WShakespeare exists to make the most rewarding writing in the English language readable, without flattening it, dumbing it down, or pretending the difficulty isn’t real.
Most Shakespeare resources fall into one of two traps. Some treat the work as a museum piece, all reverence and footnotes, written for people who already understand it. Others strip it down to plot summaries and quote lists, the literary equivalent of a postcard of a painting. Neither helps you read the poem in front of you.
This site starts from a different premise: that a curious reader, given clear and honest explanation, can meet Shakespeare on his own terms and find it worth the effort. Everything here is written to bring you closer to the text, not to stand between you and it.
What You Will Find Here
The site covers four areas, each built on the same principle: depth over breadth, and argument over summary.
Sonnets. All 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, listed by number and first line, with a full analysis for a growing number of them. Each analysis includes the complete poem, a plain-English reading of every line, the poem’s themes and form, and a close reading that goes beyond paraphrase. The Sonnets section is the heart of the site.
Poems. Shakespeare’s four longer poems, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle and A Lover’s Complaint, read with the same attention to form and language as the sonnets.
Biography. Articles on Shakespeare’s life and career, from his childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon and the “lost years” to his work in London and the debate over who wrote his plays. The Biography section sticks to what the records show, and says so when the evidence runs out.
Reference. Guides to the tools that make the texts less opaque: iambic pentameter, literary devices, major themes, grammar and syntax, Elizabethan England, the Globe Theatre and a glossary of archaic words. The Reference section is there to support the primary texts, not to replace them.
How We Write
Three principles guide everything published here.
Plain English, not plain thinking. Clarity is a courtesy, not a compromise. A student can use the quick-reference tables and line-by-line readings, and a returning reader will find an argument worth disagreeing with.
The text comes first. Every interpretation is anchored to specific lines. Where readings differ, you will hear about the disagreement rather than a single answer handed down as fact.
Honesty about difficulty. Some passages are hard, some questions are unsettled, and some famous readings are shakier than they look. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Our Editorial Standards
Accuracy matters more to us than anything else on the page, so every article goes through the same checks before it is published.
The poems are checked against their earliest printed editions: the sonnets against the 1609 Quarto, and the longer poems against their first editions, with spelling lightly modernized. Dates, names and facts are checked against the historical record. Where scholars disagree, we say so, and where a reading is our own, we make the argument rather than asserting the conclusion.
We are also a small group of writers who do this in our spare time, so despite those checks, mistakes will slip through from time to time. If you spot one, whether it is a misquoted line, a wrong date or a reading you think is off, please let us know through our contact page. We will look into it and make sure it is corrected.
For more on how articles are researched and written, see our Editorial Standards.
Who Writes This
WShakespeare is written by a small team of readers in their spare time, not a university department.
The team is led by Alex Finch, a lifelong lover of literature and a Shakespeare enthusiast who came to the sonnets as a reader rather than a scholar. Alex edits the site, sets its standards and reads every article before it goes live.
He works with a small group of writers who share the same passion for Shakespeare’s work and the same goal: to bring it to more people. We came to Shakespeare for pleasure and stayed for the depth, and we write the explanations we wish we had had when we started.
The texts themselves are in the public domain. The readings, explanations and arguments are our own, written to be read closely and, ideally, argued with.
Why Shakespeare
Shakespeare matters not because he is old or because he is famous, but because he is so hard to exhaust.
The sonnets mean something different at forty than they did at sixteen. The language resists paraphrase: however carefully you explain a line, something is left over that only the original contains. That is what this site is built around. There is always more to say, and saying it carefully, with attention to the text, is its own reward.