- 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 continues to explore the role of the individual in both writing and reading history. He references another common philosophical principle of American Transcendentalism—that there is little that can be objectively known about reality, and that each person must therefore discover their own subjective truths about the world. The notion of historical “fact” is one that Emerson critiques throughout the essay, believing instead in personal intuition over empirical data.
Emerson makes the claim that the standard definition of history does not really exist. Whereas most studies of the past focus on objective figures such as names, dates, and places, Emerson…