- 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 Chapter 21, we meet Rebecca, a mentally disabled woman who possesses a phenomenal ability to speak in poetic, metaphorical phrases. After the death of her beloved grandmother, for example, Rebecca describes her emotions as wintry, and confesses to Sacks that she thinks of her life as a carpet, requiring intricate patterns and designs to give it order and meaning.
Sacks’s characterization of Rebecca as a great poet and metaphorical thinker might seem counterintuitive, given his emphasis on the concrete in the Introduction to Part Four—one could reasonably argue that poetry is the exact opposite of the concrete (literal versus…