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.
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
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
For our complete approach—centered around a crime scene investigation activity—see The Julius Caesar Unit Plan That Works for Reluctant Readers.
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
We break down two different approaches we’ve used in Our Macbeth Unit Plan: Two Approaches That Actually Worked.
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
For our full approach, see Romeo and Juliet Lessons That Make Close Reading Manageable.
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.
An Engaging, Confidence-Building Introduction to Shakespeare
Kick off your Shakespeare unit with an escape room that hooks students from the start. They’ll race to “save” Shakespeare from rival players at the Rose Theatre through five interactive tasks — from folding an octavo to decoding Shakespearean insults. Challenging enough for AP seniors yet scaffolded for freshmen, the activity builds confidence before tackling the Bard’s works. Includes a follow-up “Sonnet 18” lesson to help students feel the accomplishment of truly getting Shakespeare.
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!
