we’d recommend A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, or Twelfth Night. These three are by far the best of Shakespeare’s comedies—we’ve watched quite a few others and some of them are rough or seem to be the same old story—and they all have high-quality film versions. 

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention King Lear, Othello, or The Tempest. All three are great plays that we’ve enjoyed reading (and watching) and that show up frequently on the recommended books list for Q3 on the AP English Literature exam. You can’t go wrong with any of them, but since we haven’t taught them, we’ll leave the advice to other classroom experts.

You’ll notice we haven’t mentioned the histories here. While several of them frequently appear on lists of the best Shakespeare plays, our students just aren’t as interested in the inner workings of the English monarchy as they are in these other stories of love and murder.

Blog - In the Classroom - The 10 Best Shakespeare Plays to Teach in High School - best shakespeare plays

Of course, the best reason to choose a Shakespeare play is because you already have a unit for it! We have big plans to build up our Shakespeare library, but for now, we have a full unit on Julius Caesar with differentiated options for standard-level and PreAP/honors students. It’s the unit we’ve most refined and perfected during our time in the classroom, and we hope your students will enjoy our crime scene investigation approach, where they ultimately use the findings of their investigation to write a business letter to a historian arguing whether Brutus should be remembered as a traitor to the Roman republic or the “noblest Roman of them all.”

What Shakespeare plays would you like to see in our curriculum library? What ranks at the top of your list of best Shakespeare plays? Reach out to us at [email protected] or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works to let us know!