- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Emerson begins “Experience” by noting that many people have an intuitive sense that they are not in contact with reality. They search for the “sharp peaks and edges of truth” in extreme experiences, like grief. But Emerson, who has recently experienced extreme grief with the death of his son, Waldo, argues that grief actually reveals the precise opposite: that real life is entirely out of reach. This is because the subject, or the individual, is always fundamentally separate from the object, or what they experience. Emerson writes that the gap is like an “innavigable sea,” an expanse whose vastness prevents…