- 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
Mathilde Loisel is very beautiful, but because of her middle-class background she is married to a humble clerk in the Ministry of Education rather than a wealthy man of high society. Mathilde is dissatisfied with her life because she feels her beauty does not correspond with her ordinary social situation, which is why Maupassant says she is “as miserable as if she’d come down in the world.” Even if she never was rich, she feels that it’s her right (because of her beauty) to have high social status, so she acts as though she has lost status, even though she…