- 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
In this short lay, a married lady and a bachelor knight carry on an affair—really more like a flirtation—through the windows of neighboring houses. The lady claims she gets up in the middle of the night to listen to the nightingale’s sweet song, so her jealous husband quickly traps a nightingale and kills the bird before her eyes.
This rather horrifying display is obviously meant to terrorize the married lady. The implication is that her husband knew all along she was flirting with the neighboring knight, and breaking the bird’s neck symbolizes what he’ll do to her, or maybe…