Research Guides: Shakespeare: Characters

Characters

Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
By William Hazlitt.
London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1921 [first published in 1817].
Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare's English History Plays
By Hailey Bachrach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters
By Nicholas R. Helms.
Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019.
Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine
By L. Leigh.
Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014.
The Women of Shakespeare.
By Frank Harris.
Oxford: Routledge, 2016 [first published in 1911].
Longman Guide to Shakespeare's Characters: A Who's Who of Shakespeare.
By Kenneth McLeish
Harlow: Longman, 1985.
Look up Shakespeare characters by name—usually first name—to get a handy, brief character description, along with the person’s key relationships with others in the play. This alphabetically-arranged source includes all of Shakespeare’s characters and indicates which play (or plays) each is involved in. It also includes summaries of all 38 plays intermingled with the character entries throughout the book.
A Dictionary of the Characters & Proper Names in the Works of Shakespeare; With Notes on the Sources.
By Francis Griffin Stokes.
New York: Dover Publications, 1970.
In general, use the Longman Guide for quick character information. These Stokes Dictionary entries, by contrast, lack clarity. The advantage of this dictionary, however, is the extras: besides containing entries on all the characters in the plays, this book lists and explains place-names, names used as allusions and most other proper names used in the plays. In each entry, the dictionary refers you to the related play, act, scene and line. In addition, some entries make references to first editions and sources.

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