- 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
These are the opening lines of Dante’s Purgatorio. In the first part of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, Dante saw defeated souls in Hell, those without hope of Heaven. Now, in Purgatory, the whole tone of the epic poem shifts to one of certain hope (“to race now over better waves […] dead poetry will rise again”).The souls here must spend years or even centuries purging their sins by learning to practice the corresponding virtues. But despite this, these souls know that they will eventually arrive in Heaven. Much as souls suffering in Purgatory must rely on divine…