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Three modern registers
Faithful to the original, modern conversational, or compressed text-message form. Switch between them on any speech to find how the line lands for you.
Original text · Modern translation · All free
Shakespeare, finally enjoyable.
Original text on the left, modern translation on the right. Glosses, deep dives, wordplay X-rays, and cultural context — all inline. No footnotes. No textbooks. Just brilliant company.
38
Plays
Tragedies, comedies, histories, romances
154
Sonnets
The complete sequence
766
Scenes
Each annotated, glossed, contextualized
3
Registers
Faithful · conversational · text-message
A glimpse of the reader
Act 2, Scene 7 — As You Like It
Original
Jaques
[as if discovering it for the first time]
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
Modern
Jaques
The whole world is a theater, and every person in it nothing more than an actor. We each make our entrances — birth — and our exits — death — and in a single lifetime one man plays seven distinct roles.
exits and their entrances — On the Elizabethan stage,
actors entered through the tiring-house doors. Jaques maps life
onto the stage: entrance equals birth, exit equals death.
One of the most-quoted speeches in English. It lands here
because Shakespeare has spent two acts building Jaques's
philosophical detachment — this is the payoff.
Every scene includes three registers, glosses, deep dives, and voice notes. Read the full scene →
Everything a reader needs.
Nothing they don't.
Gloss
Annotations that earn their place
Every gloss explains something a modern reader would genuinely miss — a dead metaphor, a historical reference, a pun. Nothing obvious annotated.
Subtext
Emotional subtitles
Each speech has a bracketed note capturing what is underneath the words — what the character is really feeling, not what they are saying.
Context
Deep dives
Cultural history, literary craft, and references — two to four per scene. Primogeniture. The Marlowe death. Why Shakespeare keeps stopping to sing.
Wordplay
X-rays for puns
Shakespeare's puns branch in two or three directions at once. The X-ray pulls them apart and shows every reading of a loaded line.
Stakes
What's on stage
For every scene: what each character on stage wants, in fifteen words. Keeps you anchored in the drama rather than the poetry.
The complete works.
Every scene annotated.
All 38 plays — tragedies, comedies, histories, romances — plus the 154 sonnets. Side-by-side translations, three modern registers, deep dives, and annotations on every line. Every word free.